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Radiation is all around us. It emanates from the sun and cosmic rays, bathing cities at high altitude in greater levels of background radiation than those at sea level. Underground deposits of thorium and uranium emit radiation, but so does masonry: stone, brick, and adobe all contain radioisotopes. The granite used to build the US Capitol is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants. All living tissue is radioactive to some degree: human beings, like bananas, emit radiation because both contain small amounts of the radioisotope potassium 40; muscle contains more potassium 40 than other tissue, so men are generally more radioactive than women. Brazil nuts, with a thousand times the average concentration of radium of any organic product, are the world’s most radioactive food.
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Adam Higginbotham (Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster)
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Exposure to a very high powered electromagnetic field is not optional, it is compulsory.
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Steven Magee
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Regarding health and safety issues, never trust the government.
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Steven Magee
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We are focus-points of consciousness, [...] enormously creative. When we enter the self-constructed hologrammetric arena we call spacetime, we begin at once to generate creativity particles, imajons, in violent continuous pyrotechnic deluge. Imajons have no charge of their own but are strongly polarized through our attitudes and by the force of our choice and desire into clouds of conceptons, a family of very-high-energy particles which may be positive, negative or neutral. [...] Some common positive conceptions are exhilarons, excytons, rhapsodons, jovions. Common negative conceptions include gloomons, tormentons, tribulons, agonons, miserons.
"Indefinite numbers of conceptions are created in nonstop eruption, a thundering cascade of creativity pouring from every center of personal consciousness. They mushroom into conception clouds, which can be neutral or strongly charged - buoyant, weightless or leaden, depending on the nature of their dominant particles.
"Every nanosecond an indefinite number of conception clouds build to critical mass, then transform in quantum bursts to high-energy probability waves radiating at tachyon speeds through an eternal reservoir of supersaturated alternate events. Depending on their charge and nature, the probability waves crystallize certain of these potential events to match the mental polarity of their creating consciousness into holographic appearance. [...]
"The materialized events become that mind's experience, freighted with all the aspects of physical structure necessary to make them real and learningful to the creating consciousness. This autonomic process is the fountain from which springs every object and event in the theater of spacetime.
"The persuasion of the imajon hypothesis lies in its capacity for personal verification. The hypothesis predicts that as we focus our conscious intention on the positive and life-affirming, as we fasten our thought on these values, we polarize masses of positive conceptions, realize beneficial probability-waves, bring useful alternate events to us that otherwise would not have appeared to exist.
"The reverse is true in the production of negative events, as is the mediocre in-between. Through default or intention, unaware or by design, we not only choose but create the visible outer conditions that are most resonant to our inner state of being [...]
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Richard Bach (Running from Safety: An Adventure of the Spirit)
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Widespread introduction of the process [of irradiating foods] has thus far been impeded, however, by a reluctance among consumers to eat things that have been exposed to radiation. According to current USDA regulations, irradiated meat must be identified with a special label and with a radura (the internationally recognized symbol of radiation). The Beef Industry Food Safety Council - whose members include the meatpacking and fast food giants - has asked the USDA to change its rules and make the labeling of irradiated meat completely voluntary. The meatpacking industry is also working hard to get rid of the word 'irradiation,; much preferring the phrase 'cold pasteurization.'...From a purely scientific point of view, irradiation may be safe and effective. But he [a slaughterhouse engineer] is concerned about the introduction of highly complex electromagnetic and nuclear technology into slaughterhouses with a largely illiterate, non-English-speaking workforce.
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Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal)
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The SIOP’s damage and casualty estimates were conservative. They were based solely on blast effects. They excluded the harm that might be caused by thermal radiation, fires, or fallout, which were difficult to calculate with precision. Within three days of the initial attack, the full force of the SIOP would kill about 54 percent of the Soviet Union’s population and about 16 percent of China’s population—roughly 220 million people. Millions more would subsequently die from burns, radiation poisoning, exposure. The SIOP was designed for a national emergency, when the survival of the United States was at stake, and the decision to launch the SIOP would carry an almost unbearable weight. Once the SIOP was set in motion, it could not be altered, slowed, or stopped.
