I have returned from Adventures in Radiation in eastern Washington and a fresh round of pre-order slots have gone up in the store as I finish up the last of the previous lots. I have discovered that I have quite a few emails with questions that aren’t related to enhancing my maxxxximum manprow. Sorry for the delay on getting back to you all, but as you’ll see below, there’s a reason for this. That reason is Science.
This last weekend was consumed with Legos, coffee, manhattans and evaluating a DOE incident report for intimate detail. If you would like your “radiation safety professional for a day” test, please look at this picture and tell me everything you see wrong with it. This is sort of like one of those puzzles from Highlights magazine when you were a kid, stuck in the dentist’s office waiting room, bored to tears, but instead with THE DEADLY RADIATIONS and, unfortunately, from an actual event. BEHOLD!
YOUR KNOWN INFORMATION:
You are going to use this setup for handling ZPPR (Zero Power Physics Reactor) nuclear fuel packages with a lot of Pu-240, Am-241 and their resulting fission products, all of which are fairly beefy gamma emitters.
Gamma dose rates are approx 30rad/hr at 10cm from a typical fuel assembly. As a reminder, in the United States, your annual regulatory dose limit is 5rad per year.
The work operation to be performed involves opening the assemblies to play with the fuel plates within, with the very likely potential for releasing airborne particulates.
The mass of inhaled Pu-240 alone necessary to make a worker exceed the annual dose limit is about 1 microgram, a quantity that is not visible to the naked eye.
Herr Direktor Funranium, without a trace of irony, banged his head on the desk, yelling “NO! You have to be shitting me!” when first shown this picture. The good news is that no one died working here. It is otherwise a “No Pants, Bear” grade bad situation. This should give you some idea of how many things are wrong in this picture to pick out.
(NOTE: the people in the picture are Important People looking at this room before work actually began to make sure that taxpayer dollars were well spent.)
I just want to state for the record that I have shown this picture to a couple dozen people now that have no background in radioactive materials work beyond being “A Friend of Phil” (yes, I do realize that this over-cocktails-background makes them more knowledgeable in the practical matters of radiation than some grad students). On just a glance, every single person that looked at this asked how in the hell anyone thought this was a acceptable/good idea.
The only root cause answer I was able to come up with is that sometimes the profit motive of private enterprise isn’t always the best idea. At some level, I’m uncomfortable with the fact our national laboratories are run by for-profit entities, especially the weapons labs as that’s a relatively new development. It’s hard to remember the mission when you have to focus on the bottom-line.
If you’ve been poking at the store side of things lately, you may have noticed that the inventories of most everything has dwindled down to zero. This is intentional as I want to clear everything out before I put up the next round of pre-orders. “Why?” you ask. Because I am off to beautiful, scenic Richland, WA for a week of Fun With Radiation. “WHY!?!?” you may ask again. Because Richland, WA is where we’ve hidden Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, AKA the Hanford Site, and they’ve accreted various things relevant to my actual career of playing with the DEADLY RADIATIONS™. So, really it’s almost a vacation, if your definition of vacation includes plutonium and talking about regulations. Regular production will resume after Memorial Day.
And you may be absolutely certain that I am going to sample all of the wares of these fine folks at the Atomic Ale Brewpub. In the interest of Science, of course.
Over the last decade (oh god, it has been that long) I have been asked many times people how the can get to go to Antarctica, most recently by Meredith Yayanos. Well, here’s my list of ways down to the Ice:
The typical way people assume you go to Antarctica is to do Science. As I have attempted to tell folks, the vast majority of people in Antarctica are not scientists but this is still a way down. As an American researcher, the first thing you’ll need is a large research grant. You then submit your research proposal to USAP, the National Science Foundation’s United States Antarctic Program (international researchers may feel free to apply, though many of the signatory nations to the Antarctic Treaty have their own programs). If approved, you’ll be granted an event number, which you should hold on to for dear life as absolutely everything you do in Antarctica will be referenced back to that.
For those of a scientific bent, it is far easier to find someone that has an existing event number, try to modify their proposal to include your research, and sort of be a research subcontractor. Or, if you like their research, go down as a research associate under their project. NOTE: this is why Antarctica is full of undergrads, grad students, and postdocs.
