Here is your advance warning of my next, entirely too brief, trip: from November 9-14th, I will be going to visit Kiev, Pripyat and Chernobyl. This is a somewhere I’ve wanted to go for a very long time so I’m treating this as a slightly belated birthday present to myself as I collect one of …
Category Archives: Adventure & Radiation
BBotE Vacation Alert, Big Trees, Bad Air, and Camping Theory
Scheduling information first: the short ordering window that closes on September 19th, before I get on a plane to Boston, is now open for most items. After the 19th, another ordering window will open so you can continue to place orders, but nothing for that one will ship until after I return on October 5th. …
Continue reading “BBotE Vacation Alert, Big Trees, Bad Air, and Camping Theory”
Recent Improvements, New BBotEs, and Vacations
Let’s begin with the improvement you can’t see or, rather, won’t see anymore. At some point a “helpful upgrade” was done by BigCommerce who provide the architecture and servers for the store side of Funranium Labs. In the course of this upgrade, they managed to break the 3rd party SSL chain and depending on the browser …
Continue reading “Recent Improvements, New BBotEs, and Vacations”
Antarctic Medical Evacuation 2003
I’m putting this here to, potentially, stop questions. I, honestly, remember near to nothing about the medevac we had in late 2003. Hypothyrodism due to protracted exposure to cold and dark takes a lot of forms and mine was memory loss and appalling Yoda like grammar. I remember very little about September 2003 and near …
Great Moments In Teaching – Fecal Samples
PLEASE NOTE: there is a very good reason there are no pictures associated with this story. As some of you may know, I teach a radiation safety course at a local community college. A while back, we were discussing bioassay techniques (read: ways determine if there’s been an uptake of radioactive material in the body, …
Continue reading “Great Moments In Teaching – Fecal Samples”
The Picric Acid Tale or “Why I Can’t Have Four Day Weekends Anymore”
Once upon a time, the radiation safety officer (RSO), let’s call him Bob, had been out performing the inventory of source material* and ran across a bit of excitement. In this particular lab, they had approximately 10 grams of uranyl acetate, a very common contrast stain for electron microscopes. The poor unfortunate grad student who was …
Continue reading “The Picric Acid Tale or “Why I Can’t Have Four Day Weekends Anymore””
No Pants-Bear Bad
Adding this slice of life from almost a decade ago at LLNL to the permanent record of Funranium Labs as a reference point for Test Subject Vision Scientist (subcategory: Male) [SCENE: Early April 2008, Lawrence Livermore Nat’l Lab. The transition to the new managing private consortium, primarily run by Bechtel, has proven to be very uncomfortable …
Klingon Scrabble and Odd Units of Measure
The other day I was trading tales with the former BBotE Ambassador of NYC, @EditrixW, and after sharing my new favorite Beatles cover song from Mongolia we drifted by COMPLETELY REASONABLE CONNECTIONS to the reason why my Lovely Assistant and I haven’t played Scrabble in quite some time. You see, we used to play it in a way I …
Continue reading “Klingon Scrabble and Odd Units of Measure”
More Volcano & Coffee Contemplation
As mentioned in the previous post, I fled the mainland for a week to escape Super Bowl madness in the SF Bay Area to the lovely Big Island of Hawaii. As my Lovely Assistant had never been to that island before, we split our time between Hilo and Kailua so she could experience both sides. …
Apologies For The Weird Production Windows
The production window closing on January 23rd, which was a long one due to CES 2016, has pretty much sold out and shipped. The next production window will be completely open on Saturday (some slots are already up) but its going to be a short window ending on February 2nd. “Why?” you might ask. Because …
Continue reading “Apologies For The Weird Production Windows”
Regarding Breathalyzers in Antarctica
As I have been asked by a number of people about the latest Office of Inspector General’s report, and in the case of Wired they interviewed me and generated a very cherry picked set of quotes designed for maximum clickbait, allow me to share my collected thoughts about it here. TL;DR version: the NSF response …
Welcome to the Wasteland
Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a piece of Nevada that America decided was expendable. It had eaten countless settlements, boomed and busted so many times with the precious metal of choice, and the taken the lives of settlers with it. We then sacrificed it on the altar of national security and …
New Things, Departures, & Fun
Alright, I’ve good news, better news, great news, and a small bummer for you all. The bummer: my roaster of choice for my Panama declares end of season. Accordingly, it has been removed as a selection on the radio buttons when you’re placing an order. It will be missed, as it always is, and hopefully …
Advice to a Young Scientist/Engineer
I am starting to build a backlog of incomplete posts, for which I apologize. For the TL;DR version: I went to the Nevada Test Site and it was awesome, the BBotE order slots for the window ending May 30th are now up, and a new label for the bottles is coming that I’m very excited …
An April Fools Cautionary Tale
TL;DR moral of the story: do not prank emergency responders. We will play it straight and you won’t like it. Once upon a time, several years ago, a grad student decided to call the spill response line and call in a spill in a non-radiological control area. Because my name is first in alphabetical order …