Runes
-
What if it was stored in a fridge
Does temperature affect nuclear decay?
Technically, maybe, but the effect is negligible.
-
My favorite podcast did an episode about that!
Highly recommend if you like leftism, and also want to listen to an engineer talk at length about what this blue glowing powder is, the series of bad decisions that led to some scrap collectors finding it, and the even longer series of even worse decisions people made regarding what to do with this blue glowing powder
You can skip the Goddamn News if you want, discussion of the spicy rocks starts at 20:28
-
“cancer-light”
Make it fancy. “Malluminance” or something
-
Researchers came up with a warning symbol for this exact scenario“In the aftermath of repeated incidents where the public was exposed to radiation from orphan sources, a common factor reappeared: individuals who encountered the source were unfamiliar with the trefoil radiation warning symbol, and were in some cases not familiar with the concept of radiation. During a study in the early 2000s, it was found that only 6% of those surveyed in India, Brazil and Kenya could correctly identify the meaning of the trefoil symbol.”
This glyph clearly portrays the object with the
️ symbol bringing someone back from the dead! We should consume the blue powder inside this metal case, as it’s clearly a kind of medicineThis kind of symbology is never going to work. We know what archaeologists do when they understand the “you will die if you break this seal” message. Ain’t no symbol is going to keep a damn human from cracking open the glowy blue box
-
It’s technically slightly visible in air; if actually visible at all in air it means the level of radiation is ludicrously deadly
It’s not so much that it’s visible in air, it’s just that your eyes have water in them
So yeah, if you can see Cherenkov radiation outside of a pool of water, then that means the only thing attenuating the radiation is your eyeballs
-
My favorite podcast did an episode about that!
Highly recommend if you like leftism, and also want to listen to an engineer talk at length about what this blue glowing powder is, the series of bad decisions that led to some scrap collectors finding it, and the even longer series of even worse decisions people made regarding what to do with this blue glowing powder
You can skip the Goddamn News if you want, discussion of the spicy rocks starts at 20:28
I love Well There’s Your Problem, highly recommend that episode as well
-
I asked Chat GPT:
Approximate unshielded dose rates:
At 1 m: ≈ 5.2×10^4 Sv/h (≈51,800 Sv/h) — fatal essentially instantaneously (seconds or less).
At 3 m: ≈ 5.8×10^3 Sv/h — fatal within seconds.
At 10 m: ≈ 5.18×10^2 Sv/h — fatal within tens of seconds.
At 30 m: ≈ 5.8×10^1 Sv/h — severe, life‑threatening in minutes.
At 100 m: ≈ 5.2 Sv/h — dangerous; a few hours would produce fatal/serious acute radiation syndrome.
(For perspective: an acute whole‑body dose of ~4–5 Sv often causes death without intensive medical care; 1 Sv already causes significant radiation sickness.)
These are conservative, point‑source, unshielded estimates for whole‑body dose from the gammas. Being closer, or in contact, or staying in the field increases dose proportionally.
Back to me again. I’m sorry my radioactive physics game is weak and I had to speculatively look it up. That’s a lot of downvotes, yet no one decided to share the math themselves.
ChatGPT is a text generator. Any “information” it delivers is only correct by chance, if at all. Without the knowledge to check the answers yourself, you can’t possibly tell whether you’re falling for random error.
More in-depth, ChatGPT has learned how likely certain word patterns are in combination. Something like “1+1=” will most often be followed by “2”. ChatGPT has no concept of truth or mathematical relationship, so it doesn’t “understand” why this combination occurs like that, it just imitates it.
You can actually see the slight randomisation in the inconsistent way 5.18 is rounded to 5.2 instead. If this was correct – I’m not qualified to comment on that – and written by a human, you’d expect them to be more consequent with the precision. It’s likely that ChatGPT learned these number-words from different sources using different precision and randomly picks which one to go with for each new line.
So what happens when it decides a word combination seems plausible, but it doesn’t actually make sense? Well, for example, lawyers get slapped with a fine for ChatGPT citing case law that doesn’t exist. They sounded valid, because that’s what ChatGPT is made for: generating plausible word combinations. It doesn’t know what a legal case is or how it imposes critical restrictions on what’s actually valid in this context.
