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Patrick Spens posted:Well obviously, I meant more specifically, because so do I and -65 still sounds nuts. Inside an industrial freezer I guess, -65 doesn't sound right for a place where people live.
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Dec 11, 2016 02:10
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| # ? May 9, 2024 12:15 |
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Central SK. It was worse when I was living in Manitoba, though; here at least it's more of a dry cold, so it's just the needle-cold wind finding the gaps in your clothes, but there it was a wet cold that seeped into your bones. Also the lakes seemed to make for even more intense wind and I think my eyeballs froze a little last winter.
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Dec 11, 2016 11:57
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Yeah lakes can seriously gently caress you up when the chill comes
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Dec 11, 2016 18:56
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Canuck-Errant posted:Central SK. It was worse when I was living in Manitoba, though; here at least it's more of a dry cold, so it's just the needle-cold wind finding the gaps in your clothes, but there it was a wet cold that seeped into your bones. Also the lakes seemed to make for even more intense wind and I think my eyeballs froze a little last winter. voting for mass implantation of heating elements for everyone's eyes.
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Dec 12, 2016 11:21
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They didn't freeze solid. If I had had any over-the-glasses ski goggles I would have been fine. My eyes are fine, too, just a little tender occasionally.
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Dec 13, 2016 01:01
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You went skiing wearing just glasses? In sub - 30C? Did the cold penetrate your skull?
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Dec 13, 2016 01:20
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I think Hooboy would be a good fit for him voting to send Canuck Errant to Hooboy
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Dec 13, 2016 02:12
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Outrail posted:You went skiing wearing just glasses? No, I was walking the 10 minutes to campus, in jacket, toque, military scarf, ski gloves, fleece-lined pants, and boots. The wind and cold still froze my drat eyeballs. Maybe if I'd been wearing plastic-framed glasses...
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Dec 13, 2016 09:54
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Canuck-Errant posted:The wind and cold still froze my drat eyeballs. Maybe if I'd been wearing plastic-framed glasses... I'm pretty sure that's goggle weather.
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Dec 13, 2016 14:17
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Big Boner Stacy posted:I'm pretty sure that's goggle weather. I'm pretty sure that's Soviet Dissident Rehoming Program weather.
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Dec 13, 2016 15:31
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A few years back in Calgary the temperature dropped below -40C with wind chill and I didn't have a car, I normally walked about 30 minutes through downtown to work. It was annoying, but with a few layers and a balaclava it wasn't too bad. The worst part was that my lungs would end up aching from breathing the cold air, even though I was breathing it through a scarf. I wouldn't want to go out in it unprepared though, I imagine you'd die pretty quickly.
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Dec 13, 2016 15:51
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Mexican Deathgasm posted:A few years back in Calgary the temperature dropped below -40C with wind chill and I didn't have a car, I normally walked about 30 minutes through downtown to work. It was annoying, but with a few layers and a balaclava it wasn't too bad. The worst part was that my lungs would end up aching from breathing the cold air, even though I was breathing it through a scarf. I wouldn't want to go out in it unprepared though, I imagine you'd die pretty quickly. I can only imagine you guys have an annual "find the hobo-pop" easter-egg hunt every spring. Your homeless population must end up looking like Pompeii victims.
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Dec 13, 2016 17:03
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Cannon_Fodder posted:I can only imagine you guys have an annual "find the hobo-pop" easter-egg hunt every spring. Your homeless population must end up looking like Pompeii victims. That's cold, man. 
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Dec 13, 2016 17:05
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Cannon_Fodder posted:I can only imagine you guys have an annual "find the hobo-pop" easter-egg hunt every spring. Your homeless population must end up looking like Pompeii victims. It's uncommon, but someone did freeze to death here in Winnipeg a couple of days ago.
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Dec 13, 2016 18:05
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Cannon_Fodder posted:I can only imagine you guys have an annual "find the hobo-pop" easter-egg hunt every spring. Your homeless population must end up looking like Pompeii victims. In my youth, when I was much more uncouth, we would refer to stuff like that as "hobo killin' cold" during the winters. In other news, I have to get my operational hours for the quarter in to maintain my license to run a nuclear reactor, so I'm busier than I thought I would be.
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Dec 13, 2016 19:14
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Olothreutes posted:In my youth, when I was much more uncouth, we would refer to stuff like that as "hobo killin' cold" during the winters. Jeez, how hard can it be. Just make sure that you don't have too many or too few neutrons and you are set.
