I was trying to decide if we should facetiously call this device a "taser" or "maser" when I realized that the article appears to give two different wavelength ranges for the device. The image caption seems to state that a 5-Thz wave corresponds to a 50 micrometer wavelength, whereas the article itself indicates that these lasers operate in the 3-30 nanometer wavelength range. Methinks someone used the angstrom symbol incorrectly, since 50 um * 5 Thz is about equal to the speed of light.
So, with that aside, we still have to decide if this thing is a maser or a taser!
The chemical changes that brought about the formation of the elements in the bellies of stars...
If you're changing elements from one to another, it's not a chemical change. It's nuclear! That's one of the definitions of a nuclear change. What kind of science journalism is this?
Who would tag this "humor"? Given the deeply-ingrained social stigma attached to being put on one of these lists, I don't really see how it's funny that one was so horribly misimplemented. Even when something is _obviously_ wrong, as in this case, it can be hard to iron out the impression that actual people get from reading these lists. What if the problem weren't as obvious as this one supposedly is? Would it still be funny?
Generally, no retraction is ever as effective as the original statement. That's probably one of the reasons why libel is such a big deal for some people--just saying "sorry, we were wrong" may not be good enough.
Don't milk the cash cow until its teats fall off: Blizzard's managed to get what, one expansion out so far? SOE has put out how many for EQ2 that was released at the same time? Sure, your balance sheet looks better if you can say, "I'm going to get 200% revenue from my begrudging players this year." It actually looks even better if you say, "I'll stick with 110% revenue from 2000% of the number of happier players."
My MMO playing friends would from time to time claim that the continuing fees of MMOs were there at least in part to ensure that there would be continuing updates and new content, aside from server maintenance costs. Naturally, I'd look at it as a slap in the face if, having that attitude, a company asked me to pay an additional charge for that content in the form of an expansion pack.
Something I've always wanted to see would be a serious, impartial, disinterested observer sitting down and going through a point-by-point comparison of WoW, Guild Wars, and Diablo II, and maybe throw in FFXI or some one of the other popular MMOs, just to see what is objectively different between them. It would be interesting to see in light of all the noise of fans crying that such-and-such is an MMO, is worth the money, etc. Of course, that latter point is nearly entirely subjective. Most of what people claim to get out of modern MMOs I was able to get out of games like Halflife--and that without paying every month for it.
This device doesn't do anything novel when it comes to fundamental radiation interactions. What's doing most of the stopping of the radiation is the gold, since it's a dense and high atomic number material. The device's utility as a sheld, therefore, depends on the thickness of gold that incoming particles would have to penetrate on a typical path through the material. Even if space progams used gold for shielding--maybe they do, for some reason, instead of lead or uranium or steel or something--the thicknesses they would need in order to stop heavy ions and high-energy protons would probably be on the order of millimeters or centimeters, which amount to millions of thicknesses of nano-scale gold layers.
Basically, it's almost certain that a millimeter of this material would be a somewhat less effective shield than a millimeter of gold, would assumedly cost much more, but would generate probably small amounts of electricity. Even then, I don't think the original idea was to utilize ambient spaceborne radiation as the "power source" for the device.
What does a strangelet look like from far away? Does it emit anything that we can detect, and so see its presence? I'm not sure anyone knows the answer to that, since we've never really positively observed stable strangelets of this kind.
Hey, maybe that's where all that dark matter comes from.
For those of you who might be interested in reading about these types of incidents--I'm fascinated by them myself--you should try the IAEA's reports. They've produced briefs on accidents such as these, including some irradiator incidents, some industrial radiography incidents, and some incidents of sources being sold as/in scrap metal.
The fear of a dirty bomb is not that people will die--not many would probably die from the blast, or the radiation. Dirty bombs are nothing more than panic weapons. The public is, by and large, so terrified of anything "nuclear" that a large radiation dispersal device going off in a crowded area would cause literal waves of _redoubled_ panic as soon as someone realized and communicated that the bomb had radioactive isotopes inside it. Justifiably or not, it would then be a blind panic--these people would be running from something they can't see or smell, and probably don't understand in the slightest. Now, being informed about radiation won't keep it from bringing you harm if you happen to be exposed to it, probably wouldn't be much comfort if a radioactive bomb exploded across the street, and won't give you instantaneous wind-direction and plume information; it might help to allay the fears of those who're outside the blast zone, and might help ease the process of relocating back into the contaminated region.
Sure, they're not weapons that'll kill millions of people at a stroke, but isn't one of the common themes of life that the most striking, obvious, and dramatic dangers aren't always the ones that should merit the most respect and attention?