There’s an open access paper on the proclivity of LLMs to bullshit, available for download from Springer. The short version is that it’s entirely indifferent to truth. It doesn’t and can’t care or even know whether the figures it spits out are correct.
Use it to generate texts, if you must, but don’t use it to generate facts. It’s not looking them up, it’s not researching, it’s not doing the math – it’s making them up to sound right.
-
This post did not contain any content.
Drop it and run! [New symbol warns of radiation dangers and aims to save lives]
The black-and-yellow trefoil symbol - long the accepted label for denoting radioactive material - is getting a companion. And it's hoped that the new symbol will alert more people to the potential dangers of large sources of ionizing radiation and save lives. Unlike some signs of danger - like the commonly used skull-and-crossbones icon that seems to scream out both 'poison' and 'pirates' the trefoil symbol has little recognition beyond the nuclear community. This was learned from a five-year IAEA-led study to evaluate the best symbol to convey radiation danger. The vast majority of respondents tested in an eleven-country survey had no idea what the symbol meant nor had any knowledge of radiation. In fact, only 6% of those questioned in India, Brazil and Kenya could recognize the trefoil symbol for what it was. What resulted was a recommendation to design a universal system of labelling large radioactive sources. In 2001, IAEA Member States approved the new warning symbol project. The assignment was daunting. How to come up with a symbol that would be universally understood regardless of education, cultural orientation or age? The IAEA has recommended that the symbol be used on IAEA category 1, 2 and 3 sealed radiation sources (dangerous sources that can cause death or serious injury). The symbol was published in February 2007 by the ISO as (Supplementary Ionizing Radiation Warning Symbol : ISO 21482). The next challenge will be to publicize the new symbol within the industry and to obtain consistent implementation on large radioactive source.
INIS – International Nuclear Information System (inis.iaea.org)
“Drop & Run” by IAEA.
-
They have “ray of frost”. They can understand “radiation”. Not necessarily what is radiating but the word itself is old.
radiation(n.)
mid-15c., radiacion, “act or process of emitting light,” from Latin radiationem (nominative radiatio) “a shining, radiation,” noun of action from past-participle stem of radiare “to beam, shine, gleam; make beaming,” from radius “beam of light; spoke of a wheel” (see radius).
Tldr “radiate” is like 1500’s whereas “emitter” is a fairly modern word, from the 1880’s.
The latin source word is much older than 1500s, but the question is whether they understand what it’s about.
Both the 15th century “radiacion” and the latin “radiationem” are about emitting light and are synonymous with “to shine” or “to glow” (though without the heat connotation).
None of that conveys the sense of danger and fear of death that the modern word “radiation” means.
Kinda like how the word “plane” was in use in English in the 1600s and derives from the much older Latin word “planum”, but if I’d tell some from 1600s England or from ancient Rome that I took a plane/planum to another country, they’d be utterly confused about what that means.
The word is the same (or at least very similar), but the concept is unknown.
So you need to find a concept that’s similar to what you want to convey, and then use the fitting word.
For example, someone from the 1600s might understand the term “flying machine” (which was a well-known word in use in research and “science fiction” at that time).
-
The latin source word is much older than 1500s, but the question is whether they understand what it’s about.
Both the 15th century “radiacion” and the latin “radiationem” are about emitting light and are synonymous with “to shine” or “to glow” (though without the heat connotation).
None of that conveys the sense of danger and fear of death that the modern word “radiation” means.
Kinda like how the word “plane” was in use in English in the 1600s and derives from the much older Latin word “planum”, but if I’d tell some from 1600s England or from ancient Rome that I took a plane/planum to another country, they’d be utterly confused about what that means.
The word is the same (or at least very similar), but the concept is unknown.
So you need to find a concept that’s similar to what you want to convey, and then use the fitting word.
For example, someone from the 1600s might understand the term “flying machine” (which was a well-known word in use in research and “science fiction” at that time).
No, they don’t convey the sense of danger, I agree.
But “light-emitter” would be worse than “it radiates death/evil”, imho
