The Steins of Science and Black Blood of the Earth. Commentary on ☢THE DEADLY RADIATIONS☢, Lasers & History. I am the Certified Laser Safety Officer to Twitter.
Mar 24, 2023 • 52 tweets • 10 min read
There's a hard philosophical conflict in emergency preparedness that goes like this: do you want to build capabilities to respond to an incident or do you want to prevent it from happening in the first place?
You need both, but they tend to compete for the same pot of money.
There's a nasty tangled ball of motivations, recriminations, blame, avoidance and desk pounding of NEVER AGAIN that happens with every incident. If we could fix that, this cycle might break but I'm going to assume for the time being that we will all continue to be human.
Dec 9, 2022 • 34 tweets • 7 min read
I'm very proud of all of you for identifying that these are all TERRIBLE IDEAS. The thing about terrible ideas is that they still occur to people and sometimes staggering amounts of money will be spent to try to make them real and marginally less terrible.
To those who refuse to play inside the constraints of the poll and demand more reasonable and less theater destroying options, I think you haven't had the pleasure to read/experience enough of the systems development and appropriations process. We get to your answer...eventually.
Dec 7, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
[pinches bridge of nose in pain] No, thirsty bullion sellers, I am not a goldbug that needs Pearl Harbor "coins" or ingots of destroyed vessels or old racist propaganda slogans in 999 gold.
It definitely makes me want to slap someone.
I'm forming an image in my mind of who will be excited to buy this. It is a Brimley-form WWII enthusiast who exclusively wear Navy ship hats for vessels they never served on, likely sunk or decommissioned before they were born. I have met so many of them at museums and parks. :(
Oct 24, 2022 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
BEGIN RANT
When you hand me an incident report and you list "training issues" as a root cause, you just told me that I need to pay MUCH CLOSER ATTENTION to management and the person that wrote this report.
Because let us take a moment to look at the Safety Professional's Blessed Cosmology. Training sits in Administrative Controls. If there is an issue of training, I'm gonna ask what specifically the issue is and why there isn't elimination, substitution, or engineering controls.
Jun 9, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Yes.
However, you can find ways to make this useful rather than the fast lane to a Florida Man headline.
Running toward things everyone else is running away from to help is the magical brain judo Floridians do. In my career, emergency response services around the country are disproportionately staffed by former Floridians.
Sometimes Florida Man makes the crisis. Sometimes we help.
Feb 1, 2022 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Just took a look at my "Coins Of Failure" aborted rant again. There's still gold (not literally) in them thar shattered dreams of states that might have been. Or, in most cases for those that became more than a feeble dream, didn't exist for long.
Mind you, if they'd actually had any gold, they might've made it.
But this is also why themes of $INSERT_FAILED_REGIME gold hang on in stories. It's not that the regime was wrong, but they never got a chance to go big because the gold was lost.
SEE ALSO: Secret Nazi Gold Train
Dec 23, 2021 • 31 tweets • 7 min read
I think he best way to start this is by shaking my ANGRYFIST at Amazon & eBay for being the gray/black markets of choice for all manner of things that should not be there. Bullshit Lasers only scratch the surface of their almost complete lack of policy enforcement.
It is known that once you have three of something, you officially have a collection. The moment you get that third flamingo, you're The Flamingo Guy and you start accumulating more flamingos until you have so many the collapse into a pink hole.
Dec 13, 2021 • 30 tweets • 6 min read
Because people were missing the CYORAs and something popped into my head, you got the first one in quite a while.
Moving radioactive rocks around is important because it lets us revisit one of my favorite topics: Regulations vs. Reality vs. What Actually Happens
Because the keyword in this CYORA is "reasonable". Reasonable is a word that entire legal and regulatory careers are built on. You may recall from earlier explainers, the discussion of the underpinning philosophy of all our radiation protection rules regs, ALARA.
Dec 10, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Me: You scheduled two hours for laser murder?
Coworker: I just wanted to make sure we had enough time.
Me: I will teach you how quickly & thoroughly a laser can die. They take MUCH longer to make work, but that's not what we're doing today.
Coworker: You scare me sometimes.
My trophy collection grows. Also, I claimed the Staff of Corona as my prize.
Dec 10, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Man, this is how everyone gets porn value packs from Santa.
