I never heard of Anthony Bourdain until years after he died. I guess I wasn't the right age, I was having a family and at work all day whenever his shows took off. He seems like a genuinely interesting person, but there are so many other interesting thoughtful people that don't have relatable cooking shows and I think Anthony Bourdain, as great as he is, gets quite a bit more attention than he probably warrants. Don't take that the wrong way, he's genuinely thoughtful and interesting, but he gets a LOT of attention OVER AND OVER.
I'll throw out Tim Kreider (author of We Learn Nothing, among other books) as someone else you might find worthwhile to checkout.
I was very deficient and they gave me 50k UI per day prescription vitamin D3 for 60 days. Sure enough I was high-normal on my next test. 800ui is likely not enough to have any effect unless you consistently take it for years.
It was for 60 days. If they continued to take this much indefinitely it would surely cause troubles, but 60 days when starting from deep deficiency is reasonable.
It is high, but it's not extreme. 50k IU just once is an equivalent of about 7000 IU daily for a week, which won't really move the needle much if you're seriously deficient (in fact, it's still within what's considered a safe daily dose for healthy people - you can produce more than that from sunlight alone). You can feel free to take your "hammer" weekly, no deficiency required.
When I took >5000 IU daily for three months, I only raised 25(OH) D level in my blood from 9 to 30 ng/ml, and there's no evidence of toxicity below 150 ng/ml.
Of course, when dealing with high doses you need to keep your levels in check, as absorption can differ between individuals.
"Compositing text into graphical data to display it on a 2D array of millions of 32bit RGB pixels instead of just using a pencil and a 50 cent notebook."
Actually I've done this a hundred times now and it has yet to make a single mistake. I don't give a crap how much GPU it uses, grandpa.
You are correct, of course, but in a sci-fi scenario maybe you could have a colony of fungi that move nuclear material around internally to keep it 'hot', thus 'burn it off' faster to extract energy. It might collect material from a wide area.
One mode of radioactive decay is electron capture, which is absolutely impacted by temperature (just mentioning this as trivia, I meant hot-as-in-radioactive).
Moving around radioactive material doesn't affect its activity, unless you're specifically talking about collecting it into a near-critical mass or something like that. Presumably that's what GP was thinking about wrt neutron reflectors. And I'm pretty sure that only works even in principle if the isotope in question can be stimulated into activity by absorbing neutrons (or other radiation I suppose), which is not the case for all of them. Bio-accumulating a critical mass of radioactive material ion by ion... well, it sure is sci-fi.
Things happily eat nuclear waste. This is one of the big problems with nuclear waste, your body will happily integrate radioactive isotopes or heavy metals, which then slowly kill you.
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