Tempest in a teapot

[unixronin]

The health blog on the New York Times has a column about the deadly danger to small children posed swallowing by various types of button-cell batteries.  This terrible danger happens THOUSANDS OF TIMES PER YEAR!!!  Well ... OK, maybe a few hundred ... no?  Ten to a dozen?

Well, OK, ALMOST ten.  ...Over the past six years.

Three hundred and forty million people, more or less, in the United States.  And in any given year, one or two of them swallow a button-cell battery and die as a result.

So, let's see ... how does that compare to other common risks?  No, wait: let's compare to RARE risks.  Oh, yes, here we go:  You are fifty times more likely to be struck and killed by lightning in any given year than you are to die from swallowing a button-cell battery.

But wait, not everyone who swallows a battery dies.  What about all the children that don't die, but still suffer serious injuries?

Well, the article says that's about a hundred people per year in the US at present, up from about fifteen per year in 1985. Out of three hundred and forty million.  That's, um ... gee. 130 times less than the number of people aged fifteen and under injured on those deadly, death-trap contrivances, bicycles, each year.  (About 13,000 in 2009.)  Hell, it's almost the number of 15-and-unders killed on bicycles in 2009 (93).

Well, we all knew bicycles were dangerous.  How about something nice and safe like the school playground?

ZOMG!!!  About two hundred thousand playground injuries per year among the 14-and-under set, about 90,000 of them severe (fractures, concussions, internal injuries, amputations etc).

Well, OK ... how about food?  Food's nice and safe, isn't it?

Well ... since you mention it ... actually, not so much.  WebMD says between 66 and 77 children under 10 die each year after choking on foods, and 10,000 children under age 15 are treated in emergency departments. Three quarters of those are children under 3 years old.  Even more deaths and choking injuries result from "swallowing balloons and small toys".

But Ms. Parker-Pope thinks we have an imminent crisis that desperately needs attention, because one to two people per year are dying from ingesting button cell batteries and maybe a hundred are being seriously injured.  We need to secure all battery compartments, everywhere, right away.

Or then again, Ms. Parker-Pope, maybe we could all start paying attention again to what our kids are getting into.  And maybe you could find something productive to do with the time on your hands, of which you appear to have rather too much if you have time to get all in a tizzy about a hazard so rare that, frankly, it's lost in the statistical noise.

Sometimes I swear we're actively breeding people for stupidity.

Comments

Re: I don't dispute the Gulf of Mexico dying...

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

Okay, let's take this from the top. What Obama should have done as soon as it was clear that a crisis was developing in the Gulf of Mexico, and why, was a) call in the Army Corps of Engineers and the Seabees, who have a magnificent track-record for carrying out big huge projects to the finish in good order, b) call in top geologists and petrologists, trained in identifying the salient characterstics of sea-floor geology and what you have to do in order to deal with problems such as this one in areas like this, and c) call in top marine biologists and others concerned with marine life, shore life, and related matters, to identify what needs to be done to heal the Gulf of Mexico's wounds to the extent possible. The geologists and petrologists would lay out what needed to be done to cap the well and clean up the leak, including consulting with people who had done such work successfully in the past and maybe bringing them in on it, and turn that over to the Seabees and Army Corps of Engineers, who would then go to work to cap the leak and clean up the spill, possibly in conjunction with those outside workers who'd done that in the past. The biological scientists would form a second team to start working to save the life of the Gulf. And they'd have started work within a week of the Deep Horizon explosion, ten days at the most, saving precious time needed to get in there and cap the damned thing before it got all out of hand. Instead, this dragged on and on and on until now, even though BP is working on it, it's going to take forever to plug the leak and clean up the spill, certainly beyond the time at which a huge amount of the tar and oil has made its way out into the Atlantic Ocean and up the East Coast, and perhaps even into the Caribbean.

Which is beside the point. What I mean was, metaphorically speaking, Mrs. Parker-whatever is dithering while Rome burns. Doesn't she have anything better to do with her time?

Re: I don't dispute the Gulf of Mexico dying...

[hugh-mannity.livejournal.com]

BP's not trying to plug the leak. They're looking for ways to capture the oil.

I'm not sure that the Army Corps of Engineers or the Seabees are trained in deep water oil exploration. It's a somewhat specialised area. Amateurs, even enthusiastic ones, are likely to do as much harm as they are good. Wasn't it the Army Corps of Engineers who let the New Orleans levees go? Heck of a job!

What's unconscionable is BP's lying and prevaricating and the Administration's acceptance of that.

What would have been a good idea back when they started drilling would have been a small ($10K or even $100K) fee per rig per year which would have been used to fund a corporation to explore solutions to oil leaks, develop the technology and manpower to deal with them. There are close to 4,000 rigs in the Gulf of Mexico right now. Deepwater Horizon wasn't the furthest out or in the deepest water. We've either been astoundingly lucky, or the oil companies are actually very good at what they do. However $40M or $400M a year would fund a shit-hot cleanup crew (and probably have enough left over to pay insurance to rig workers killed or injured on the job).

Government is mostly comprised of people whose main skills are raising money and getting people to vote for them, along with their cronies. They don't have much in the way of real world skills.

It's not the government's job to fix *everything*.

Re: I don't dispute the Gulf of Mexico dying...

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

If BP isn't trying to plug the leak, then they're lying about the cap they put on it.

The Seabees and Army Corps of Engineers don't have to be trained in deep water exploration. They are outstanding at following directions. The geologists and petrologists -- and petrologists from somewhere other than BP -- figure out what needs to be done, and where, and the Seabees and the Army Corps of Engineers then carry out the battle-plans worked up the scientists.

