Evolution Of Safety Equipment – The Berkeley Box

For folks that haven’t been lucky enough to experience the “Phil Points At Things That Aren’t There Anymore” Manhattan Project Tour of Berkeley, there is a secondary bit of education that comes courtesy of having 160 years worth of chemistry buildings still standing to point at. I similarly do this for students when getting them …

CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE – Kneejerk Spent Fuel Solutions

People who believe they have True Ultimate Power want nice, simple, sound bite executable solutions that obliterate nuance and complications with BOLD & DECISIVE ACTION. Were those actions good and appropriate? Ehhhhhh. [The twenty-third in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers for my CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE quizzes. There’s never really a right …

Ultraviolet Rant – Scorched Ape Eye Club

Having now had a chance to take a look at the likely culprit, assuming a repetition of the previous incident, all I can say is You Completely Irresponsible Fucks. I am having flashbacks to yelling at Naomi Wu for irresponsible deployment of germicidal UV designs in 2020. I am gonna try to very briefly summarize …

CYORA: Spicy Rock Shipping

Because people were missing the CYORAs and something popped into my head, you got the first one in quite a while. Moving radioactive rocks around is important because it lets us revisit one of my favorite topics: Regulations vs. Reality vs. What Actually Happens [The twenty-second in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers for …

CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE: Anti-Terror Money

There’s a hard philosophical conflict in emergency preparedness that goes like this: do you want to build capabilities to respond to an incident or do you want to prevent it from happening in the first place? You need both, but they tend to compete for the same pot of money. [The twenty-first in an ongoing …

CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE: Rad Presents

I think he best way to start this is by shaking my ANGRYFIST at Amazon & eBay for being the gray/black markets of choice for all manner of things that should not be there. Bullshit Lasers only scratch the surface of their almost complete lack of policy enforcement. [The twentieth in an ongoing series of …

CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE: Anti-Drone Radiation

I’m very proud of all of you for identifying that these are all TERRIBLE IDEAS. The thing about terrible ideas is that they still occur to people and sometimes staggering amounts of money will be spent to try to make them real and marginally less terrible. Explainer time! [The nineteenth in an ongoing series of …

Coins of Transition: Revolutions & Civil War

[Editorial Note: This post has sat incomplete for almost three years because I was trying to stitch together some very big and complicated concepts spanning roughly 2600 years. Coming back to this and trying to figure out what I wanted to say, I figured out that the real uniting theme and thesis is {Marge Simpson …

CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE – Mailing Cheney’s Heart

With the exception of the old Pu-238 pacemaker, as hospitals & mortuaries prefer FedEx for some reason, all of these things have been sent through the mail by the USPS. Whether they should have is the issue. If the postal inspectors had checked, they’d be cranky. [The eighteenth in an ongoing series of my compiled …

CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE: Radioactive Kitty

The fun thing about this one is that I know a lot of people out there have treated their cats for hyperthyroidism, but the number of responses from people that’ve experienced radiopharma medical care for humans that I’d call “inadequate, bordering on actionable” is high. [The seventeenth in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers …