All nuclear things fall off much faster than square of the distance unless you're in vacuum. The atmosphere is nowhere near transparent to any of them. An addition to the inverse square issue the behavior of the various types is complex:

Gamma: Halving distance in the low hundreds of meters.

Alpha: Goes a few centimeters.

Beta: Goes a few meters per million electron volts. Most sources don't go above a few million electron volts.

Neutron: The only one with good penetration, halving distance around a kilometer for high energy neutrons. But note that there are few sources of neutron radiation other than fission.

Thus unless you're flying into fallout it's not much of an issue.

Gamma is technically a kind of electromagnetic emission, so it falls off with the square of the distance. The others fall off as you say.

Everything falls off as inverse square in 3D. His point is that the atmosphere attenuates it as well.

I've had a pretty wild ride from being hit at probably less than that speed.

I'm sure you've seen video of the police performing a PIT maneuver. That's basically what happened to me--tapped by a car starting from a stop sign. They got a scrape, I got totaled. And, yes, it works as advertised--totally confusing, my foot somehow found the brake but I have no recall of doing so.

The basic problem is that making the angle low makes the urinal take up more space. Businesses don't like that.

Phones, 45 in a 25? I was taught that pedestrians are invisible. 99.9% of cars will stop, but not all--don't take the risk. Cross only when you can see that nobody's coming.

Yup, this is the part that bothers me.

5 year old kid who has been properly trained walking alone--I have no problem with that. My mother was blind, I was taught safe street crossing from an early age. I do not recall when I was crossing residential streets unsupervised, I do recall I was crossing major streets (at traffic lights) alone at 7. I'd take the bus to go visit grandma--no escort on either end.

But 5 year old unsupervised at a pond is another matter. Unless they have plenty of swimming experience that disturbs me.

She repeatedly saw him do it safely. Why should she think he wouldn't do it safely if not observed?

Because mom is not around, so now he can go where he wants? You must believe that people in society follow all the expectations? Especially children?

And there's the problem that they can do this with no recourse and no defense permitted.

I'm reminded of the guy who lost his Google access over "child pornography"--a picture sent to his little boy's pediatrician that got automatically uploaded. The police agreed he had done nothing wrong, Google didn't give him his account back.

Voter ID laws aren't about fraud. The amount of fraudulent voters required to sway an election would be a massive operation that could not be kept secret. But it's a distraction from the real issue: vote fraud by improperly denying people access to the ballot box.

Sure, you can get an ID cheap. Most of the time. But if all of your ID is lost (which can easily happen to the victim of a purse snatching) it's going to take time and money to fix the problem. And voter registrations are not supposed to be permitted to be challenged too close to the election. Not supposed to be doesn't mean it doesn't happen repeatedly, though. This scales much, much better than sending in fraudulent ballots. We find a handful of fraudulent ballots, often by Republicans trying to prove fraud is easy. 2016 and 2024 both had more people denied access by ID laws, challenges and the like than the margin of victory. And those missing votes would have skewed heavily Democrat.

Almost forgot: SAVE puts a very onerous paper trail on divorced women. They'll need copies of the paperwork changing back to their maiden name--something an awful lot of them don't have. I've already seen a variation on this with RealID. A mistake was made at my wife's naturalization, a hyphen crept into her name that didn't belong, went unnoticed for years. Even when it was discovered it was a so-what. Social security had an errant hyphen, everything else was as intended. No problem. Then RealID came along--and she had to do a legal name change in order to change her name to what her ID and passport said. Weeks and hundreds of dollars.

Denying legitimate voters is just as much fraud as permitting fraudulent ones. A system in which the the former happens at least 10,000x as often as the latter is not a good system.

And the government keeps the database truly secure? You're providing a single point of compromise that would be incredibly valuable. If nothing else, it would be cracked the XKCD way.

I don't think there is a "full" state, but watching the changes as the years go by I have thought of collisions. Not really like a hash table, though--most collisions are with things that would be filed together. I think it's more like the brain returns a random item matching the category. Brains are expensive, memory that gets fuzzy with age is probably the better choice than trying to feed a brain that does better.

Yes, evolution is not going to penalize everyone with a "100-year brain" when the rest of our body seems optimized for something more like a 30-40 year lifespan. Evolution is all about propagating your genes, and not too many 100-year olds are going to be doing that!

In any case, fuzzy associative recall is really the "design spec" for a brain, so semi-graceful degradation and fuzzy recall comes for free.

I'm not sure if old-age memory unreliability is totally random - I would not expect it to be. I'd expect these associative recall failures to happen when there are too many memories partially matching the same "key" (activation pattern), which presumably happens mostly when they do have something in common.