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Eric Schlosser (Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety)
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I know we don’t need everyone in the world to agree for this to work, but there’s got to be a critical mass of covered-dish people or we’ll never win.” “Okay.” Gretyl broke her silence—she’d been prodding the screen in a way that radiated leave-me-alone-I’m-working (Gretyl was good at this). “What’s a ‘covered dish’ person?” “Oh. If there’s a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor’s house with: a) a covered dish or b) a shotgun? It’s game theory. If you believe your neighbor is coming over with a shotgun, you’d be an idiot to pick a); if she believes the same thing about you, you can bet she’s not going to choose a) either. The way to get to a) is to do a) even if you think your neighbor will pick b). Sometimes she’ll point her gun at you and tell you to get off her land, but if she was only holding the gun because she thought you’d have one, then she’ll put on the safety and you can have a potluck.
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Cory Doctorow (Walkaway)
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So, as far as swimming safety goes, the bottom line is that you’d probably be OK, as long as you didn’t dive to the bottom or pick up anything strange. But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to someone who tried to swim in their radiation containment pool. “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.
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Randall Munroe (What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions)
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Who calls the Prince of the Mud?'
…
The snapping turtle snapped. Its head shot out to maximum extension—Eliot wouldn’t have believed anything that big could move that fast. It was like a Mack truck coming straight at them. As it bit it turned its head on one side, to take them both in one movement.
Eliot reacted fast. His reaction was to crouch down and cover his face with his arms. From the relative safety of this position he felt the day grow colder around them, and he heard a crackle, which at first he took for the pier splintering in the turtle’s jaws. But the end didn’t come.
'You DARE?' Janet said.
Her voice was loud now—it made the boards vibrate sympathetically under his feet. He looked up at her. She’d gone airborne, floating two feet above the pier, and her clothes were rimmed with frost. She radiated cold; mist sheeted off her skin as it would off dry ice. Her arms were spread wide, and she had an axe in each hand. They were those twin staves she wore on her back, each one now topped with an axe-head of clear ice.
The turtle was trapped in mid-lunge. She’d stopped it cold; the swamp was frozen solid around it. Janet had called down winter, and the water of the Northern Marsh was solid ice as far as he could see, cracked and buckled up in waves. The turtle was stuck fast in it. It struggled, its head banging back and forth impotently.
'Jesus,' Eliot said. He stood up out of his defensive crouch. 'Nice one.'
'You DARE?' Janet said again, all imperious power. 'Marvel that you live, Prince of Shit!
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Lev Grossman (The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3))
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The granite used to build the US Capitol is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants. All living tissue is radioactive to some degree: human beings, like bananas, emit radiation because both contain small amounts of the radioisotope potassium 40; muscle contains more potassium 40 than other tissue, so men are generally more radioactive than women. Brazil nuts, with a thousand times the average concentration of radium of any organic product, are the world’s most radioactive food.
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Adam Higginbotham (Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster)
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A. There are people who collect elements. These collectors try to gather physical samples of as many of the elements as possible into periodic-table-shaped display cases.1 Of the 118 elements, 30 of them—like helium, carbon, aluminum, and iron—can be bought in pure form in local retail stores. Another few dozen can be scavenged by taking things apart (you can find tiny americium samples in smoke detectors). Others can be ordered over the Internet. All in all, it’s possible to get samples of about 80 of the elements—90, if you’re willing to take some risks with your health, safety, and arrest record. The rest are too radioactive or short-lived to collect more than a few atoms of them at once. But what if you did? The periodic table of the elements has seven rows.2 You could stack the top two rows without much trouble. The third row would burn you with fire. The fourth row would kill you with toxic smoke. The fifth row would do all that stuff PLUS give you a mild dose of radiation. The sixth row would explode violently, destroying the building in a cloud of radioactive, poisonous fire and dust. Do not build the seventh row.
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Randall Munroe (What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions)
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Snowflakes stick to his sooty eyelashes, his eyes warm brown. I am no more afraid of him than I was in the lower level of the temple. He radiates warmth and safety, riveting me with the trust he engenders. I want to tuck myself against his tall, muscled form and curl into his body heat, like a rabbit in a burrow. My cheeks flame in embarrassment. I should not feel this way. I did not react so favorably to the rajah. His touch, his voice, and his smell were repulsive. But every nerve ending in my body comes alive near Captain Naik. Beside him, my slenderness feels delicate, curvy, and even womanly.