1) Depends on the design of the detector. There's no chance the alpha particles from the Am-241 will be detected, as the cardboard box the smoke alarms are in will stop those, but the photons might be. The cat's scan residue (rimshot, please, along with everyone else in this discussion--but I would guess it's Tc-99 residue from a Tc-99m scan) was picked up by this detector system, so assumedly the Am-241 gammas might as well. That said, I don't know what activity is usually used smoke detectors (and I'm too lazy to look it up), or what activity is usually administered to cats during vet. nuclear med. procedures; questions like these are ones of quantity. You might well be stopped. From their perspective, you might well be buying twelve Am-241 sources to line the casing of a bomb.
2) I was under the impression that oncologists were in the habit of doing just that--giving "doctor's notes" to patients with outpatient implanted brachytherapy seeds or devices. Being treated with a linear accelerator would not be likely to leave a perceptible amount of radiation in your body (photoneutrons from high energy linacs might cause some activation, but I don't think that it's generally a serious concern as far as setting off radiation alarms). Would it also bother you that you might well set off radiation alarms at nuclear power plants, if you happened to work at one, while being treated for your cancer?
3) From a machine perspective, this was not a false positive. From a judicial/social standpoint, it was. I don't have much more to add beyond that.
But device makers have begun designing them to connect to the Internet, which allows doctors to monitor patients from remote locations.
"Excuse me, sir? The plane is about to taxi, and I'm going to need you to shut down your wireless internet device."
Some day in my lifetime, a person's heart might have "flight mode." That idea bowls me over. I'm assuming this is some kind of cellular internet connection the devices use. Fifteen seconds of google didn't really turn up much info, but then again I wasn't looking very heard.
It's a really unfortunate choice of names, this "T-ray." Inevitably, it wants to make a person associate these waves with x-rays. Photons are photons, but as far as these guys go healthwise, it's pretty certain they'll have more in common with radio or microwaves than x-rays. Heck, the reason they call them x-rays and gamma rays in the first place is because they're in the regime where it makes sense to talk about photons as particles, rather than waves. And they call them "radio waves" and "microwaves" because THEY are down in the more wave-like regime. Just call it "millimeter wave" and be done with it, before we get people claiming they're getting ARS from T-ray devices.
(Let us not forget that a single terahertz-range photon carries about 4meV of energy. That's little-m milli, not big-M mega. These guys might cause some heating, but they're not going to be ionizing many atoms in your body.)
If there's anything that would get the public interested in space, it would be something like this. Why aren't they soliciting the public to name THIS noble craft? But I shouldn't kid myself: to really capture general interest, it would be needed to launch many crafts to bore holes such that, viewed from Earth, a person's name were to be spelled out. "Come," we could shout, "be the person to be remembered forever as having put the first and surely forever largest man-made eyesore upon the moon!"
I doubt very much we'll only every have the One Big Gaming company - games would suck so much people would eventually stop buying them.
I was too busy playing games back then, and less busy thinking about them--besides that I was just a kid--but didn't something very much like that actually already happen once sometime in the 80s or 90s?
The difference, now, is that video games are breaking into the "real world" and are becoming akin to movies and television. They'll suck, sure, but people won't stop buying them, and the medium will become permanently bankrupt, speaking to creativity, with only the rare gem from an independent studio shining out once in a long while. And you'll still probably somehow have to put up with advertisements to see those gems.
It sounds like a story you'd hear out of the old Soviet Union.
Ah crap. Of course it's only after I hit submit that I realize, to my horror, that I'm setting myself up to be brought up on charges of Internet terrorism for "Inciting a Soviet Russia Joke."
It's a little scary. These days, I don't have much trouble imagining a scenario like that happening: some government or regulatory body dictates that the value of Pi is 3 for some inane or petty reason; an engineer is brought up on charges of mass terrorism for attempting to design a water tower using the accepted value of Pi, rather than the approved value; said engineer is convicted and jailed as a terrorist for trying to keep people safe. It sounds like a story you'd hear out of the old Soviet Union.
I don't know the limits of the length that it's capable of measuring, but it's possible to use a technique called "optical time domain reflectometry" to measure the length of a piece of fiber optic cable. It works, basically, the way you'd expect from the name: you put a signal in the fiber, and you see how long it takes for it to reflect off of the broken end.
You could do this at both ends of the cable to see how much cabling there is between you and the break. Repeaters or splices in the way would probably cause reflections at known times, and if you find two different unknown reflections at the two different ends, well, you've just found your second break. I'd imagine that it's not much of a problem that the cables are long, since light is fast: you NEED a long length of cable for your electronics to be able to measure the time gap.
