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Nuclear Scanning Catches a Radioactive Cat On I-5
Jeff recommends Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat's story from a community meeting with Northwest border control agents. Seems their monitoring for dirty bombs from the median of Interstate 5 caught a car transporting a radioactive cat. "It turns out the feds have been monitoring Interstate 5 for nuclear 'dirty bombs.' They do it with radiation detectors so sensitive it led to the following incident. 'Vehicle goes by at 70 miles per hour... Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope [in the passing car]. The agent raced after the car, pulling it over not far from the monitoring spot.' Did he find a nuke? 'Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological treatment three days earlier.'"
Schrodinger
Schrödinger cat is not amused
Please, please, please, somebody tag this catscan.
I heard it hated to be observed.
Did the cat have any superpowers?
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
have 18 half-lives.
(captcha: murders)
Holy smokes! Isotopes everywhere!
I'm surprised they needed a detector to find something that, by definition, comprises all of matter.
Just callin' it like I see it.
You never know with those feline terrorists.
Perhaps it was a persian cat? You can never be too careful with those Al-Qaeda supporters
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
The summary says the car was populated by a "cat", but doesn't mention if there was a human driver. Either that, or the car was driven by a 60's beatnik with a fondness for Jazz music. "Hey dude, I just pulled over this radiocative cat, man, I mean he was smokin'."
Cosmic.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat
OMG, they measured and saw it! the paradox is solved!
FBI goon: "What's the matter??? CAT GOT YOUR TONGUE?"
... just how radioactive was this cat? If it's sufficiently radioactive to show up at quite a distance in a moving vehicle, how much full-body radiation are the people around the cat getting?
I do not want a hot cat sitting in my lap.
C: The man didn't have the right form.
S: What man?
C: The man from the cat detector van.
S: The looney detector van, you mean.
C: Look, it's people like you what cause unrest.
S: What cat detector van?
C: The cat detector van from the Ministry of Housinge.
S: Housinge?
C: It was spelt like that on the van (I'm very observant!). I never seen so
many bleeding aerials. The man said that their equipment could pinpoint
a purr at four hundred yards! And Eric, being such a happy cat, was a
piece of cake.
S: How much did you pay for this?
C: Sixty quid, and eight for the fruit-bat.
S: What fruit-bat?
C: Eric the fruit-bat.
S: Are all your pets called Eric?
"Feed cat Plutonium pellets with kibble. Wrap cat in detcord. Place timer on cat and set for five minutes. Release mouse on crowded street. Release cat after mouse. Run. Remember to face Mecca at 4:29 after you release cat." "Oh, don't forget to plug ears."
This is a story about Schrodinger's cat. This is exactly the kind of result you should expect.
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Plus if you live in Montana or California, tough luck. These states support terrorism by rejecting REAL ID and thus endangering you! (endangering you by your rendition to Gitmo). 2. I'm a cancer patient undergoing radiation therapy. What can be done to prevent the horror of being pulled over by the KGB? Would it be reasonable to issue "radiology patient" tags, like they issue handicapped tags for the handicapped? Yes. That badge would need to be accompanied by REAL ID. The badge itself would be built by the highest bidder who has offered better quality, 3D hologram embossed with your wife's or Eva Longoria's photo on the badge and also has Bluetooth enabled. Oh BTW, your insurance would not pay for the badge which would cost $399 each. 3. What is the false positive rate of such monitoring? Here, we have a cute example of a sick cat setting off a false positive. What about other incidents like this that fail to get into the newspaper? Those details are "deemed classified." Much like information about cellphone tower coverage which companies used to provide publicly but stopped in 2003/04 when Bush deemed them classified at their instigation. Similarly if you continue questioning about false positives, you would be classified as a "person of interest" and be subject to such intense surveillance that the movie Enemy of State would be outdated. Heck, even your stool shit would be studied after scraping it from toilets.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
You know perfectly well that the news would be: "Manhattan has been contaminated with radioactive Uranium dust.". Lines like "The radiation level is entirely harmless." and "There is no reason to panic, the radioactive dust will not affect your health." might appear in the article, but it would be after the "continued on A7" hyperlink.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
i can haz cat scan?
No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.