[BREAKING] News Thread

[Moonface]

Has there even been a really big tragedy before on Halloween or close to it that's related to the holiday at all? I can't say I can think of anything prior to this but I feel like there has to be something.

[ShiraNoMai]

There tends to be one for each holiday, but I suppose I can't really find anything other than an Angolan Three-Day War in the early 90's. This might be the one for the record books, sadly.

[Moonface]

Just saw this video on Reddit which shows a lone cop trying to control the crowd during that Halloween party: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfu...er_asking/

From what I can tell, this is after the stampede has occurred and he is trying to get the crowd to disperse safely, although it seems he has a hard time getting cooperation from people. In a follow up interview he apparently was denied backup and wishes he could have saved more people, putting a lot of blame on himself due to being the only one who could even do anything. It sucks if that is the actual case because he did what he could with what he had, and if anything more could have been done then that failing falls on those who failed to give him backup and/or cooperate with his requests.

I'd hope if this party gets held next year that steps will be taken to stop a repeat of this, but looking at this guy struggling to get backup after shit has hit the fan because they think he can handle it alone doesn't give me much hope.

[Moonface]

I just read that Celine Dion has been diagnosed with Stiff Person Syndrome, which is a neurological condition that causes involuntary stiffening of the muscles to the point the sufferer becomes a living human statue. It's utterly awful to live with and no level of treatment seems to give any decent quality of life, but the onset of the condition can be slowed, which is what Dion is currently pursuing.

She's only 54 so it really sucks to see her diagnosed with this, especially with how incredibly rare this condition also seems to be. Comments I've seen from people who know someone that had this said they didn't last super long or just requested assisted suicide where it was legal to do so, so it doesn't look like she's going to have super long left and if she does it'll just be horrible the entire time.

Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/celebrit...r-AA1535wU

[Mr EliteL]

Yikes that's terrible! If I got that and didn't have long left I'd be seriously considering assisted suicide, just sounds so awful. I take it she can still at least move about but with some difficulty at the moment, so if she does go for the easing route and then eventually the not great option, hope she's able to get anything she needs to do done in time, especially any final farewells.

[Moonface]

Based on the article I suspect she can still move to an extent but clearly it's already affecting her badly since she had to postpone her tour (which I won't be surprised to see just cancelled permanently) due to the spasms affecting both her movement and vocal cords. Going by this page, it seems she might be in the later stages of symptoms since vocal problems are present at that point, although given her wealth status she might have a decent chance with treatments that alleviate the problems of SPS compared to stories I read online when this news broke as I suspect a lot of those people likely didn't have the money to get every treatment possible and I also don't know when those stories occurred, so certain treatments maybe didn't even exist for them at the time.

Seems the general range of life expectancy is 6-28 years with the condition though, so maybe she's got longer than I initially assumed. With how it sounded from witness stories I thought it was basically a quick death sentence or a fate worse than death like diseases such as motoneurone disease (which I can confirm from experience is fucking awful).

[Maniakkid25]

In news of the "Ain't no FUCKIN' way!" variety, the holy grail of nuclear fusion has reportedly been finally reached: we have surpassed Ignition, otherwise known in layman's terms as "break-even"! Yes, at the National Ignition Facility, a 2.05 Megajoule blast of lasers started a fusion reaction that produced 3 Megajoules of energy.

I cannot stress how big this is: this is "finding the Higg's Boson" levels of achievement! This is a guaranteed Nobel! This is the peak we've been struggling to make it over the entire time! In technological terms, the hard part is over! It's all downhill from here, just refining and improving!

...If this is real.

This is one of those times were caution is key; this will be torn apart by the scientific community, looking for any possible errors. They know what to look for, and if they give the green light, this is absolutely insane!

[Moonface]

I appreciated the article explaining the difference between this and the type of nuclear reactor most people know and think of, since I was wondering what the differences were.

While it's definitely a great achievement, the article didn't seem to paint the most positive overall picture of it I think. Right after it mentions this achievement, it veers into the statement of "But it will take quite a while before fusion becomes available on a widespread, practical scale, if ever" and that the NIF laser is slow and inefficient despite being the most powerful in the world, and for this single experiment it took 300Mj from the electrical grid just to power that laser, so a gain of 1.5Mj has a long way to go to offset the overall energy needed to produce that gain in the first place. All of that stuff just makes it hard for me to feel very positive about the future when all these points make it sound rather bleak for the time being. I guess the biggest improvement that could be made is making a better laser that works better on all fronts, but my assumption is that isn't really feasible because otherwise why hasn't someone done it already?

[Maniakkid25]

Make no mistake: this is not a technology ready for prime time. But just getting more out than what you put in (in terms of the actual reaction, rather than power draw) is and always has been the hard part. Us inching ever closer over that Ignition line was enough to make headlines consistently in scientific articles. Getting it to a state that it could actually sustain a building, let alone a full city, maybe years, if not decades away, but this is the home stretch. I am kind of in agreement, though, that it won't come to us fast enough to prevent the current climate change debacle, but it will be by the end of our lifetimes that we'll see these being built, mark my words!