CT is in a somewhat unique clinical position. MDs recognize that radiation dose is a bad thing, but (assuming trends haven't changed much recently) most think of a single CT dose as comparable to a dose from a single radiograph, when it is usually several times higher. Therefore, when weighing risk/benefit they are underappreciating the risk of the long-term risks of the procedure (increased chance for cancer--although those numbers are admittedly very approximate, especially for unusual populations such as children) as opposed to the obvious immediate benefit (potential for catching something dangerous). This is a problem of education, and one reason why medical physicists need to be educators in their workplaces.
I would agree that CT is overutilized as an imaging modality. However, CT is a unique situation that makes it a poor choice for displaying the tendency of modern American MDs to overdiagnose or overtreat. For CT, the problem is that there is apparently a widespread misunderstanding of the risk of the procedure. For most other situations, I would bet that the risk/benefit ratio is not the problem: it's more likely to be either patient demands that the doctor _do_ something, fear of malpractice suits (as you mentioned), or it could even be an attempt to "get their money's worth." That last point is definitely more prominent if you look at MRI as a modality: the units are extremely expensive and yet have minimal risk if used properly. My feeling is that, if MRI is overprescribed, it is probably for reasons of cost-recovery--which is also very sad.
And shortly afterward one of these [government inspectors], a physician, made the discovery that the carcasses of steers which had been condemned as tubercular by the government inspectors, and which therefore contained ptomaines, which are deadly poisons, were left upon an open platform and carted away to be sold in the city; and so he insisted that these carcasses be treated with an injection of kerosene--and was ordered to resign the same week! So indignant were the packers that they went farther, and compelled the mayor to abolish the whole bureau of inspection; so that since then there has not been even a pretense of any interference with the graft.
Does anyone remember the issues the NWS forecasting website was having the other day? I had thought it said something about server problems due to ice.I wish I remembered it the situation more clearly.
Slashdot Mirror
A little half-hearted google searching indicates that "basse 16" has something to do with pipe organs. This is probably not relevant, though.
I was trying to decide if we should facetiously call this device a "taser" or "maser" when I realized that the article appears to give two different wavelength ranges for the device. The image caption seems to state that a 5-Thz wave corresponds to a 50 micrometer wavelength, whereas the article itself indicates that these lasers operate in the 3-30 nanometer wavelength range. Methinks someone used the angstrom symbol incorrectly, since 50 um * 5 Thz is about equal to the speed of light.
So, with that aside, we still have to decide if this thing is a maser or a taser!
The chemical changes that brought about the formation of the elements in the bellies of stars...
If you're changing elements from one to another, it's not a chemical change. It's nuclear! That's one of the definitions of a nuclear change. What kind of science journalism is this?
I think throwing books at anyone in government is considered terrorism/treason these days.
And I have a tiger to eat your scissors!
Oh, wait. Damn that rock!
Who would tag this "humor"? Given the deeply-ingrained social stigma attached to being put on one of these lists, I don't really see how it's funny that one was so horribly misimplemented. Even when something is _obviously_ wrong, as in this case, it can be hard to iron out the impression that actual people get from reading these lists. What if the problem weren't as obvious as this one supposedly is? Would it still be funny?
Generally, no retraction is ever as effective as the original statement. That's probably one of the reasons why libel is such a big deal for some people--just saying "sorry, we were wrong" may not be good enough.
Don't milk the cash cow until its teats fall off: Blizzard's managed to get what, one expansion out so far? SOE has put out how many for EQ2 that was released at the same time? Sure, your balance sheet looks better if you can say, "I'm going to get 200% revenue from my begrudging players this year." It actually looks even better if you say, "I'll stick with 110% revenue from 2000% of the number of happier players."
My MMO playing friends would from time to time claim that the continuing fees of MMOs were there at least in part to ensure that there would be continuing updates and new content, aside from server maintenance costs. Naturally, I'd look at it as a slap in the face if, having that attitude, a company asked me to pay an additional charge for that content in the form of an expansion pack.
Something I've always wanted to see would be a serious, impartial, disinterested observer sitting down and going through a point-by-point comparison of WoW, Guild Wars, and Diablo II, and maybe throw in FFXI or some one of the other popular MMOs, just to see what is objectively different between them. It would be interesting to see in light of all the noise of fans crying that such-and-such is an MMO, is worth the money, etc. Of course, that latter point is nearly entirely subjective. Most of what people claim to get out of modern MMOs I was able to get out of games like Halflife--and that without paying every month for it.