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Emily R. King (The Hundredth Queen (The Hundredth Queen, #1))
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With his reputation in tatters, his health ravaged by radiation absorbed at Chernobyl, his disillusionment with his country’s unwillingness to focus more on safety, and feeling the weight of so many dead on his shoulders, Valerii Legasov hanged himself on the disaster’s second anniversary - a day after his proposal for a reformed Soviet scientific community was rejected. During the hours preceding his death, he dictated his memoirs in the form of a lengthy voice recording, in which he concluded that the accident was the, “apotheosis of all that was wrong in the management of the national economy and had been so for many decades.”259
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Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
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You’re a scientist. And there is no greater expression of sheer stupid human hope than the study of science. We’re born groping around in the dark but science says, “We can understand this.” It says, “There’s something here to understand and this act of blindly reaching forward is worth it.” It says, “You could be devoting your entire career to what’s really a dead end and it's still worth it. You could be dismissed in your own lifetime, you could poison yourself with radiation, you could be executed. And it’s still worth it. More than your safety, more than your life, that divine earthly act of trying to understand.”
Personally, I find that brand of optimism exhausting but if it wasn’t for science, we wouldn’t have deodorant or instant coffee, so.
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Jessica Mary Best
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In an improvised courtroom, the deserted town of Chernobyl’s own Palace of Culture played host to the last of the USSR’s show-trials. Soviet law required that the trial take place near the scene of the crime, and radiation provided a convenient excuse to limit the number of attendees, since access to the zone required special papers. Ostensibly an open trial with journalists and victims’ families invited to the opening and closing days, the bulk of the three-week proceedings took place in secret, behind closed doors. Charges brought against the defendants went back to the earliest days of the plant, when the test was supposed to have been conducted during commissioning, but also spanned routine disregard of safety regulations and failure to provide proper on-site training.
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Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
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By 2011, enough data had been accumulated to show that some risk existed due to long-term, heavy use of mobile phones, compelling the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization, to classify mobile cell phone radiation in the Group 2B category, indicating a possible carcinogen (a substance or source of exposure that can cause cancer).14 This is the same category as DDT, lead, engine exhaust, chloroform, and glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup®). Later, in 2016, a $25 million study conducted by the National Toxicology Program (NTP), part of the National Institutes of Health, confirmed what many have believed for years—that exposure to EMF radiation emitted from cell phones can lead to serious health issues including brain and heart tumors.
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Daniel T. DeBaun (Radiation Nation: Complete Guide to EMF Protection & Safety - The Proven Health Risks of EMF Radiation & What You Can Do to Protect Yourself & Family)
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The possibility of any nuclear explosion occurring as a result of an accident involving either impact or fire is virtually non-existent,” Secretary of Defense Wilson assured the public. His press release about the Genie didn’t mention the risk of plutonium contamination. It did note, however, that someone standing on the ground directly beneath the high-altitude detonation of a Genie would be exposed to less radiation than “a hundredth of a dose received in a standard (medical) X-ray.” To prove the point, a Genie was set off 18,000 feet above the heads of five Air Force officers and a photographer at the Nevada test site. The officers wore summer uniforms and no protective gear. A photograph, taken at the moment of detonation, shows that two of the men instinctively ducked, two shielded their eyes, and one stared upward, looking straight at the blast. “It glowed for an instant like a newborn sun,” Time magazine reported, “then faded into a rosy, doughnut-shaped cloud.
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Eric Schlosser (Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety)
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When fears rise supreme, we remember that in spite of any picture to the contrary, our greatest protection is to understand that we are under no laws but God’s. God’s laws are love, strength, order, and harmony. They are invisible, yet, mighty and powerful. They silently but surely bring the hand of peace and order into seeming turmoil and fear. They are an unseen medicine bringing quiet, sure healing and stability. Such is our mainstay through all of the human experience. To the extent that we understand that we are under no laws but God’s, our fear disappears. It is not possible to be afraid when all the Universe and beyond is working under the infinitely good orchestration of the Divine. Armed with these simple truths, we radiate a firm and unshakeable knowledge that there is, in every situation, an inner and higher reality which is unmarred by the many, different human dramas. We help those around us with our serenity and trust. Each one of us is loved greatly. No person or event or anything on Earth and beyond can take this from us.