[Moonface]

I'm curious, is there anything that can go horribly wrong with these types of reactors? The article gave me the impression that the worst thing is the laser just doesn't target the hydrogen well enough to convert all of it into fusion energy, and it doesn't seem like anything super bad has happened during previous experiments to reach this point since I feel it would've come up in that article during the parts about the work done in the past.

[Maniakkid25]

*WellYesButActuallyNo.gif*

So, there are things that can obviously go wrong, but nothing catastrophic can happen. The reaction could break containment, but it's not self-sustaining, so it can't really do much outside of scorch the immediate vicinity -- which is already evacuated due to the radiation hazard (the fusion process blasts a crapton of neutrons -- more than enough to kill a person from radiation sickness). The Tritium could get released, and that's radioactive with a half-life of about 12 years, but we're talking about grams in an atmosphere with a pressure of 10,000 KILOS per square meter (inb4 "actually, Kilogram is a unit of mass, not force"). Once dispersed, it wouldn't be enough radiation to move the needle compared to background. Hell, even a direct whack would probably be the equivalent of an airplane ride! I mean, Tritium is so well understood we literally use it in self-illuminating stuff to this day!

The fact is, there's no system that can have 100% perfect mechanical function all of the time. But the nature of the reaction means that even if something breaks, the worst thing that happens is the reaction stops. This is not a system that can have a Chernobyl-type event occur, if that is what your concern is.

Edit: and I feel like I should note this: a modern nuclear FISSION plant (i.e. the type of nuclear reaction you're actually thinking of) can't have a Chernobyl-type disaster, anyway. If you remember with Fukushima, there was a catastropic breakdown of the reactors, and yet there was a leak, not a massive explosion. Granted, that leak went into the sea and hydrogen explosions (contained in areas designed to deal with that event), but that's not the point. The point is that the general consensus of Chernobyl is that it was a RIDICULOUS FLUKE that could only have happened by doing it wrong at every possible point, fron development to the final SCRAM button hit. Seriously, they were basically held at gunpoint to do a system test that EVERY OTHER FACILITY rejected, and did it with an inexperienced team because that's just how it was timed, on a reactor that should have been rendered obsolete a couple DECADES before that! This is not normal; this is "THE STARS ALIGNING" levels of catastrophic stupidity.

[Moonface]

Note: If you're in here wondering where the Turkey/Syria earthquake stuff went, I split it into its own thread since it was getting talked about enough to warrant doing so.

So if anyone hasn't heard by now, Bruce Willis has been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, a disease which has no treatments or cures available and is the most common form of dementia for people under 60 (Willis is 67, however). Judging by the statement from the family, it seems it has already progressed enough to drastically affect Willis to the point I doubt we'll ever hear from him personally in any capacity ever again. The man is probably a complete shell of what he was and if I was in his position I'd probably wish I could just have my life ended instead of going through what I expect an existence of suffering until the disease takes my life. I hope all the money he accumulated during his last years of acting at least does something to make things easy on him and his family for however long he has left. I've seen anything from 2 to 10 years for a victim to remain alive after being diagnosed, so it's anyone's guess how long Willis has left.

[Dragon Lord]

Yeah, I saw that on the news this morning. He's been one of my favorite actors since I was a kid, so seeing his career not only come to an end, but to see his life itself pretty much come to an end is just heartbreaking for me. Seems like all of my favorites from my life have had something terrible happen to them.

I definitely feel for his family and close friends. They always say that dementia is the hardest for the people who don't have it. Having a loved one who you have known your whole life constantly asking who you are, not remembering any of the amazing times you had together... just sounds horrible. I don't have a whole lot of fears in life, but one of the biggest ones I do have is the thought of my mother getting dementia. I just hope that I am fortunate enough not to have to deal with that sad of a situation. I hope they'll be able to find peace in remembering the good times, at the very least.

For me, it definitely sucks big time to know I'll never see him in another movie again.

[Mr EliteL]

Yeah it's awful Willis has got that, one of the things I don't want to see happen to anyone, already lost my Aunt to it and my Nan had an early version but she went to another condition and luckily didn't completely lose herself. I don't particularly want to see an image of him now but it's also possible he's become unrecognisable too. Hope he can pass sooner than later as much as I hate to say that, suffering too long with it just drains relatives. As long as they and us all who liked what he's done have their memories of him when he was well, he surely won't be forgotten.

[Moonface]

@Dragon Lord: What movies of his would you say are your favorites?
Same question goes to anyone else who wants to share their own answers btw.

I couldn't remember every film of his off hand so went to his Wikipedia page to get a list, and discovered just this moment that the guy actually released an album back in 1987, with two more albums in 1989 and 2001. I can't imagine Bruce Willis singing on an album in all honesty and now I'm curious what it sounds like. XD