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PDA/Radiation Detector
sgpennebaker writes "This article tells of lab rats who've built a cell phone/PDA/GPS device that also lets you surf the web and, oh, yeah, sniff out any dirty bombs that might have gone off in your area. Then you can cancel your meetings, call family and friends and send GPS coordinates to whoever it is that cleans up afterwards. I'm waiting for the next generation; I want one that also tracks hungry, angry bears and emits a loud noise when it senses their proximity."
I want one that also tracks hungry, angry bears and emits a loud noise when it senses their proximity.
Nothing like attracting their attention, right?
blog |
I want a cellphone that alerts me whenever there is a slut in proximity that wouldn't mind being screwed by a pasty-skinned-underweight-nerd!
This article tells of lab rats who've built a cell phone/PDA/GPS device that also lets you surf the web and, oh, yeah, sniff out any dirty bombs that might have gone off in your area.
Man those lab rats are getting smart...
a) it's not a tricorder
b) it measures the temperature rise in a thin tin film at 1K (cryocooling in your PDA, anyone?)
just more idiotic pandering to Homeland Security...
Was this product in developement pre-Sept. 11? I'm interested in knowing if this is a knee-jerk reaction to terrorist attacks (ala duct tape shortages) or if it was on the drawing board before.
Trolling is a art,
This PDA I've developed keeps away tigers.
Now you don't see any tigers do you?
Try any radiation monitors on old orange glazed Fiestaware in granny's house, you'll be suprised how much it makes a geiger counter tick! I tried it with my old 50's era CD counter and a plate was as hot as the calibration source. Also smoke detectors have a radioactive ionizing source in them.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Thinkgeek.com has a watch that detects radiation. No GPS though
Radiation Watch
"This article tells of lab rats who've built a cell phone/PDA/GPS device that also lets you surf the web and, oh, yeah, sniff out any dirty bombs that might have gone off in your area..."
ok if a bomb goes off and you need a friggin PDA to figgure out where, I would say your beyond help.
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
Sucks having to carry both a PDA and a radiation detector.
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
The Ultra-Spec uses extremely low temperatures -- within one degree of absolute zero, or -459 degrees Fahrenheit.....Put in the hands of people like police, firefighters and customs agents....
Something tells me that this won't be appreciated nearly as much as Mr. Labov suggests. Perhaps they want to work on a room temperature version before they go passing these things out. But then again, think of the overclocking possibilities...
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
You would know that a bomb went off, but hell, that happens all the time. You wouldn't know that it was a dirty bomb though. Unless you had the lab-rat special.
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
I just saw 'Bowling for Columbine' yesterday. It sheds a different light on this kind of inventions. I mean, how many weight are you willing to carry around to protect yourself from all possible terrorist attacks? These things will not help, they will just make some company rich.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Are these things going to be available to the general public? If they are how many digits are we talking about for one of them?
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
Here's a 2-year old article on kids being taught to use palm devices to measure smog and air pollution levels.
Why do I h8 apple?
I want a pda that can scan for cellular phones (gsm included), and if possible jam them!
Why? One word: Movies
How many generations of Palms will we see until they are producing a bona fide tricorder?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
`But the advantage of RadNet is that it is a "smart" sensor that can pick up on the difference between radiation emitted by a so-called "dirty bomb," a mix of conventional explosive and nuclear materials, and the radiation from a recent hospital treatment.`
I'm highly skeptical about this point. Gamma radiation all looks the same, except for varying intensities, regardless of the source... and background neutron radiation almost never exists (unless you're hanging out near nuclear weapons or a running fission reacor.) I don't think the device could really discern between a dirty bomb and other radiation sources.
::diatonic::
Ita time to buy a hunk of uranium ore off ebay and carry it around to piss people off.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
"PDA/Radiation Detector"
Was I the only one who read this and thought "Great! Now I have a way to detect radiation and all those annoying Public Displays of Affection"? (Or did they mean it also detects Personal Digital Assistants? Damn multi use acronym....)
Seriously -- what all did the tricorder do, exactly? (I can easily imagine an episode where they use it as a geiger counter; did that ever happen?) Ours do the communicator's job along the way too. Not too bad.
If only our in-the-field medical instruments resembled spinning salt shakers more...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I do believe some smart kid in michigan used just that idea to build himself a breeder reactor about 20 years ago out of nothing but tin foil, americenium taken from smoke detectors, and his trusty (home-mady, jury rigged) neutron gun.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
figure out someone simply ported the old HP48 Tricorder program to the PDAs and cell phones.
Method of processing duck feet
Sssssssh!
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
Or have our fearless politicians lied to us...
I want one that also tracks hungry, angry bears
We're here! We're queer! We don't want anymore bears!
Is it me or have the submissions gotten lamer and lamer lately? I mean, I know this is slashdot, but this one is TERRIBLE. And its trending that way
Berto
How would you know?
A dirty bomb doesnt have to go KABOOM and rattle all the windows in town. It could be anything that could disperse radioactive dust over a large area.
The article is biased towards "look what the stupid government is doing" like everything else out of San Francisco.
