What Are Dewars?

A minimal jargon explanation, by Herr Direktor Funranium. Written while consuming a carbonated, no H2O Manhattan.  Standards of insobriety, with corresponding misspellings and grammatical errors, are being upheld. The stupid simple, “Go away, yer botherin’ me, boy” explanation of how a dewar works is that it’s like a really, really good scientific-grade Thermos(TM). The average …

Who’s Herr Direktor?

Herr Direktor Funranium is the after hours mad science alter-ego of the theoretically mild mannered health physicist, Phil Broughton. By day, I work in radiation safety as a health physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. My normal duties have an emphasis on radiation producing machines, radiation detection instrumentation, and (unofficially) the weird stuff you …

BBotE: Recent Developments (2/8/10)

Coffee Science is a forever advancing field. Like other disciplines, it comes in fits and starts, though this could be due to caffeine. Even more important is the role of happenstance in the advancement in the body of human knowledge; the headscratching declaration of “Huh, well, that wasn’t supposed to happen.” This last Sunday, I …