China's war on kissing?

Sometimes I get some pieces when scanning foreign news that make me laugh. Take this piece out of People's Daily:

Signs of "black eye" will be put up next month in camera monitored venues in Beijing, accompanied with words in Chinese and English "you are entering a camera monitored zone".
According to the municipal public security bureau, suspicious acts or objects detected by the cameras will be automatically reported to the command center.
Intimate acts of lovers may be initially categorized as "kidnapping" or "robbery" by the computers, which are programmed to be sensitive to violations of "safe distance", and reported to the command center.

So kissing or possibly holding hands would be flagged for human review? Looks like the morality police aren't giving up any time soon.

Dietary defense against a dirty bomb

A Canadian federal study recently investigated the impact of dirty bombs. The scenarios included cesium and americium.

This old Wired piece, however, mentioned that cesium behaves chemically similar to potassium. It follows that increasing one's intake of potassium after exposure could compete for chemical absorption. A quick check of the periodic table suggests that iron is likely the most tolerated competitor for americium.

Even if one doesn't dose up, apparently the personal risk from initial exposure is small. This may explain the lack of such recommendations.

The risk is actually pretty minimal, replied Steve Koonin, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology.
"Long exposure to low-level gamma radiation, if you do the numbers, produces a miniscule increase in cancer rates -- one extra cancer per 100,000 people," he said.

On a side note, the FAS projected that a contaminated zone would increase the risk to residents by one cancer per 10,000 people. Perhaps a reason for the paranoid not to invest in real estate downwind of potential targets.