There are other sources of potentially dangerous radiation out there, and being someone who regulary works with fire depts, I know for a fact they want to know everything they can about the factory that just burst into flames.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I want one that also tracks hungry, angry bears and emits a loud noise when it senses their proximity.
You have a lot of problems with marauding bears do you? Maybe if you washed up after eating instead of leaving the peanut butter and jelly smeared all over your face....
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
If you have a Motorola i88s and download a midlet I wrote you can track your cell phone and have it's position update a web page in real time. You can also mark an interesting location to see where it is on a map or aerial photo later. This is possible thanks to Nextel's always on internet connection for $9.99 for 1 Meg per month
Free cell phone tracking
Don't need GPS.
Run in any direction.
http://www.antirad.com/sources.htm
Pottery glazes and art glass, some ceramic glazed jewelry and cloisonné enameled jewelry contain high percentages of uranium oxides to produce bright yellows and oranges. Fiesta Red china dishes by Fiestaware produced through 1971 emit gamma and beta. Acidic foods left in contact with this chinaware will dissolve small amounts of these radioactive elements which will be ingested. Enameled jewelry made with these glazes and worn next to the skin is hazardous.
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
But what we really need is a cell phone/PDA/GPS device that detects process servers.
Depleted Uranium is not spent the fuel rods leftovers most people assume from its name. It is what is left over after extraction of the fissile material from refined Uranium.
Significant amounts of refined Uranium are stable isotopes. To get enriched Uranium you force the refined metallic Uranium through a series of filters that select the isotopes based on physical characteristics. Uranium ions in solution are large enough a special porous ceramic filter can pass the ions of the desired atomic weight. Using several passes with different sizes of pores you get the nice hot Uranium you need for bombs and such. One of the byproducts is a nice very dense metal, Uranium. Almost as hard as austenitic steel and much denser than lead. Not much hotter than the tritium illuminator sources in the standard issue compasses carried by infantry. The dust is however a mechanical poison that works much like ionic silver. Silver nitrate is just as dangerous a compound.
As to your other points, I will respond the same way I responded to skillet-thief: Ssssssssh!
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
You have to admire the cooling mods on their PDA, to get it to absolute zero. That sure ain't water cooling.
I'll glue a magnet to mine and to my mug, so I can chill my soda while waiting for the next dirty bomb.
...senses when smelly, fat, ugly Linux geeks are in the area so I can beat them over the head with my 13 CD Office 2003 beta CDs.
they use a PDA/Radiation detector to authenticate your nickname password change requests.
We Don't Want Anymore Bears! Or Bear-Sniffing PDA's either. But the radiation sniffer's quite convenient. You may never have that meeting now that the entire office is radioactive, but you'll definitely know whether it was worth going to or not...
I emits a loud signal to the bear that there is an idiot with a PDA and a dirty bomb who is not afraid to use it on said hungry bear.
Give the bear fair warning and all.
ACK
Read the title as PDA/Nerd Detector.
Why are you fascinated with every stupid gadget they make for a PDA? Do you have a PDA fetish?
I could find you hundreds of "alternative" PDA configurations used in science, medicine, manufacturing, supply chain logistics, my ass, you name it. Who gives a fuck?
... Ashcroft going "HO HO HO ...."
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be
I'm Glad this isn't running under one of Uncle Bills OS's I would hate to see a BSD, im sure it wouldnt bode well.
Never mind the smart rats, spare a thought for the Beta testers. I can just imagine the developers.. "yep it should be right this time, just head on over to that highly radio active material and give me a call....on the mobile" Tee Hee..
Yup all various penetrators from DU rounds. My wristwatch is a hotter radiation source. The issues with DU are due to the dust. The radioactive nature of the metal is a hysteria button used by the leftist enviro-terrorists to whip up the panic in the unwashed masses.
The dust is a mechanical poison that works much like ionic silver. Silver nitrate is just as dangerous a compound. Heavy metallic ions are bad in general. Heavy metal poisoning is bad. Cadmium, Lead, Tungsten, Polonium and Rhenium dust are just as bad. Mercury is worse. Uranium Oxide dust is non-water soluble and settles very quickly. Now if you crawl around a knocked out tank without a dust filter you'd die of silicosis faster than DU poisoning from the residue of an anti-tank munitions.
On the other hand if it is a Soviet built tank it is the Boron, Molybdenum and Osmium dust from the vaporized armor that you should worry about. It'll cut your lungs out in just a few months.
Exactly. This is not a GM detector. I am a little surprised that the sensitivity of a thermodetector would be high enough, but LLNL does good work, so it figures. When I first read that it was a low temperature detector, I thought it was going to be one of those germanium detectors we used when I was an undergrad. The way that gamma ray spectrometers work is by telling how big the pulse is from each gamma ray detected, and sorting them into bins by size. The reason GM tubes can't do this is because every pulse is the same size.
A PDA that senses hungry, angry, Gang Memebers?
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My PDA will make noise and always be sounding the "dirty bomb" alert when I'm going to get water out of my Revigator!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I thought it said PDA/Radar Detector at first.
WIMHO would be more practical.
blah
The alarm is "JonKatz! JonKatz!"