The thing is, if whoever should have been on top of this back when it started had been on top of it, got it moving right then and there in the right direction, this could have been contained well before it turned into the unholy mess it is now. That didn't happened. We're fucked. The Gulf is fucked. The Atlantic Ocean is fucked. That will impact the economy of the whole world so thoroughly that it could ultimately trigger WW 3 -- all-out nuclear war -- as nations scramble to grab rapidly dwindling resources to feed their own people and screw everyone else's. The world's chances of making it to 2100 intact are just about zilch. Everything else is academic now. Next to that, everything else pales into insignificance. Happy mass extinction, people.

Re: I don't dispute the Gulf of Mexico dying...

[hugh-mannity.livejournal.com]

I refer you to the BBC: Gulf of Mexico oil cap funnels 6,000 barrels (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/us_and_canada/10246924.stm).

That's not stopping it, that's capturing (a small percentage) of it. This is why it's taking so long -- because they don't want to lose the well, they wan the oil.

Re: I don't dispute the Gulf of Mexico dying...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

So now BP is admitting that their cap, which is capturing a small percentage of the leak, is capturing 6,000 barrels per day of the 5,000 barrels per day they've sworn all along is the size of the leak? And they expect to be able to increase this daily rate over the next few days?

I must be bad at math or something, because I don't understand how that could work.







....Unless, of course, BP's been knowingly lying through their teeth about the size of the leak, by at least an order of magnitude, since day one. But surely they wouldn't do that, would they...?

Re: I don't dispute the Gulf of Mexico dying...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oh, and ...

"The estimates for the total amount of oil that has leaked since the spill began vary widely from 20 million to 45 million gallons."

Well, let's see. One barrel is 42 gallons. So that's roughly 476,000 to 1,070,000 barrels. Forty-five days since the blowout. That's 10,500 to 23,800 barrels a day ... no, I still don't get 5,000. Did I forget to carry something?

Re: I don't dispute the Gulf of Mexico dying...

[hugh-mannity.livejournal.com]

It's called "creative accounting". It's something you learn at MBA school.

I didn't want to confuse the issue with higher math :D

Re: I don't dispute the Gulf of Mexico dying...

[jilara.livejournal.com]

It's not a plug, it's capture dome they're using to try to herd the oil into a syphon and pump it elsewhere.

At least we haven't decided to go for the Teller solution: those idiots who think a couple tactical nukes will fix it. After all, those sorts of solutions work in the science fiction movies. Oh what fun, now it's radioactive oil...

Yep, happy mass extinction, folk. And if all the nations of the Caribbean aren't looking at this in terms of their Personal Extinction, they aren't paying attention. I'm looking at this in terms of a global meltdown, as well.

Hey, and it's the start of hurricane season.

Re: I don't dispute the Gulf of Mexico dying...

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

"Plug" was used functionally, not literally. I know they're using a capture dome for that. "Plug" is a general term which, used as a verb, which I was doing, merely refers to the idea of stopping any more of the petroleum from exiting its underground containment and entering the waters of the Gulf.

As for nukes . . . The least we can do is not use them. The geology of the sea floor in that area is all wrong for that. The Russians who used a nuke to cap a runaway oil well were dealing with a geology appropriate for that. We aren't. To say the least. Let's not add that last, crowning touch to the perfect catastrophe.

Re: I don't dispute the Gulf of Mexico dying...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

There's already been speculation that it was a clathrate blowout in the first place. Dropping a nuke on top of an unstable clathrate bed sounds like an absolutely brilliant idea.



(NOT.)

Re: I don't dispute the Gulf of Mexico dying...

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

Tell me about it. I think those who are in charge of efforts to cap the leak and clean up the spill know that. I hope. Otherwise, we're all in a lot more trouble than we think we are. {shudder}

Re: I don't dispute the Gulf of Mexico dying...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

As a matter of fact, nukes (well, OK, technically CRAM warheads, nukes by any other name) causing a massive collapse of deepwater clathrate beds was the underlying plot of John Barnes' Mother of Storms (http://books.google.com/books?id=GPeGO-YrDpgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=mother+of+storms&source=bl&ots=rbIpK5snnK&sig=91tCKAJW2bNq4RahDSsq0Viml8E&hl=en&ei=0M4LTMKDDMH_lgfbnbm-Dg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CC0Q6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false).

Re: I don't dispute the Gulf of Mexico dying...

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

That's one I've never read, or even have known about. I used to love disaster novels back when I was in my teens and 20s, though then it was global nuclear war that was the subject of most of the disaster novels I read. Those culminated in 1987 with R. R. McCammon's Swan Song (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swan_Song_(novel)), which has never, to my knowledge, been outdone by any other novel before or since. Since reading that when it first came out, those disster novels I've read -- or, to be accurate, looked at and then gave up in justifiable disgust -- have been few and far between, mostly about super-sharks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg:_A_Novel_of_Deep_Terror) and other scientific impossibilities that would have given my my science teachers and professors laughing fits over the utter scientific ignorance of the writers.

On the other hand, there's always the Bloop (http://www.bloopwatch.org/thebloop.html). Maybe it will come to investigate all that hoohah (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hoohah) and give us a nice show when it goes berserk over its outrage at what's happened there, destroying everyone and everything responsible for the Deepwater Horizon disaster and ensuring a nuke will never, ever be used by anyone to try to cap the damned thing, no matter how tempting it might be. We can always hope. ;-)