science

Kodak’s Nuclear Nothing-Burger

Posted by Orvan Taurus on October 29, 2025
Posted in: history, radiation, safety, science, technology.

“But the truth about the reactor was stranger, and tamer, than the headlines suggested.”

Kodak used a Californium-252 source to emit neutrons… but Cf-252 is insanely expensive (today it goes for $30,000 per milligram) so they used as little as they could. But they still needed neutrons for some research (“If an X-ray shows you the crack in a pipe, neutrons will show you the leak.”). The answer was to use plates of Highly Enriched Uranium as a set of “neutron amplifiers.” It sounds like a reactor or even partway to a bomb… BUT.. there was NOT enough uranium to do much of anything more than act as the intended amplifier. And without the Cf-252 source… it did…NOTHING. The Cf-252 had to be there or there was no signal to amplify and the uranium, even if “weapons grade” sat there doing what unprovoked uranium generally does – NOTHING.

“…the CFX was deliberately engineered to remain subcritical so that each fission produced fewer neutrons than needed to sustain a chain reaction. Without the CF-252 feeding it, the process peters out.”

“[T]he CF-252 component weighed about the same as a snowflake.”

The real story of Kodak’s flux multiplier is less a conspiracy than a technical curiosity.

Or, once again: DON’T PANIC!

Twinkle Twinkle Little… Planet?! Yup!

Posted by Orvan Taurus on October 28, 2025
Posted in: astronomy, optics, science.

There is the common idea that “planets do not twinkle.”

This is utterly and completely WRONG.

While planets generally do not twinkle, and will seem steady in comparison to stars, even in turbulent atmosphere that results in what is called “bad seeing” – that is in comparison, and generally.

The idea is that stars are, effectively, point sources and thus subject to atmospheric instability distorting the optical path from outer space to ground. But planets, even if you can’t see a disk without a telescope, are NOT point sources and the few arc-seconds of a disk means that atmospheric turbulence “evens out” or something. In cases of only very mild turbulence, this might even be the case. But in cases of genuinely bad seeing, a few arc-seconds doesn’t matter. The moon might not twinkle, but the moon is around 30 arc-MINUTES across! And, of course, so is the Sun.

If the “seeing” is truly lousy – the atmosphere turbulent enough – even planets can and will twinkle. This is NOT theoretical. I have SEEN planets “twinkle.” Not as much as stars, no, but planets are NOT magically immune from atmospheric turbulence. Within the past week I have seen Venus twinkle. At first I figured it was the result of the light passing over a building (a “heat island”) that made things worse than normal. But then I took a bit of a drive and even with NO buildings about, and nothing but fields and trees, the twinkling remained. Yes, really. Yes, Venus. Mind, higher in the sky was Sirius and the star did twinkle much more obviously/fiercely.

In fairly calm (“good seeing”) skies, at near-zenith, a planet will seem to be steady in its light in comparison to stars which, despite “good seeing” can still twinkle. But closer to the horizon, with more air for the light to need to pass through, and in times of poorer seeing… yes, planets can and do and WILL twinkle. This more noticeable in Winter when the air is DRY and doesn’t have stabilizing humidity. I recall an articles that put forth that the best nights for planetary observation were those when “the dew was dripping off the telescope tube” – all that water in the air stabilized the air. Not good nights for “Deep Sky” (galaxies, etc.) stuff, but planets are, relatively, bright and the attenuation due to humidity would be compensated for by the atmospheric stability yielding steadier images.

Masks Work, But Don’t

Posted by Orvan Taurus on April 25, 2025
Posted in: health, medicine, science.

During, and after, the Great COVIDiocy there were various articles proclaiming that masks do indeed work, citing tests run and particles blocked. Only, of course, we knew in 1920 (from studying the use of masks in the 1918 influenza pandemic) that masks do not work at all for stopping respiratory viruses, and actually tend to make things worse by giving bacteria a warm moist place to breed and then get inhaled. So, what the heck was going on, beside the obvious Narrativium (über Alles!)?

Well, what you find depends on what you look for and what you look for depends on detector sensitivity and choice of detector and… here’s something about that:

If Masks Work, Why Don’t They Work?

Short version: Big particles do indeed get mostly blocked. The smaller particles of actual concern do not.

Oh, just like folks were saying all along? “Trying to keep out mosquitoes with chicken wire.”

Tachy and Brady and so…

Posted by Orvan Taurus on December 4, 2024
Posted in: humor, language, question, science.