Of course you may fabulously independently wealthy, or have such folks as backers, and don’t want to deal with the USAP and feel like having an expedition to Antarctica on your own. You better have your shit together unless you feel like pulling a Capt. Scott down there because without an event number assigned to your expedition, absolutely no one will help you. Or they will help, grudgingly, and an extremely high price that will be taken out of your hide when your sorry, unprepared ass gets rescued and shipped home…assuming you survive to get rescued.
There are a variety of cruises that “go to Antarctica” that you can sign up for but buyer beware. Many of these cruises on converted Russian fishing vessels count crossing 66° 33′ 44″, the Antarctic Circle, as going to Antarctica. Some visit islands south of the circle, some play along the peninsula but I don’t know any that do landfall on the mainland. These cruises are also painfully expensive.
My Ceremonial South Pole Hero Shot & Xmas Card 2002
But perhaps price is no object to you and you want your hero shot at the ceremonial South Pole. Well, there’s always Adventure Networks that for ~$60k will fly you down, let you do a bit of skiing, take your picture and fly home. Honestly, we Polies looked at these flights with some disdain as we contemplated our paychecks and watched 60-70 year olds pile out of the plane, gasping for air at the altitutde, stay for 30min and fly out. That was back when the trip only cost $30k.
If you want to actually work in Antarctica and let someone pay you to be there, there are a variety of contractors that support the USAP mission. The primary support contractor for USAP is Raytheon Polar Services Co(NOTE: this is no longer accurate). Akima Staffing Solutions is also down there as well. This is they way for most anyone else to go to Antarctica if you don’t think you have “science applicable skills” good enough to support the NSF directly as a grantee. Construction workers, cooks, mechanics, custodians, etc.,on average there’s eight people to every one person doing research just to keep the stations running. If you aren’t afraid of scrubbing pans or wielding a shovel, and don’t mind long hours and low pay, you can go to Antarctica. I’m to understand a judge on the federal bench once went on sabbatical as a dishwasher. Of course, you will have to pass the physical and psych qualifications; you have to be crazy enough to want to go to Antarctica, but not too crazy.
Lastly, there is a special Antarctica Artists & Authors Program out of the NSF to promote the creation of works of art inspired by Antarctica. The grant will pay to get you to Antarctica, plus food and berthing once you’re there, but there’s no money for salary or materials. So get your ducks in a row to keep the home fires burning before you go on an inspirational journey. Also, don’t be surprised if you get roped into the odd job or two while you’re there.
Alright, as of tomorrow, resupply cases for all your local BBotE Ambassadors (except for College Station, TX and Dublin, Ireland) are either there or on their way. In fact, Portland may be out of stock again and in need of another. I am to understand the case for Delta City (AKA Detroit) has disappeared into a black hole somewhere between Oaktown and the Motown so a replacement may need to go out. Per Justin, Ambassador of London, that the clouds cleared over his blighted city for the first time in months and angels could be heard singing. That might be a titch of hyperbolic exaggeration, but he sure was happy to get resupply.
And I am pleased to announce that I can finally repay New Zealand for all the kindness it’s shown me for the last decade or so. Next week I will be shipping the inaugural case to the BBotE Ambassador of Wellington, Ms. Meredith Yayanos. Do you not know Meredith? Allow me to acquaint you. Admittedly, this entry needs a bit of an update as she is now a denizen of Wellington, which is California’s loss but New Zealand’s gain.
You see, back in the dawn of BBotE Warren Ellis asked, pretty please, if would I drop a bounty of BBotE on his co-conspirator Ariana Osborne (AKA She Who Turns Warren’s Muttered Ramblings Into Things & Stuff) to see what wonders might result if she slept even less than normal. The story gets a bit fuzzy after that but, somehow, a bit of that bounty made it Meredith’s hands, an edition of Coilhouse was published in record time, new music projects were contemplated, the Pacific Ocean was leapt in a single bound, and other Pythonesque feats as well. So drop her a line, New Zealand!
On a completely unrelated note, my brain sometimes works slow but the background processes are always turning away. Roughly a year ago, I offered to do some science nerding for a friend’s 10yo daughter. He somewhat apologetically waved me off and said that, much like her dad, while she was interested in science, the math skills weren’t really there (much like him) and that music & art were really her passions.
Last night, while enjoying the zen like meditative state of a BBotE extraction, I had a realization and answer to that.
