Slashdot Mirror
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...
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
Sucks having to carry both a PDA and a radiation detector.
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.
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.
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.
The actual researchers on this project. And a video on the air quality experiment with the palm using gps and air quality sensors to track data.
Why do I h8 apple?
figure out someone simply ported the old HP48 Tricorder program to the PDAs and cell phones.
Method of processing duck feet
I want one that also tracks hungry, angry bears
We're here! We're queer! We don't want anymore bears!
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
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
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.
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
radioactive boyscout
... June 26, 1995, was not a typical day.
Ask Dottie Pease. Cruising down Pinto Drive, Pease saw half a dozen men crossing her neighbor's lawn. Three, in respirators and white moon suits, were dismantling her next-door neighbor's shed with electric saws, stuffing the pieces into large steel drums emblazoned with radioactive warning signs.
The cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn. He had attempted to build a nuclear reactor in his mother's shed following a Boy Scout merit-badge project.
I don't think he turned himself in, but he did realize what he had put together was too 'hot' and he had started dismantling it.
When David's Geiger counter began picking up radiation five doors from his mom's house, he decided that he had "too much radioactive stuff in one place" and began to disassemble the reactor. He hid some of the material in his mother's house, left some in the shed, and packed most of the rest into the trunk of his Pontiac.
At 2:40 a.m. on August 31, 1994, Clinton Township police responded to a call concerning a young man who had been apparently stealing tires from a car. When the police arrived, David told them he was meeting a friend. Unconvinced, officers decided to search his car.
They opened the trunk and discovered a toolbox shut with a padlock and sealed with duct tape. The trunk also contained foil-wrapped cubes of mysterious gray powder, small disks and cylindrical metal objects, and mercury switches. The police were especially alarmed by the toolbox, which David said was radioactive and which they feared was an atomic bomb.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
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.
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
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.