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Donna Goddard (The Love of Devotion)
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A year after Calder Hall opened, in October 1957, technicians at the neighboring Windscale breeder reactor faced an almost impossible deadline to produce the tritium needed to detonate a British hydrogen bomb. Hopelessly understaffed, and working with an incompletely understood technology, they operated in emergency conditions and cut corners on safety. On October 9 the two thousand tons of graphite in Windscale Pile Number One caught fire. It burned for two days, releasing radiation across the United Kingdom and Europe and contaminating local dairy farms with high levels of iodine 131. As a last resort, the plant manager ordered water poured onto the pile, not knowing whether it would douse the blaze or cause an explosion that would render large parts of Great Britain uninhabitable. A board of inquiry completed a full report soon afterward, but, on the eve of publication, the British prime minister ordered all but two or three existing copies recalled and had the metal type prepared to print it broken up. He then released his own bowdlerized version to the public, edited to place the blame for the fire on the plant operators. The British government would not fully acknowledge the scale of the accident for another thirty years.
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Adam Higginbotham (Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster)
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I research what astronomers do not want researched.
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Steven Magee
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I research what electrical utility companies do not want researched.
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Steven Magee
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Electrical grounding systems are a known human health hazard.
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Steven Magee
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He radiates warmth and safety, riveting me with the trust he engenders. I want to tuck myself against his tall, muscled form and curl into his body heat, like a rabbit in a burrow.
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Emily R. King (The Hundredth Queen (The Hundredth Queen, #1))
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It is an honor to be associated with Karen Silkwood.
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Steven Magee (Magee’s Disease)
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sign of things to come, radioactive particles were detected over San Francisco a few days later, and after that over Paris, bringing this “fallout” threat to wide public attention for the first time. Also endangered were the forty thousand U.S. sailors and soldiers who had been crowded cavalierly nearby, or who mounted the ships later to inspect or clean them—with safety guidelines widely ignored—and were exposed to troubling levels of radiation.
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Greg Mitchell (The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood--and America--Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)
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The child makes a judgment about their own safety based on their parents’ reactions. If the parents radiate calmness, then they understand that nothing is threatening them and that there should be nothing to worry about. However, if the adults appear worried about the child’s condition, then the child understands that something is wrong and also begins to worry.
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John Austin (STRESS, FEAR, PANIC ATTACKS, AND ANXIETY RELIEF: How to deal with anxiety, stress, fear, panic attacks for adults, teens, and kids. Tools and therapy based on true stories. Self help journal)
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The rise of Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) in the USA population can be traced back to President Bill Clinton. While memorable for sexual foreplay with Monica Lewinsky, EHS people associate him with the 1996 Telecommunications Act that prohibits the protection of human health and safety from the known biologically toxic effects of wireless radio frequency (RF) radiation.
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Steven Magee
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Correctness means never returning an inaccurate result; returning no result is better than returning an inaccurate result. Robustness means always trying to do something that will allow the software to keep operating, even if that leads to results that are inaccurate sometimes. Safety-critical applications tend to favor correctness to robustness. It is better to return no result than to return a wrong result. The radiation machine is a good example of this principle. Consumer applications tend to favor robustness to correctness. Any result whatsoever is usually better than the software shutting down. The word processor I'm using occasionally displays a fraction of a line of text at the bottom of the screen. If it detects that condition, do I want the word processor to shut down? No. I know that the next time I hit Page Up or Page Down, the screen will refresh and the display will be back to normal.
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Steve McConnell (Code Complete)
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There is compelling evidence that a nutritional approach to post-op treatment of breast cancer far exceeds in safety and effectiveness any regimen of chemotherapy and/or radiation treatments.
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Suzanne Somers (Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer and How To Prevent Getting it in the First Place)
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As a radiation researcher, I always try and sit next to the window on an airplane to observe the extreme altitude atmosphere. Since the Boeing 737 Max door plug blowout, I try to ensure my seat is not next to an exit for safety reasons.
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Steven Magee
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It appears to me that the main public safety issue around nuclear power is what Luisa Vinton and the United Nations agencies found at Chernobyl: “Fear of radiation is a far more important health threat than radiation itself.” The lesson of Chernobyl is double: one, be careful; two, be careful what you fear.