I have forgotten more math than most people ever learn. I feel like a case study of “use it or lose it” as, at one point, I had to shove more or less an entire undergraduate math degree in my head in six months in order to complete my BS in physics. Tensor analysis, bra-ket notation, Legendre polynomials, Bessel & Von Neumann functions…all those things I used to be rather good at in order to do quantum mechanics, GONE. I remember what they were for and why I’d want to use them, but I’d need to spray a whole lot of WD-40 into my brain to free those rusty gears and actually do something.
But honestly, the shape of those things is what was important in the first place. The ability to look at the world, tilt my head slightly to the right, squint, and say to myself “Yeah, I’m pretty sure it works that way.” The math to prove it is an afterthought, the confirmation with elegant numbers & equations that the universe works like you intuitively thought it did. The name I’ve been calling this for as long as I can remember is Physical Intuition; that deep down knowledge of how physics works that changes how you see the world around you.
I don’t see waves on the ocean, I see possibilities of what the ocean floor looks like and wind/water interaction. I don’t see a rock with crystals in it, I see the Earth baking in a magmatic kitchen with temperature-pressure diagrams vs. different chemical concentrations. I don’t see a satellite TV dish out the window, I see the perfect curvature for impedance matching for receiving a electromagnetic beam originating in Low Earth Orbit like the last puzzle piece dropping in place.
This is an artistic way of looking at the wonder of world. The math is just another way of trying to express it. So, don’t let the fear of math, or perceived incompetence, keep you away from trying to find a deeper understanding of the world. The worst that can happen is you learn something new when you’re wrong.
I have completely cleared the orders spike due to the TWiT Army and turned ordering back on for most items, as some of you have already noticed. However, there has been a significant change. Once upon a time, there was unlimited ordering of the standard six varieties (Ethiopia, Kenya, Kona, Malabar, Panama, Sumatra) and limited stock of the others that might easily run out (Death Wish, Rwanda, Colombia, Peru).
Not anymore.
Because it isn’t fair of me to make people wait weeks for things they’ve paid for. Because my Lovely Assistant complained a bit that she hadn’t seen much of me in the last month. Because I have more travel coming up at the end of May. And because, frankly, I’ve had to consume far too much BBotE to stay awake to make more BBotE in the last month.
Henceforth, there won’t be unlimited ordering on any item in the store, so you may hit “Currently Out Of Stock” now when you go to find something. I’d rather tell you to wait and check back later, than take your money and make you wait while I crank a backlog. Makes me feel guilty and you feel cranky. The expected release dates you’ll see on the item listings are when things should be finished and on the road to you by. It is very likely that I’ll get your order out earlier than that date but may overshoot it by a day or two. I apologize in advance if you go to the store and what you want isn’t there, feel free to drop me a line to ask when the next run is likely to happen.
(Side Note: I have discovered a limitation in my software, possibly in my understanding of it, relating to the expected release dates. If I change that release date, it goes back in time for all orders of that item. So, if I slate a production run due on the 7th, sell it out, and then set a run due on the 14th, when people that placed an order for the first run go check on their order it’ll say 14th. Sorry about that and I expect to answer emails about this on a regular basis.)
On a positive note, throttling things like this will likely give some time to do some experimentation again. The last month of uninterrupted maximum production has taken all my slack to go hunt new tasty BBotE away and that’s got to resume. As proven in the past, even tried and true favorites like Panama can run out and I need to find things that can take their place for you all.
And with that, GAME ON! I’m gonna go play with the Deadly Radiations again now. Bye bye.
PS – BBotE Ambassador resupply for local distribution is in progress. London, DC/Baltimore, Portland, Detroit, and Minneapolits-St. Paul all have cases on the way already. Madison, New York, Seattle, Chicago, and Santa Barbara will be going out by the by.
Because I don’t want to lengthen the backlog any longer than it already is.
Running maximum production since March 21st and recruiting some help to actually get BBotE & steins out the door *AND* have the luxury of sleep has been no small feat, ye tstill hasn’t obliterated the backlog in a satisfactory manner. The fact that I’m going to be on travel April 11th to 19th doesn’t help. On March 31st, looking at where things were going, I dropped an expected release date of May 1st on all items purchased from that point on so that people weren’t sitting around, anxiously staring at their mailbox, when they were 300 or so orders deep in the first come-first served queue.
That didn’t stop the backlog from growing either. Slowed it down, but didn’t stop.