Okay, how about get as many compasses as required to extract the same mass of tritium as found in a typical DU slug and then give it to your kids to play with.
You make a good point, but the thing is that there is a lot of DU around in a place that america has been fighting in.
Sure DU isn't as other radioactive materials but the thing is that there is a lot of it (kilogram wise) shot around the battlefield when people are trying to kill people. Those A-10 pilots are good, but they have to put a minimum number of shots on target before it is considered killed.
and then the kids that find the wrecked tanks can play with all those funny heavy metal lumps sitting in that strange white dust.
Actually I prefer all of my dirty bombs to make the sound "KAPOW" and shake only half the windows in town.
/.-er?
-Osama Bin Laden
Now who knew that Bin Laden was a
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Radiation dose is directly proportional to time;
I would not carry anything I knew was radioactive in close proximity to my 'nads, for any length of time.
Radaition damage is statistical, but one high-energy photon can do damage to a given chromosome.
I've always been at one end or the other of a probability curve; I'm not going to experiment with gangrene to piss off a few people with radiation detectors.
This will go perfectly with my CompactFlash form factor Gene Sequencer!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Tracking other things?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
It's a pretty cool way to detect radiation, but I wonder about its effectiveness. They say it's the size of a '95ish cellphone, so how close to the source would it have to be to get an effective reading? They say it measures gammas so it depends on photo-interactions (ie compton scattering, pair production, photo-electric effect...not an acutal collision like the article implies). It's most likely that compton scattering and photo-electric effect will occur (they are based on essentially the proximity of the gammas to an electron) as opposed to pair production (which requires a highly charged nucleus and how many of those can you find at 1K??)
In any case, all of those rely on the probability that a gamma will interact which means that size does matter: the bigger the counting material (the tin) the more likely a gamma will get measured. IMHO the best radiological defense wouldn't be portable little devices (which are good for measuring personal exposure) but rather some large detectors placed in strategic locations (say wiring a metal detector with some of this tech and turn it into a metal/radiation detector?).
All in all a pretty cool devicewhich has some limited use but I doubt it will turn out to be any major solution to discovering a dirty bomb randomly, I'd say they are much better suited to scanning suspicious items (or monitoring your own gamma exposure!).
--Jubedgy
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis hebes
Just how do you detect something that does not interact much with electrons? Neutrons pass right through most geiger-muller tubes without ionizing the gas. Scintillation based detectors usually require cryogenic temperatures or large volumes to detect neutrons. This thing most likely gets x-ray, gamma and beta (if the electrons can penetrate that far) but not neutrons.
-1, Troll
... with the rats' genetics again? I hate it. Them running around the lab at night with their big bulging heads and those little tiny hands.
(mutter, mutter, whine, mutter)
We understand that you are upset, but did you realize you didn't actually say anything meaningful in your post? You're replying to someone who explained the situation very well, and now you're saying "But I don't know other stuff, too!"
Why don't you actually research health problems related to the use of depleted Uranium shells instead of being ignorant and upset?
Actually, I have a friend who could use the bear-tracking device. He's off hiking the Appalachian Trail, and his cellphone doesn't work in remote areas, but there are a lot of wild animals around. I think the loud noise might annoy the bears, though.
When hiking in bear country, if you don't want to encounter them the advice I've heard is: make noise. You could shout occassionally, but a simpler method includes loosely attaching cookware to your backpack.
But then the noise normally bothers the hiker too. I guess I'd rather deal with an annoyance I control than an wild animal many times my size.
This is not my sig.
When I worked in Glacier National Park in Montana we sold "bear bells" in the gift shop. Generally speaking a bear doesn't want to have anything to do with you unless you're around in mating season, cub season, or just too close to their personal territory. So, by making noise while on the trails you were less likely to run across a bear (which is a good thing you know)
I would rather be able to Detect Police Radar/Laser with my GPS. And then internet enable the sucker to upload/download other points that people have detected radar. Then my GPS can adjust my route to avoid police speed traps.
I can see the Mazda commercial now.... Zoom Zoom.
"Times may change, but standards must remain the same." - George Carlin.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
...warn me when the robots are coming!
-72
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
Check out this news piece at CNET.
I am living in Hong Kong right now. So I know that I would very much like my cell phone or PDA to warn me of the SARS. Now, just have to figure out which company offers such service.
I want one that also tracks hungry, angry bears and emits a loud noise when it senses their proximity
Who needs that; I'd rather pay my Bear Patrol Tax. And while I'm at it, I think I'll pick one of those Tiger Deterant Rocks.
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa: That's spacious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
The image shows some guy calibrating the detector. The large black cylindrical part is a very heavy plastic detector.
I have ~20 lbs of DU on my desk right now and my wrist watch has a bigger effect on the geiger counter I use in the lab.
..."
Like I said "The dust is however a mechanical poison
plastic detectors used for suprathermal electrons? They use boron plate/cylinders for the detector and a big blob of polymer for to slow the electrons down
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/watches/5cef/ This watch detects radiation, and is smaller than a PDA. The only thing big about it is the price ($1,500 for a watch?)
Man Gets 70mpg in Homemade Car-Made from a Mainframe Computer