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Dec 13, 2016 19:37
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Mr. Nemo posted:Jeez, how hard can it be. Just make sure that you don't have too many or too few neutrons and you are set. Honestly, it's not hard at all. But I have a minimum number of hours where I must be logged in as the operator. Also it is finals week so we will be making unknown samples for people to identify. So I will probably have to irradiate random poo poo like table salt, stainless steel, Teflon, molybdenum, and some others. Last year we did a neodymium magnet and hoo boy was that a mess! We didn't give it to any students because they likely could not have identified it. We also did a Costco multivitamin, which had a load of weird stuff in it. It was at this point that I realized my life is sort of odd, because I can treat a nuclear reactor like a toy and just do things that I think could be neat with very little justification. Olothreutes fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Dec 13, 2016 |
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Dec 13, 2016 20:48
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You should irradiate Silvia. She's kind of a bitch.
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Dec 13, 2016 21:24
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Irradiated maple syrup. That one would be fun, especially if they can't smell it
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Dec 13, 2016 21:30
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Canuck-Errant posted:Irradiated maple syrup. That one would be fun, especially if they can't smell it Because it's a liquid we would have to encapsulate it, like we do the table salt, so they would not be able to smell it. The problem with maple syrup is that it's almost certainly just a hydrocarbon, so mostly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; none of which irradiate well because they are quite stable and absorb very few neutrons, and even for those they do absorb (carbon will do the most absorbing, followed by hydrogen, it is nearly impossible to put extra neutrons on oxygen for various quantum mechanics related reasons) they turn into isotopes that are stable. It wouldn't be much of an experiment. E: The abstract for this paper says the major minerals are potassium, calcium, and magnesium. None of these are particularly good sample materials for irradiation (at least for the purposes of this laboratory, which is to test the student's ability to identify a material based on the gamma emission spectrum) and they are present in such minute quantities that actually getting any sort of measurable amount of activated material would be basically impossible. Olothreutes fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Dec 13, 2016 |
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Dec 13, 2016 21:33
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Olothreutes posted:Because it's a liquid we would have to encapsulate it, like we do the table salt, so they would not be able to smell it. The problem with maple syrup is that it's almost certainly just a hydrocarbon, so mostly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; none of which irradiate well because they are quite stable and absorb very few neutrons, and even for those they do absorb (carbon will do the most absorbing, followed by hydrogen, it is nearly impossible to put extra neutrons on oxygen for various quantum mechanics related reasons) they turn into isotopes that are stable. It wouldn't be much of an experiment. Ah, good point. Though looking into the subject further has led to some interesting material on identifying 'treated' gemstones - I didn't know that clear topaz could be turned deep blue by gamma radiation until just now, for one. Pretty neat stuff.
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Dec 13, 2016 21:40
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Canuck-Errant posted:Ah, good point. Though looking into the subject further has led to some interesting material on identifying 'treated' gemstones - I didn't know that clear topaz could be turned deep blue by gamma radiation until just now, for one. Pretty neat stuff. Yeah, radiation does neat things to materials. Without googling it I'm going to say that exposing the topaz to gammas elevates some of the electrons to a higher energy state where they become trapped and unable to return to the ground state, and this affects how light scatters in them producing the blue effect. I suspect that if you heat one of them up it will lose the color and become clear again. They probably caution you against heating them. The same thing happens in some ceramics, salts, and we use it to create thermoluminescent dosimeters (TLDs) to track personnel dose.
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Dec 13, 2016 21:46
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Irradiate the source for a Smoke Detector and the filament for a camping Lamp. That ought to be an interesting one.