By the time I get on a plane on Wednesday, I expect to have almost all of the orders placed prior to March 31st out the door, with notes of apology to those folks who were at the end of line. Today, I zeroed the inventory on almost everything but steins, because I want to clear the backlog out before I take more pre-orders. Feel free to drop me a line if you’d like an email when I turn pre-orders back on, but for the time being I don’t want to field anymore messages from people who failed to read “pre-order” on the listing, the warning of delay due to a long queue at the top of the description, or the link to the Admission of Defeat. This is an attempt to regain control while a stronger inventory control system is put in place that will more effectively meter orders vs. production capacity.
As I have said more than once, this is for fun. It is a hobby. The moment that it ceases to be so it is another job and, frankly, I already have one of those that I love far more than coffee.
Been quiet here for a bit as I’ve been running at maximum BBotE production capacity, non-stop, since March 21st and still have quite a way left to go yet. But I want to take a moment to have you meditate upon a thought I had several years back that came back up again today: The Black Resume.
The Black Resume is a term I came up with (perhaps unwittingly borrowed) when lamenting to a friend about the vast amount of things I know how to do, KSAs (knowledge, skills, abilities) that definitely contribute to my being a useful worker as weird stuff comes up and provide keen insights into the human condition, that I would never,ever list on my resume/CV when applying for a job in my chosen field. Things that would, in all likelihood, prevent me from ever being hired when they scare someone in HR. Things that invariably come up later when explaining how I knew about, or how to do, something.
For example, a far from exhaustive and non-incriminating list: bartending, amateur rocketry, nitroglycerin/explosives manufacture, amateur demolition, odd pharmacology, encyclopedic knowledge of “unpleasant history”.
I have to admit, when written down the Black Resume pleases me more than my real one. These are things that make me a more whole, interesting, and happy person which makes me a better worker in my genuine trade…but these are things HR would have trouble quantifying/evaluating. In fact, might make it likely I’d never get hired in the first place.
A few days ago, a visitor made a post that said, “Looks like the TWiT Army takes down another site.” Not quite, as the back-end migration that was successfully completed the week prior to last Tuesday’s Mac Break Weekly has proven up to tackling the full and blistering attention of Mr. Leo Laporte’s audience. Funranium Labs survived the TWiT Army admirably and I give high praise to my web guru and BBotE Ambassador of College Station, Mr. Jason Pulliam, for sailing directly into the heart of the storm.
However…
My 9L/day maximum production most definitely has not survived the attention. I will be spending the next couple weeks trying to clear the backlog and that’s assuming orders stop rolling in. Your local BBotE Ambassadors of Canberra, Dublin, London, Portland, NYC, Seattle, and College Station are out of stock. I have reliable reports that Chicago, DC, and LA still have some, so feel free to drop them a line. It is going to be a while until I manage to restock them.
So, this is a declaration that I’m doing all I can to get BBotE and Steins of Sciences out to you as quick as I can, but the line ahead of you may be quite long. To make it even more fun, I have some travel scheduled April 12-19th and there will be no production during this time.
You’ve won this round, TWiT Army, but the war is not over. Moo hoo ha ha.
Courtesy of some recent kind words by Test Subject Siegel on Mac Break Weekly, just a few of people have decided they might want to try some BBotE.
Did I say some? I meant to say a lot. As in, well exceeding my 9L per day production capacity. So, there’s going to be a titch of delay in getting BBotE to everyone. I hope to have the backlog cleared by the end of next week because I don’t like to leave anyone languishing without caffeinated delights.
This is Brian Clevinger’s fault. I thought I’d take moment at the outset to blame him.
In addition to having a physics degree, having been nominated Eternal DM For Life amongst my gaming circle all the way back to elementary school, and a truly compendious amount of knowledge about Frank Herbert’s Dune, I am a geography/history lover like you wouldn’t believe. And, since age 8 going through all the change my dad pulled from the newspaper machines to roll them for the bank, I’ve been a coin collector. Combined, this has given me some odd insights into world history, particularly American, through the lens of our currency. An awful lot of our history is tied up in our money. This, of course, triggers rants that I hope are instructive. I will put them together in my Copious Free Time(TM), but here’s what I think needs to be shared:
Lesson Three: Pieces of Eight – The Counter Reformation and 400 years of the same damn coin.
Lesson Four: Andrew Jackson – FUCK YOU, OL’ HICKORY. No really, FUCK YOU.
Lesson Five: Odd Denominations – Exactly why did the US have 3 cent pieces anyway?
Lesson Six: The Nickel – It used to be worth 3 cents.
