Slashdot Mirror
NYC Wants to Ban Geiger Counters
Ellis D. Tripp noted a village voice article about attempts in NYC to pass a law requiring permits for air monitoring devices including apparently geiger counters. I'm sure everyone will feel much safer not knowing anything.
The title is very misleading, its actual a response to a possible panic caused by people using bad detectors. Imagine if hundreds of people buy shitty detectors that can be tripped by high NOX counts(A car emission). Suddenly on a hot afternoon during rush hour, 100+ counters register a large nuclear presence. Thats a big worry.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
This is ancient early 90s news but Brooklyn has been the site of nuclear waste storage and it concerns many citizens. There is a warehouse there called Radiac Research Corporation that has about enough nuclear material for one atom bomb, although I'm sure it's not refined to that. Citizen watch groups have formed that will walk around the streets with Geiger counters. You will find some shock reporting that has somethings factual and a lot of things anecdotal evidence. If you do watch those videos, ironically pay attention to the state employed inspector on the boat. Hard numbers and comparisons with other major cities are a must to make any effect in this kind of reporting. Still, I would be upset if stuff like this dried up. I think it's important so that the community at least feels like it has an independent non-interested voice--I would risk false alarms for that any day.
I've also heard from other sources that New York City offers permits for polluting which isn't so wrong except that some of these are ridiculous. A lot of the rivers and streams to this day still are being polluted but since the companies are 'grandfathered' into pollution control, they can keep doing it. Do you ever think they're going to clean that up? I hardly think so.
So they want to avoid false alarms that could cause a mass panic. But like a lot of things there is a trade off and the trade off is the ability to independently verify that the air quality or radiation levels are indeed safe. If I were a citizen living there, losing the latter in and of itself would cause me panic. Poor means you're at risk of being ignored & treated like you don't matter and I don't think New York City (especially historically) is any different from the rest of the world.
My work here is dung.
NYC actually has very strict gun laws... much stricter gun laws than the rest of the state of NY...
They do not directly. In typical usage, you will pull a very specific amount of air through a specific type of paper filter and then messure the counts. The counts can then be used to determine a Microcuries/ml of radioactivity in the air.
There are some concerns as to the accuracy. Is the air pump, filter, and counter calibrated and working correctly? Was background levels taken into consideration, what is the baseline in the area. Is there a temperature inversion happening which is causing a natural radon build up and will the person taking the readings know how to compensate for that? All of these will effect the accuracy. I see the problem of people not having a general understanding of contaminants and exactly what is involved in monitoring them and they could be easily mislead by potentially bogus results. Is that enough of a concern to ban people from taking their own readings? I don't think so.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
pitchblende is a murky dark colored rock that is a very high quality ore for many radioactive materials. dark. grey to black with some samples pitched to the purple or brown.
yellow radioactive rock is your usual uranium oxide, hydrated "yellowcake," a low concentration. but that's the production ore in north america and most of the world. in the 60s, you could buy a sample in a little plastic box at visitor centers like at the Oak Ridge Laboratories.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Guns? Legal? NYC?
Air rifles/Pistols (aka BB or Pellet guns) - totally illegal
Rifles/Shotguns? If they are not an Assault Weapon (anything over 5 rounds) - Go get fingerprinted, and then pay $300 every 3 years - and have to subit paperwork for each one you own or transfer
Pistols? Unless you are connected, forget about a carry permit. For a home/business permit? Apply (but make NO mistakes in your paperwork - our you will be denied) wait 9 months (although the law says they can't take more than 6) go for your interview, and still probably get denied. If you do get a permit, it's more expensive than the rifle/shotgun permit...
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
They are like cockroaches, almost totally unafected by radiation ;-)
I owned one of those I picked up at an antique shop. They aren't geiger counters, the rely on ionization without the cascade amplification that happens inside of a geiger-mueller tube.
Look at the scale. You'd have to be inside a pile of pitchblend before the needle would move, and I doubt plutonium (an alpha emitter) would move the needle unless you somehow injected it inside the ionization chamber. They looked cool though, especially if you want to be a ghostbuster for haloween.
For radiation detection, you'd be better off with a silicon solar cell, neon bulb, CCD, computer with the old windowed ram, eeprom, reverse biased germanium diode, a glow-in-the-dark toy and one of those cheap "see-in-the-dark" scopes. The NYC law is ridiculous. As for NOx, SOx, O3 and other air quality issues, I've had the (mis)fortune of being able to detect those by breathing deeply. If it doesn't work, or hurts the air is full of sh**.
If Clinton and Guliani don't come out publicly against this insane law, they won't get my vote.
New Yorkers are tough bastards. They'll piss and moan, but they're not super-hazard conscious...You can't be, and live in the City all the time, because you're far more likely to be killed by a manhole or a cracked out subway driver than any terrorist.
Just to point out that this wasn't hyperbole, there was that case a few years ago in which a New York woman was a few years agokilled by an electrified manhold cover. The testing that followed turned up hundreds of similar risky metal sheets on sidewalks throughout the city.
Of course, if this ordinance goes through, one of the followups will probably be to outlaw public ownership or use of voltmeters. Wouldn't want people to panic at the thought that they could be electrocuted for the mistake of walking down a mid-city sidewalk.
Here in Boston, we've only had a few dogs killed this way. No children so far. But I'd imagine the local authorities are looking at this story with interest. Maybe Boston can also block unauthorized use of hazard sensors like geiger counters or voltmeters.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
On a beautiful 1986 summer day in Poland the secret police confiscated all Geiger detectors from all the schools and universities. A week later the world learned about the Techernobyl catastrophe. (This is a true story, my uncle was a chemist at one of the universities)
The argument has made repeatedly on Slashdot that computer users should be licensed - that users should demonstrate a mastery of basic skills and show some sense of responsibility for the potential consequences of his actions.
But tell the Geek that he needs a license before toying with class 4 biologic and radiological alarms and the world becomes a nanny state.
Have you ever been to pretty much anywhere outside of the US? Have you ever read the news of any other country but the US? Your response leaves me little option but to think that your knowledge of the outside world is quite distorted...
The other interesting thing is
b. Any person deploying a biological, chemical or radiological detector shall immediately notify the police department if such detector indicates an alarm, notwithstanding whether the person holds a permit for such detector, by following such procedures as are prescribed by rule of the commissioner and/or are included as a term of the permit itself.
so if I commit a misdemeanor by having an illegal NBCR detector, it's a misdemeanor of me not to report the activation of my illegal detector without regard to whether I have reason to believe the alarm to be giving a false indication! an other interesting problem may be what happens when all of the new cellphones in NYC have to be registered because the have radiation detectors built in.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Perhaps you are not familiar with the state of your country, but your freedoms are routinely being trodden on and removed. In fact, half the articles here on Slashdot are about what is happening and who is doing it. You've got:
1) Civil liberties being gradually eroded in the name of the "war on terror"
2) A government committing torture
3) A government taking people off to some jail out of the country with no trial for many years
4) Your phone companies spying on you without warrants
5) Billions upon billions of dollars getting thrown away in an unpopular war with no sign of an end
6) Record/movie industry writing laws
I wonder what most people would say if you asked what they'd rather have - a gun, or the above?