This device doesn't do anything novel when it comes to fundamental radiation interactions. What's doing most of the stopping of the radiation is the gold, since it's a dense and high atomic number material. The device's utility as a sheld, therefore, depends on the thickness of gold that incoming particles would have to penetrate on a typical path through the material. Even if space progams used gold for shielding--maybe they do, for some reason, instead of lead or uranium or steel or something--the thicknesses they would need in order to stop heavy ions and high-energy protons would probably be on the order of millimeters or centimeters, which amount to millions of thicknesses of nano-scale gold layers.
Basically, it's almost certain that a millimeter of this material would be a somewhat less effective shield than a millimeter of gold, would assumedly cost much more, but would generate probably small amounts of electricity. Even then, I don't think the original idea was to utilize ambient spaceborne radiation as the "power source" for the device.
I was a little surprised not to see that one up there.
Then again, it was kind of a pointless list to begin with.
What does a strangelet look like from far away? Does it emit anything that we can detect, and so see its presence? I'm not sure anyone knows the answer to that, since we've never really positively observed stable strangelets of this kind.
Hey, maybe that's where all that dark matter comes from.
For those of you who might be interested in reading about these types of incidents--I'm fascinated by them myself--you should try the IAEA's reports. They've produced briefs on accidents such as these, including some irradiator incidents, some industrial radiography incidents, and some incidents of sources being sold as/in scrap metal.
The fear of a dirty bomb is not that people will die--not many would probably die from the blast, or the radiation. Dirty bombs are nothing more than panic weapons. The public is, by and large, so terrified of anything "nuclear" that a large radiation dispersal device going off in a crowded area would cause literal waves of _redoubled_ panic as soon as someone realized and communicated that the bomb had radioactive isotopes inside it. Justifiably or not, it would then be a blind panic--these people would be running from something they can't see or smell, and probably don't understand in the slightest. Now, being informed about radiation won't keep it from bringing you harm if you happen to be exposed to it, probably wouldn't be much comfort if a radioactive bomb exploded across the street, and won't give you instantaneous wind-direction and plume information; it might help to allay the fears of those who're outside the blast zone, and might help ease the process of relocating back into the contaminated region.
Sure, they're not weapons that'll kill millions of people at a stroke, but isn't one of the common themes of life that the most striking, obvious, and dramatic dangers aren't always the ones that should merit the most respect and attention?
1) Depends on the design of the detector. There's no chance the alpha particles from the Am-241 will be detected, as the cardboard box the smoke alarms are in will stop those, but the photons might be. The cat's scan residue (rimshot, please, along with everyone else in this discussion--but I would guess it's Tc-99 residue from a Tc-99m scan) was picked up by this detector system, so assumedly the Am-241 gammas might as well. That said, I don't know what activity is usually used smoke detectors (and I'm too lazy to look it up), or what activity is usually administered to cats during vet. nuclear med. procedures; questions like these are ones of quantity. You might well be stopped. From their perspective, you might well be buying twelve Am-241 sources to line the casing of a bomb.
2) I was under the impression that oncologists were in the habit of doing just that--giving "doctor's notes" to patients with outpatient implanted brachytherapy seeds or devices. Being treated with a linear accelerator would not be likely to leave a perceptible amount of radiation in your body (photoneutrons from high energy linacs might cause some activation, but I don't think that it's generally a serious concern as far as setting off radiation alarms). Would it also bother you that you might well set off radiation alarms at nuclear power plants, if you happened to work at one, while being treated for your cancer?
3) From a machine perspective, this was not a false positive. From a judicial/social standpoint, it was. I don't have much more to add beyond that.
But device makers have begun designing them to connect to the Internet, which allows doctors to monitor patients from remote locations.
"Excuse me, sir? The plane is about to taxi, and I'm going to need you to shut down your wireless internet device."
Some day in my lifetime, a person's heart might have "flight mode." That idea bowls me over. I'm assuming this is some kind of cellular internet connection the devices use. Fifteen seconds of google didn't really turn up much info, but then again I wasn't looking very heard.
We're gonna need more SI prefixes.
It's a really unfortunate choice of names, this "T-ray." Inevitably, it wants to make a person associate these waves with x-rays. Photons are photons, but as far as these guys go healthwise, it's pretty certain they'll have more in common with radio or microwaves than x-rays. Heck, the reason they call them x-rays and gamma rays in the first place is because they're in the regime where it makes sense to talk about photons as particles, rather than waves. And they call them "radio waves" and "microwaves" because THEY are down in the more wave-like regime. Just call it "millimeter wave" and be done with it, before we get people claiming they're getting ARS from T-ray devices.