Lesson Seven: Fast-tracking Statehood – Wanna be a state NOW? Find some gold or silver.
Lesson Eight: Banks – Really. Stop and think about it. What is a bank? What was a bank?
Lesson Nine: Faces – Though I love the Great Emancipator, there was a reason the original Coinage Act forbade the portrayal of actual people on our coins.
In the dark and unforgiving dawn of the Black Blood of the Earth production and distribution, after bringing an entire ice chest of BBotE labeled only with lab tape to her wedding, my friend Natara asked if she could be the local dealer for BBotE based upon how well it had gone over with the crowd.
Considering the fun doing bottle hand offs at odd hours on street corners for cash, I felt that the route of maximum honesty of likening ourselves to volunteer drug dealers was perhaps not the best choice (no matter how accurate it may feel). Keeping that illicitness in mind. the very limited, not entirely sober, consensus referred to what we were doing as “pimping BBotE” and thus the local distributors became the BBotE Pimps & Pimpstresses.
Last week, I got this message which I received permission to share with all of you:
Dear Phil,
I know you likely get lots of emails saying some version of “BBotE is awesome” and this is only a slight variation on that, but I hope you’ll humor me by reading it anyway.
I was introduced to your too-good-to-be-true beverage in October 2011 and gifted a bottle in mid-January. I’ve cheered about it on Facebook and Twitter and been experimenting with different variations on Black Blood lattes. I was pretty much on the path to being among your legion of lifelong fans and customers. When my current bottle was getting perilously low, I made my way to your site with the intent of exploring my options for local pickup/exchange and there discovered I’d be encountering someone you referred to as a pimp(stress).
I grew up with the stereotype of the pimp: the dude with a long car, long coat and a ridiculous ostrich-feathered hat. I wish pimps were, in fact, cartoonish figures we could all laugh and point at, harmless in their hilarity and outrageousness.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case; pimps are a real thing and they deal in: Human trafficking. Slavery. Degradation. Rape. Coercion. Exploitation.
And just as pimps are real, so are their victims.These people have nothing to do with your product and marketing, I know, but the casual and hip usage of the word “pimp” only serves to erase their very real situation, their very real pain.
Please understand, this isn’t the beginning of some campaign; I won’t be talking about this on Twitter or Facebook or starting an online petition. I’m just one woman saying, “There’s no way in hell I’d meet a stranger who is comfortable calling himself a pimp.” I’m just one woman who can’t hand her cash over to an enterprise that makes light of trafficking, even unintentionally. And just maybe I’m not the only one.
Best regards,
Angélique
She’s right. Unequivocally correct. There is corner of my inner asshole that almost always says “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke” on so many topics, but on this one the inner asshole has to go sit in the corner and await is next chance to play.
So, I polled the collected volunteers as to what how they would like to be referred to. The consensus answer is “BBotE Ambassador”, though many fine suggestions that appeal to a love for alliteration and deeply corrupt vulgate Latin were expressed. Each individual BBotE Ambassador may have a particular appellation that they prefer, i.e. Coffee Consul of Chicago/Cook County (please pity his wife for dealing with his alliterative soul), but you could always call them the thing you and they have in common: “Fellow addict”.
Aren’t we all?
Thank you for taking the time to drop a line, Angélique.
In the interest of sharing important slices of life from my time as Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station’s bartender, I give you the recipe for “Enhanced” Sangria, AKA Mechanics’ Juice.
Accidentally freeze an entire airdrop pallet of wine so that you have enough broken bottles that need to be consumed NOW so that this recipe’s portions make sense.
Procure a reasonably clean 5 gallon bucket*. At the very least, a bucket free of detritus. Add the booze in the right order and you don’t have to worry much about disinfecting things.
Add one 750ml bottle, each, of the following boozes: gin, light rum, tequila, triple sec, vodka.
Add three bags of frozen fruit and several sliced oranges. Fresh fruit won’t last forever and you might as well use it here instead of throwing it out.
Fill the remainder of bucket with red wine. Try to strain out the broken glass, chunks of cork, and label before dropping them in.
Let sit for roughly 24 hours. DO NOT PUT THE BUCKET OUTSIDE IN THE SUBZERO TEMPS. Freezing things is why you’re making this in the first place.
Hide the sharp implements and serve to the unsuspecting by the pitcher.
NOTE: A single person should not consume an entire pitcher of this.