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Dec 13, 2016 21:51
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Arkanomen posted:Irradiate the source for a Smoke Detector and the filament for a camping Lamp. That ought to be an interesting one. We actually have americium check sources available in the lab, but Am-242 (which is what you would make) has a very high fission cross section and would almost certainly fission before you could generate enough of it to be detectable. Building up a detectable amount would be very, very difficult. Thorium is similar, it would become Th-233, which has a short enough half life to be useful but beta decays aren't good as the students won't be able to see the beta, the detectors we use will only pick up photons, and the associated gammas with that decay are mostly low enough energy that they will probably get swamped by the background. There are a few that you could see reliably, like a 447 KeV, but they're comparatively rare (1.18% of decays will emit this, versus 96% that will be under 100 KeV and mostly lost in the noise). It's actually pretty hard to get materials that play well for our purposes. Neodymium will do it because it turns into promethium, which has zero stable elements and multiple short half life isotopes, and several of those decay to unstable isotopes as well. Iron is good because you can produce manganese 56 from iron 56 by knocking out a proton with a neutron, and Mn 56 is very easy to detect. Chlorine is neat because you can teach them about simultaneous decay, when it decays you get two photons released at the same time, so the detector will register both of them and sum the energy levels. This gives you a higher energy that you would actually expect, so they have to learn to check and see if they are actually looking at the sum of two photons instead of just assuming it is one. Fluorine is good because you can knock out an alpha particle with a neutron to create N-16, which has a very fast decay (under 10 seconds, so they have to rush to the detector for this one) but is very high energy. At these energy levels you can, and do, get pair production inside the detector, where you create an electron/positron pair in the detector at the cost of some energy that you convert into mass. You can get this energy back from the positron when it annihilates with another electron giving you a pair of 511 KeV photons. All of this happens on a time scale that is faster than the detector can resolve. After you get the 511s, they can either be absorbed by the detector (and therefore sum their energy into the count) or one, or both of them can escape. These escape peaks produce a really distinctive triple pointed "crown" shape in your count that is evenly spaced, and once you see them one time you will recognize them forever, and it's therefore instructional to show them to people. Molybdenum is good, the most abundant natural isotope is moly 98, which becomes moly 99 when you irradiate it. Moly 99 turns into technetium 99, which is a major medical isotope. We generally give this one to health physics oriented students so they have experience with it when they go on to practice medicine. Olothreutes fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Dec 13, 2016 |
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Dec 13, 2016 22:17
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Oh. I got it in my head they were doing Mass Spec on the samples, looking at the decay products and trying to figure out what you irradiated, if that is indeed a thing you can do.
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Dec 14, 2016 02:18
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Can you illuminate a big Mac? Can't be much organics in there. It's kinda hard to think of stupid poo poo you could irradiate. A sex toy? Literal poo poo?
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Dec 14, 2016 02:24
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A dive knife would be interesting, because some of those are made with moly in the alloy.
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Dec 14, 2016 02:29
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Outrail posted:Can you illuminate a big Mac? Can't be much organics in there. In general anything organic, literal poo poo/bigmacs included, will not work well for the same reasons as maple syrup. You want things that have relatively large absorption probabilities, are common and not dangerous, and produce some sort of unique and instructive spectrum. That's a tall order, it turns out. There are thousands of isotopes but you can only make a fraction of those in our reactor, and from those you need to be able to make enough of the isotope for the student to be able to identify it. The neodymium magnet was neat as hell, for me and some of the faculty, because it was chock full of stuff. Neodymium, dysprosium, iron, copper, nickle, and some others that I'm forgetting. After you irradiate it you get a forest of gamma peaks that are very difficult to tease apart from one another. Many isotopes will emit various gammas with different energies with some probability. Like 45% at energy X, 20% energy Y, 18% energy Z, etc. So one way to tell if a particular isotope is present is to look for multiple peaks that would all come from the same isotope. But in the case of the magnet there was so much data it was nearly impossible to tell things apart without knowing in advance what to look for. Especially once you get down below around 200 keV, because then the background levels are higher and you can lose a lot of data in there so it becomes very hard to say with confidence "Yes, that is a 93 keV peak that corresponds to ____." Sex toys, the good ones, are made of silicone. Which is mostly oxygen and silicon. Oxygen as I mentioned before is super hard to put extra neutrons on, and silicon is 92% Si-28, while Si-29 and 30 are both stable (and naturally occurring, but with low abundance) so the majority of what you make will simply be more stable isotopes of silicon. Glass is the same. Diving knives are probably some manner of stainless steel, and there are probably around a million different kinds of stainless that are all slight isotopic variants of one another. Does it have 10% vanadium, or only 6%? Instead of vanadium does it have yttrium instead? Who knows! Really, it's bonkers what you can get with steels. Off the top of my head I can think of the following stainless steels, and at least two of them I know contain moly: 201, 202, 302, 304, 304L, 316, 316L, 440, Inconel, Hasteloy, HT-9, and VG-10. I'm sure there are a boatload more.
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Dec 14, 2016 04:17
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It snowed heavily today and on the drive home I looked out the window at the sky all alight due to the higher albedo of the snow and the city lights, and thought "Hooboy probably looks like this at night, except for all the trees." What I'm saying is I want nighttime renders of this planet from the next probe kthx.  Edit: Also, what happens if you irradiate a chunk of rock? Granite, quartz, pumice? I assume most of them are pretty inert? What about a fluorescent light bulb or similar? Faerunner fucked around with this message at 06:07 on Dec 14, 2016 |
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Dec 14, 2016 06:05
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why haven't you irradiated yourself to get your super cool mutant powers yet?