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Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary)
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Make America Safe Again.
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Steven Magee
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Sitting on top of an electrical outlet and having radio frequency WiFi devices charging their batteries while streaming wireless movies is a very undesirable dynamic for the biological health of the passengers and aircraft crew.
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Steven Magee
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When I flew on a Boeing 737 Max and saw that there were electrical outlets in every seat and the entertainment system was wireless radio frequency WiFi streaming to passenger mobile devices, I became very concerned about the health and safety of these new airplanes.
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Steven Magee
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I am the most famous scientist that you have never heard of.
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Steven Magee
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Over time, it became clear that my invisible friend and the Hawaiian visions were arising out of erratic low blood oxygen levels, company supplied drugs, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, abnormal electromagnetic radiation exposures, very high altitude damage, sleep apnea, bruxism and food intolerance.
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Steven Magee
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It is the responsibility of parents to ensure that irresponsible scientists do not endanger their children.
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Steven Magee
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With the benefit of hindsight, I would not choose a career that had me working with the various forms of electromagnetic radiation.
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Steven Magee
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The most dangerous job by far in the USA is an astronaut.
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Steven Magee
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Brain disease, heart disease, gastrointestinal disease and blood disorders were common in the radiation pioneers.
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Steven Magee
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Being biologically successful is more than producing the next generation, it is also providing a safe environment that promotes their good health.
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Steven Magee
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High altitude astronomy is a catch 22: Stay inside the observatory and get high altitude observatory disease (HAOD) or go outside and get radiation sickness. Either way, the sea level adapted human may develop sickness.
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Steven Magee
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If I were healthy, I would not research radiation.
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Steven Magee
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During my time in high altitude astronomy, I was never informed that I was working in an abnormal radiation environment for the sea level adapted human.
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Steven Magee
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Since 1996 the W. M. Keck Observatory has been observing what happens to workers that spend their time in and around two massive Faraday cages.
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Steven Magee
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When it comes to smart meters, I advise people to keep their distance from them.
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Steven Magee
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almost never mentioned by the media, no one was killed by the Fukushima accident and no one has subsequently died as a result of it, unless we add in the suicides of those driven from their homes by an overzealous application of radiation safety rules.
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James E. Lovelock (A Rough Ride to the Future)
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I often tell people that I have radiation sickness to see how they react.
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Steven Magee
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When it comes to solar modules and solar inverters, I advise people to keep their distance from them.
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Steven Magee
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I researched radiation because I knew that my life depended on understanding it.
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Steven Magee
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Recovery requires researching radiation.
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Steven Magee
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The military meets the definition of domestic terrorism.
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Steven Magee
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The long term effects of exposure to high powered 20 watt sodium LASER guide stars are unlikely to be fully understood for a few more decades, as it is such a new technology and only a relatively small group of people have been exposed to it. LASER radiation safety standards appear to be where X-Ray radiation safety standards were in the 1900's.
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Steven Magee
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According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Workers exposed to high [electromagnetic] fields have increased cancer rates.
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Daniel T. DeBaun (Radiation Nation: Complete Guide to EMF Protection & Safety - The Proven Health Risks of EMF Radiation & What You Can Do to Protect Yourself & Family)
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Metabolism was approximately 7 percent higher in the region of the brain that was closest to the cell phone’s antenna when the devices were turned on compared to when the devices where turned off, which the authors considered significant.
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Daniel T. DeBaun (Radiation Nation: Complete Guide to EMF Protection & Safety - The Proven Health Risks of EMF Radiation & What You Can Do to Protect Yourself & Family)
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Anyone arguing against nuclear energy on the basis that perfect guarantees of safety are impossible to come by is actually subscribing to a magical or homeopathic view of radiation.
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Rauli Partanen (Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future? (2017 edition))
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How precarious that safety was, he didn’t realize. It was shattered, at last, by means of a trifling accident. Christmas had passed. By this time the sudden splendours of spring had waned. Now Meerlust lay like an island of heavier green in a tawny sea of veld that
swept upward wave beyond wave to the arching sky. The rivers ran down to the sea in a gin-clear trickle. The scattered rocks of the wilderness radiated fierce heat.
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Francis Brett Young (Cage Bird, And Other Stories)