Of course, that happened. This is the reason that there is a brilliant scarlet stain on the wall of one of the bedrooms in the Elevated Station. Someone had “an incident” and that stain is FOREVER I tell you. We’d only taken occupancy of the new station about a week beforehand, so this was the first ding in the fender if you will.
I take some solace it wasn’t me, but I did make the sangria that caused it. Sorry about that, US Antarctic Program.
* This recipe can be easily scaled up to for 55gal Rubbermaid wheelie trashcan. I know this because we had more frozen wine left over and repeated the experiment on a more epic scale.
In my continuing efforts to find new and interesting things, I decided to head a little further in South America to try a new distinctive dark roast. Brazil has generally been a bit of a let down for roast consistency but I hadn’t had a lot of opportunity to play with the coffees of Peru. Considering that the country is on par with Sumatra for straight up stratovolcanism, though not quite the same geology and geochemistry, I figured it was worth a try.
The Peruvian Salkanty, or Salkantay depending on your preferred spelling (NOTE: it is not “Salty Carny” as Test Subject Broken Tongue called it), is a dark roasted high altitude coffee that surprisingly kept that bright citrus flavor as a hot brew. When made into BBotE, that changed entirely. The citrus changed to pepper. I am not quite used to a strong black pepper warmth in my coffee, not that it was bad just surprising, but Test Subject General Antagonist claims it reminded him of the pepper notes he gets from the chicory in Nawlins coffee. There was also a vote for “cakey brownie”. Test Subject NO experienced an almost minute delayed aftertaste of more pepper that rather surprised him. The rest off us felt it was a rather long palate, but no second spike like he had. Vodka addition, muted the peppery burn a bit, blending it more with the brownie flavor. Chipotle brownies?
Sadly, Test Subject Broken Tongue had no special input beyond, “This doesn’t taste like any carnies I’ve ever licked.” I recommended he go find a Peruvian circus for proper comparison.
So, I think it makes the cut to be worth sharing as a short run. If it strikes a chord with people, it’ll stay until it the roaster runs out.
In other news, there is likely to be a bit of a hiatus on Mundo Nuvo as the roaster that makes it happen at Caffe Vita is currently on walkabout in Ethiopia hunting up new and interesting small farm sourcing. I have high hopes he’ll be returning with delicious treats in addition to making more of my heart’s delight, Guatemala Mundo Nuvo. When the current inventory is gone, it’ll probably be out of stock for a month or two.
The nice folks at Death Wish have expanded their roasting capacity so there is near to no reason that I should ever run out of stock again for you eXXXtreme caffeine sports afficianados. The Rwanda Abakundakawa supplies remain strong for the foreseeable future.
The Colombia Paez that I’m fond of remains, sadly, intermittent despite my encouragement of the roaster. I try to lay in supplies when I can. Don’t be surprised when that goes out of stock for short stretches.
And, of course, the hunt for new things, and the return of some old favorites, goes on. Don’t think for a minute I’ve stopped haranguing my old supplier of Panama to get that back. The standards (Ethiopia, Kenya, Kona, Malabar, Sumatra) remain standards and are in no danger of going away.
Lastly, in response to a request from Test Subjects Kristobek & Thornber, there is a smaller sized 350ml “Rugged FMJ” Stein of Science more appropriate to coffee or Trappist ale consumption than the full imperial pint, yet up to their clumsy antics. I made two of the textured style a while back (as that’s what the luck of the draw gave me) but these are nice smooth metal shields. They’re going to remain a part of the regular line up I think.
Error has been fixed in the sense that my “helping” has been undone.
Remind me the next time that I try to fix something on The Internets that it isn’t as simple as building an x-ray fluorescence unit. The next time I get that urge, I will resist it and go have a cocktail instead. This is the wisdom that comes with age.
Right, the back end migration has not been without casualties. It appears that I’ve lost the ability to ship internationally for the moment until I & my trusty webminion can get home to sort this out.
In the meantime, you nice folks in Germany, Australia, Denmark, and Norway, enjoy this nice video of a singing owl.
A reminder: over the last weekend there was a swap of back end for the store which means, unfortunately, you cannot access your old pre-February 24th, 2012 orders to chat with me. The database should remember who you are but you’ll have to drop me a line the conventional way. Alas.
I get some personal questions from time to time in the ol’ Ask Herr Direktor bucket and the most popular is… Question: “What the hell is a health physicist and why are you one?” Answer: The completely uninformative TL;DR version is “a safety professional that specializes in ionizing radiation”.