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Dec 14, 2016 06:38
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Sadly the only super power you can get from radiation is cancer. 
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Dec 14, 2016 09:10
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vorebane posted:Sadly the only super power you can get from radiation is cancer. Hey, (technical) immortality is a nice perk!
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Dec 14, 2016 13:02
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vorebane posted:Sadly the only super power you can get from radiation is cancer. hosed up if true
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Dec 14, 2016 16:14
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vorebane posted:Sadly the only super power you can get from radiation is cancer. But they use radiation to cure cancer! Maybe we're just not using enough!
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Dec 14, 2016 18:29
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You're stuck with steroids and crap kid.
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Dec 16, 2016 05:33
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`Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the ship, not a crewman was stirring, not even the skip. The pods gently humming away in their bays, The wardens awake, for thousands of days. While the crew slept away all the miles, The wardens were up, all full of smiles. “A toast to us, yet another year gone, our job is a hard one” she stifled a yawn. “Though Indeed it is, we persevere Under our care, they’ve passed another year. Bedia was bright, her face full of glee Their new home lay ahead, a chance to be free. Otto agreed and raised his glass high, “It may be hard, but we’ll give our best try!” A toast they all shared, flying through space, All that was left of the great human race.
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Dec 24, 2016 13:04
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Olothreutes posted:A toast they all shared, flying through space, You take that back, you said there were other colony ships! Have a great Christmas!
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Dec 24, 2016 13:23
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Every Hoo' down in Hooville like Christmas a lot, But Silvia, who lived in her office, did not! Silvia hated Christmas, the whole Christmas season! Now, please don't ask why, no one quite knows the reason. It could be her head wasn't screwed on just right. It could be, perhaps, she was just too uptight. But I think that the most likely reason of all, May have been that her heart was two sizes too small. Whatever the reason, her heart or her shoes, She stood there on Christmas eve, hating the Hoos. Staring across from her office with a sour, frumpy frown, At the warm lighted mess hall across and a bit down. For she knew every Hoo down in Hooville right beneath, Was busy now, hanging up some makeshift wreath. "And they're hanging their stockings!" She snarled with a sneer, "Tomorrow is Christmas! It's practically here!" Then she growled, with her fingers tapping apace, "I must find a way to stop this huge Christmas waste!" For tomorrow she knew, all the Hoomans would play, They'd wake bright and early. They'd drop a whole day! And then! Oh, the noise. Oh, the noise! Noise. Noise! Noise! That's one thing she hated! The NOISE! Noise. Noise! Noise! Then all the Hoomans, all of the crew, would sit down to a feast. They wouldn't care about rations, not even in the least! They would feast on Hoo carbs, and and even Hoo steaks! Which was something that gave Silvia a case of the shakes. And THEN they'd do something she liked least of all! Every crew down in Hooville, the tall and the small, Would stand close together, with Christmas bells ringing. They'd stand hand-in-hand. And the crew would start singing! And the more Silvia thought of this Hoo Christmas thing, The more that she thought, "I must stop this this whole thing!" "Why, we've a huge stellar expanse with these great drives! There's no reason to keep this holiday alive." Then she got an idea! An awful idea! Sivia got a wonderful, awful idea! "I know just what to do!" Silvia laughed in her throat. And she dug through her closed for a fitting lab coat. "This is stop number one," Grinch Silvia hissed, And she crept in the darkness, easy to miss. She slithered and slunk, with a smile most unpleasant Around the whole room, and she took every present! Then she slunk to the fridge. She took the crew's feast! She took the Hoo-carbs, She took the roast beast! She cleaned out the fridge as quick as a flash Why, that Silvia was acting a bit brash. The crew invited her, despite her actions so rude, To participate in their party, their great festive mood. And Silvia, with her feet so cold she thought there was snow Stood puzzling and puzzling, "How could it be so?" Even with her objections to this whole affair, The rest of the crew seemed not to care? "Maybe Christmas," she thought, "doesn't come from a store." "Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more." "A tradition lives on, from our old home planet." "Come on Silvia, take your 'tude and just stuff it!" A brazen cry from across the mess hall, The other crew was smiling one and all. And what happened then? Well, on Hooboy they say, That Silvia's small heart grew three sizes that day! And the minute her heart didn't feel quite so small She did indeed join in with them all! Merry Christmas, and a happy holiday season to all of you 
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Dec 24, 2016 13:54
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Olothreutes posted:Every Hoo' down in Hooville like Christmas a lot, This was lovely. The Hoo puns make me chuckle.
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Dec 24, 2016 14:10
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What a hooge effort of great poetry
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Dec 24, 2016 15:02
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