(Let us not forget that a single terahertz-range photon carries about 4meV of energy. That's little-m milli, not big-M mega. These guys might cause some heating, but they're not going to be ionizing many atoms in your body.)
If there's anything that would get the public interested in space, it would be something like this. Why aren't they soliciting the public to name THIS noble craft? But I shouldn't kid myself: to really capture general interest, it would be needed to launch many crafts to bore holes such that, viewed from Earth, a person's name were to be spelled out. "Come," we could shout, "be the person to be remembered forever as having put the first and surely forever largest man-made eyesore upon the moon!"
I doubt very much we'll only every have the One Big Gaming company - games would suck so much people would eventually stop buying them.
I was too busy playing games back then, and less busy thinking about them--besides that I was just a kid--but didn't something very much like that actually already happen once sometime in the 80s or 90s?
The difference, now, is that video games are breaking into the "real world" and are becoming akin to movies and television. They'll suck, sure, but people won't stop buying them, and the medium will become permanently bankrupt, speaking to creativity, with only the rare gem from an independent studio shining out once in a long while. And you'll still probably somehow have to put up with advertisements to see those gems.
It sounds like a story you'd hear out of the old Soviet Union.
Ah crap. Of course it's only after I hit submit that I realize, to my horror, that I'm setting myself up to be brought up on charges of Internet terrorism for "Inciting a Soviet Russia Joke."
It's a little scary. These days, I don't have much trouble imagining a scenario like that happening: some government or regulatory body dictates that the value of Pi is 3 for some inane or petty reason; an engineer is brought up on charges of mass terrorism for attempting to design a water tower using the accepted value of Pi, rather than the approved value; said engineer is convicted and jailed as a terrorist for trying to keep people safe. It sounds like a story you'd hear out of the old Soviet Union.
I don't know the limits of the length that it's capable of measuring, but it's possible to use a technique called "optical time domain reflectometry" to measure the length of a piece of fiber optic cable. It works, basically, the way you'd expect from the name: you put a signal in the fiber, and you see how long it takes for it to reflect off of the broken end.
You could do this at both ends of the cable to see how much cabling there is between you and the break. Repeaters or splices in the way would probably cause reflections at known times, and if you find two different unknown reflections at the two different ends, well, you've just found your second break. I'd imagine that it's not much of a problem that the cables are long, since light is fast: you NEED a long length of cable for your electronics to be able to measure the time gap.
fresh out of mad [science] grad school
If I could moderate individual words, the bolded one would be "-1 Redundant." We're all of us crazy!
CT is in a somewhat unique clinical position. MDs recognize that radiation dose is a bad thing, but (assuming trends haven't changed much recently) most think of a single CT dose as comparable to a dose from a single radiograph, when it is usually several times higher. Therefore, when weighing risk/benefit they are underappreciating the risk of the long-term risks of the procedure (increased chance for cancer--although those numbers are admittedly very approximate, especially for unusual populations such as children) as opposed to the obvious immediate benefit (potential for catching something dangerous). This is a problem of education, and one reason why medical physicists need to be educators in their workplaces.
I would agree that CT is overutilized as an imaging modality. However, CT is a unique situation that makes it a poor choice for displaying the tendency of modern American MDs to overdiagnose or overtreat. For CT, the problem is that there is apparently a widespread misunderstanding of the risk of the procedure. For most other situations, I would bet that the risk/benefit ratio is not the problem: it's more likely to be either patient demands that the doctor _do_ something, fear of malpractice suits (as you mentioned), or it could even be an attempt to "get their money's worth." That last point is definitely more prominent if you look at MRI as a modality: the units are extremely expensive and yet have minimal risk if used properly. My feeling is that, if MRI is overprescribed, it is probably for reasons of cost-recovery--which is also very sad.
And shortly afterward one of these [government inspectors], a physician, made the discovery that the carcasses of steers which had been condemned as tubercular by the government inspectors, and which therefore contained ptomaines, which are deadly poisons, were left upon an open platform and carted away to be sold in the city; and so he insisted that these carcasses be treated with an injection of kerosene--and was ordered to resign the same week! So indignant were the packers that they went farther, and compelled the mayor to abolish the whole bureau of inspection; so that since then there has not been even a pretense of any interference with the graft.
Does anyone remember the issues the NWS forecasting website was having the other day? I had thought it said something about server problems due to ice.I wish I remembered it the situation more clearly.