Now, would you like to know what that means? This is a bit of a ramble, so brace yourself.
For a moment, please try to imagine ALL of Science. All of it, even the bits that you feel uncomfortable referring to as Science, perhaps you call it *finger quotes* “Science”, or squishy science, even perhaps pseudoscience. Are you holding all of that in your head? Okay, now take absolutely any topic in that ball of knowledge you’re holding and add ionizing radiation to further explore a hypothesis in the topic. In my experience, there is absolutely no field of human thought or endeavor that someone hasn’t found a way to add some kind of radioactive material tracer to or bombard with x-rays to prove a point.
It is vitally important to have someone around to say, “Okay, you could do that, but would you mind putting some shielding behind your target so you don’t irradiate the Chemistry 1A lab bench on the other side of the wall? At the very least, can you wait until after the students are gone?” One of the sayings about health physics is that it is a topic “an inch wide and a mile deep”. Understanding what radiation does is relatively easy; understanding what EVERYTHING ELSE does in the presence of radiation is another matter.
As a matter of history, x-rays were discovered by Roentgen in November 1895 and radioactive materials by Becquerel in July of 1896. The first recorded radiation injury happened due to an x-ray over exposure in August 1896; medical use of x-rays medical began shorty after the discovery. The term “health physics” entered parlance during the Manhattan Project to describe all those people doing radiation protection and biological research (mainly focused on their fellow workers/researchers handling radioactive materials) to protect us from their work and, sometimes, their work from them. On organizational charts and pay stubs “health physicist” was less informative to foreign intelligence services than “radiation protection professional/researcher”. In my opinion, the field as a whole has suffered from this obfuscation in the public eye ever since.
The effects of ionizing radiation, be it x-rays from a machine or radioactive materials, are pretty straightforward. We have an excellent idea of how much it takes to hurt people, how it hurts, and how to protect against it. In fact, ionizing radiation is wonderful because there are actually meters that can detect radiation directly. Biosafety and industrial hygiene (chemical safety) have been greatly hampered by the fact that tricorders don’t exist yet. But we’re getting there.
So what is it that I *do* exactly? Mostly paperwork. At the moment, I am responsible for the radiation producing machine (read: x-ray) and radiation detection instrument calibration program at UC Berkeley, which means I shuffle a lot of paper making sure everyone is playing nicely. This means making sure that machines are properly registered with the state (much like a registering a car with the DMV but you have 30 days instead of 7), that all the controls actually work AND are followed, that instruments stay in calibration and good repair, and that everything is used in a sane manner. The last thing in the world I want to see is “BABY’S FACE SCORCHED TO BONE BY ROGUE ACCELERATOR” because life doing radiation safety is difficult enough.
Lawson Adit - Are You Sure Building A Tunnel Through A Fault Is A Good Idea? Do really think they put any radioactive material down here?
Another old adage is “The more interesting the job, the more paperwork they make you do.” I’d say a good 90% of my day is devoted to writing reports and reading regulations. But that 10% where I get to help a researcher build their experiment such that they expand human knowledge but don’t dramatically shorten their grad students’ lifespans, or go down into the mine that I didn’t know was there just to make sure radioactive materials weren’t stored there, or play Scooby Doo Adventures trying to figure out what happened in a lab 70 years ago to make that spot of mysterious contamination…THAT is what I love about being a health physicist.
In addition to all that above, I’m a teacher. I teach radiation safety at a local community college and a train people how to work with radioactive material & machines. I try, as much as I can, to try to get people to think about the world around them and appreciate it’s beauty and wonder, the electromagnetic spectrum being one of the most wondrous things to me. That’s the thing every scientist has in common, no matter how highly specialized they are, is that some part of the world is wonderful and they need to know more about it. At some level, the health physicist is the interface between people intensely interested in the world using radiation but not necessarily thinking of consequences and a public absolutely terrified of the very word. I think the phrase I used in my interview was “A health physicist has to be an ambassador for the isotopes.”
So, if you notice me trying to sneak the occasional tidbit of information about working with radiation to you, that’s part of my subversive effort to diminish some knee jerk ignorance in the world. Ionizing radiation is no different than fire: useful, beautiful, dangerous, deserving of respect. A health physicist is here to remind you to be respectful, play nice with the toys and the other children. In a way, we’re the recess yard duties of radiation.
