An exploration of ultracoffee, radiation safety, and more often than not a beer or two.
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 …
Continue reading “CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE: Anti-Terror Money”
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 …
Continue reading “CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE: Rad Presents”
[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 …
Continue reading “Coins of Transition: Revolutions & Civil War”
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 …
Continue reading “CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE – Mailing Cheney’s Heart”
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 …
Continue reading “CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE: Radioactive Kitty”
The first thing to keep in mind with a rocket launch is that you don’t get to do a lot of “aiming” between pressing IGNITION and ABORT. Aiming, AKA mission planning, is what you spent the previous several months/years doing. These seconds/minutes are the shitfuckdammit stage. [The sixteenth in an ongoing series of my compiled …
Continue reading “CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE – Abort Launch”
All of these choices technically cause legacy waste to take up less space, even if one is just a bullshit accounting trick. All of them have been tried, all of them have lead to uptakes, but like all of these quizzes my word choice is important. So, let’s define some terms. [The fifteenth in an …
Continue reading “CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE – Legacy Waste”
I thought I would make a new end of year CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE, except I realized I kept running face first into “All Of The Above”. So instead, I want to discuss archetypical accidents to try to encourage you to not be the cause/victim in one. As we approach NYE 2020 with restrictions …
Continue reading “The Archetypical Injury – My NYE 2020 Benediction”
I should preface that my primary vacuum tube experience is related to trying to fix the 1920s built-in wall radio made of redwood in a house my family rented when I was in elementary school. Readers, I never fixed that radio. [The fourteenth in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers for my CHOOSE YOUR …
Continue reading “CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE – Old Tubes”
When I put these polls up, one of the most common responses is “Why on Earth would anyone ask *me* to do this?” That’s fair, but this is my game. ;) But for reactor siting? The number of different fields we talk to is astounding, lest we miss something. You never know when you might …
Continue reading “CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE – The NYC Reactor Problem”
No BBotE and shipping talk today. When people ask how I got into safety work or how to improve the safety culture in their research labs (industry is much easier to fix), I like to share this wisdom from my undergraduate advisor: “Working safely is not just something you do in addition to your research …
To reiterate, the good news here is zero chance of zombies. The bad news is that you have to cope with the living instead. Unlike the shambling dead, who are fairly goal oriented (re: your brains), the living have Opinions™ and they are often contradictory. [The twelfth in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers …
Continue reading “CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE: Radioactive Dead”
A good place to start is that counting labs rarely (read: I have never seen one) end up on the top floor with beautiful views of your surroundings. No, you get the dungeon labs where sunlight & windows are a rumor, but the radon down there is quite real. [The eleventh in an ongoing series …
Continue reading “CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE – Radon Hijinks”
When you’re regarded as a teacher/professor’s favorite student over their entire career, it makes it very likely the school administration or alumni association will drop you a line for help, no matter what you went on to do in life. This may encourage you to move far from home. [The tenth in an ongoing series …
Continue reading “CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE – Demonstration Radiation”
Mooching off of other departments is always a challenge, if for no other reason than they’re gonna mooch right back at you later. Of course, the things they’re most willing to give you is their garbage. As the saying goes, “It’s not waste if someone else has a use for it.” [The ninth in an …
Continue reading “CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE – The Counting Experiment”