TRUE FACT: Once, I got taken to a birthday party at a beach bonfire where I had no gift. I apologized to the birthday girl for this and asked what she wanted. "Booze, smoke, porn? I don't know."
Reader, I gave her all three of these things from the nearby liquor store.
Jul 17, 2021 • 29 tweets • 6 min read
The fun thing about this one is that I know a lot of people out there have treated their cats for hyperthyroidism, but the number of responses from people that've experienced radiopharma medical care for humans that I'd call "inadequate, bordering on actionable" is high.
Thyroid ablation is one of those fun treatments where we intentionally do the thyroid destroying uptake of radioiodine, specifically I-131 to limit the body burden, to get rid of diseased thyroid tissue. And it's one that is comparable between humans and cats.
Jan 26, 2021 • 69 tweets • 15 min read
688. 689.
Dec 30, 2020 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
I thought I would make a new end of year CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE, except I realized I kept running face first into "All Of The Above".
So instead, I want to discuss archetypical accidents to try to encourage you to not be the cause/victim in one.
As we approach NYE 2020 with restrictions in place and limited staffing, on top of the usual ghost towns that institutions become during the holidays as the older staff members take use-it-or-lose-it vacations, we are particularly vulnerable to the first archetype: Work Alone
Dec 16, 2020 • 39 tweets • 8 min read
People who believe they have True Ultimate Power want nice, simple, soundbite executable solutions that obliterate nuance and complications with BOLD & DECISIVE ACTION. Were those actions good and appropriate? Ehhhhhh.
To those of you who looked at these choices and said, more eloquently, "These are shit" you are correct. But these are all options that have been considered *precisely because* they are easily conveyed as sound bite solutions.
Dec 6, 2020 • 29 tweets • 6 min read
The first thing to keep in mind with a rocket launch is that you don't get to do a lot of "aiming" between pressing IGNITION and ABORT. Aiming, AKA mission planning, is what you spent the previous several months/years doing. These seconds/minutes are the shitfuckdammit stage.
Part of the mission planning for the safety aspects is thinking the unthinkable and forecasting the debris fallout areas for where things are likely to impact if depending on when you press the big red button.
And a lot like hurricane forecasting, you get cones of uncertainty.
Dec 4, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
If my dad were still alive...
Someone in your life may need this. Check it out y’all.
HOLY SHIRT! THEY'RE OFFERING SPACE MACHETES!!! MY FLORIDIANS, THE MOTHER SWAMP CALLS US TO SPACE!!!!! lunareplicas.com/collections/fl…
Nov 24, 2020 • 31 tweets • 6 min read
With the exception of the old Pu-238 pacemaker, as hospitals & mortuaries prefer FedEx for some reason, all of these things have been sent through the mail by the USPS. Whether they should have is the issue. If the postal inspectors had checked, they'd be cranky.
The underlying rules for what can and cannot be shipped, and by what methodologies, for the United States are all hiding in 49CFR, AKA the Department of Transportation part of the federal code.
Additionally, we are beholden to IATA for international air transport rules.
Nov 14, 2020 • 28 tweets • 6 min read
I should preface that my primary vacuum tube experience is related to trying to fix the 1920s built-in wall radio made of redwood in a house my family rented when I was in elementary school.
I am just old enough to remember asking "What's that?" when I saw the vacuum tube tester in Thrifty next to the ice cream bar but young enough that there were no tubes for sale and the testing machine hadn't worked in years.
Nov 1, 2020 • 30 tweets • 7 min read
To reiterate, the good news here is zero chance of zombies.
The bad news is that you have to cope with the living instead. Unlike the shambling dead, who are fairly goal oriented (re: your brains), the living have Opinions™ and they are often contradictory.
The reason I like to ask questions like these is because there's often not a good answer and we haven't *really* had to figure it out. Which means this is the best time to do it is now, rather than as a game time decision when the crisis is already in process.
Oct 23, 2020 • 42 tweets • 8 min read
All of these choices *technically* cause legacy waste to take up less space, even if one is just a bullshit accounting trick. All of them have been tried, all of them have lead to uptakes, but like all of these quizzes my word choice is important. So, let's define some terms.
I specifically asked for "worst rad material uptake", not dose/exposure. Obviously, if you get a lot of radioactive material into the body there will be some internal dose from that. What I am not worried about in this quiz is external dose from the drums.