Science Fiction fans, and those interested particle physics, are aware of the idea of the tachyon. This is a hypothetical particle that travels faster than light. The idea goes that as long something is faster than c, it doesn’t necessarily violate Relativity. The idea considers c as a border that cannot be crossed, but there is at least a possibility of things on the other side of that border.

If you have a very rapid heartbeat (over 100 beats per minute), your condition is tachycardia. Alright, ‘tachy’ is fast. To swipe a bit from Wikipedia… comes from the Greek:ταχύς, tachus, meaning swift. If you have an unusually slow heart rate (under 60 beats per minute) your condition is bradycardia. Brady… from Greek: βραδύς, bradys, “slow.”

And, yes, particles slower than light (everything we know about that has non-zero rest mass…. so not photons, gluons, or gravitons…) are, or at least can be, called bradyons.

Particle accelerators can be influenced to get particles within them to aggregate, at least to a degree. The accelerators can get these particles to amazing speeds. Sometime almost, but of course never quite, c. Even at those speeds, sub-c, so bradyons. And thus a pulse or aggregation of such particles is a… brady bunch.

She Blinded Me…, With Distortion!

Posted by Orvan Taurus on June 10, 2024
Posted in: music, science.

No, not really. But this is an interesting video of a gal reacting to a video I recall from 1984 or so. Thomas Dolby’s video of She Blinded Me With Science. Evidently the gal has some “science” bit and a following that included folks quoting the tune at her and she finally decided to give it a listen/view.

The whole thing is interesting, but the bit around 14 minutes in or so really caught my interest. It’s about distortion and how vocal (research?) folks do NOT like the idea of it coming from certain places. And I so get that. It’s a sort of weird thing that scientists and engineers (and others…) spent so much time and effort to rid sound reproduction (whether recorded or transmitted) of distortion, only for “musicians” to go “Oh, cool, now that we can control it, it’s an effect, not a problem.” ARGH!

Yeah, yeah, the horn mute is just a crude physical version of a wa-wa peddle or sommat. Riiiight. Kids these millennia.

Science…

Posted by Orvan Taurus on June 8, 2024
Posted in: astronomy, science.
Science…

In fact, it is never truly settled. Even the “sure” things get the odd tweak now and again. Newtonian mechanics can let you do all sorts of wonderful stuff. But Einsteinian mechanics lets you do all that and some even more amazing things. And folks have been looking for cases where Einstein’s Relativity fails. Such has not been found, yet. But it would be no great shock if there was some weird edge case where Relativity needs tweaking – and that might allow “impossible” things. Or not. Won’t know until we get there.

But most certainly go read that post, and pay good attention to Feynman’s list. Some of those, if not all of those, he learned the hard way.

Aurora!

Posted by Orvan Taurus on May 11, 2024
Posted in: astronomy, electricity, radiation, radio, science.

It’s no 1987, but still Impressive. Of course, in 1987 I was still living north of the 45th parallel. That event had color to the southern horizon.It was intensely intense as auroras go. This past night was no slouch, but not of that intensity.

Now, it was still amazing. I drove a bit north of town to a usually lonely gravel road. The same one I drove to a few years back to see the comet. It was not so lonely this past night. I was not the only one to have the idea of aurora watching from there (I was alone for the comet…). I must have spent 30 to 45 minutes watching the skies and the aurora. In southern MN, the aurora at times was as far south as Spica in Virgo. I think at least once, I saw a blurring over the northernmost two brighter stars of Corvus. It was bright enough to mask some stars of Ursa Minor and Cancer was just plain gone.

I never saw any for sure color, though hints of greenishness. A couple (phone) camera photos did show some green. I am not putting those here as I am sure many others got much better photos by simply using proper cameras. The really impressive thing was that when I got back home, I could still see the aurora in town. This is a “doesn’t happen” kind of thing. So, sure, even though I didn’t see color for sure, it was intense enough to overcome a fair amount of Waste Light / Light Pollution. That’s impressive.

So, how’s radio propagation? Especially the shortwave bands? And are the power grids in the far north (and far south) holding?

A Fusion Cuisine Question

Posted by Orvan Taurus on February 6, 2024
Posted in: cooking, humor, science.

Orvan: If it doesn’t involve tritium, is it REAL fusion cuisine?

bluej: Heavenly Father please spare us from The Minotaur Cookbook, Amen.

Orvan: Astonishing, I know, but I am not the gamma-ray gourmet. Don’t send ionizing radiation to do radio’s job. Wanna cook something? DIATHERMY!

Kermit: Note to self: When Orvan says a dish is hot, he’s not referring to temperature or Scoville level…

Zoozve: Venus’ Not-Moon that is also a Not-Not-Moon

Posted by Orvan Taurus on January 29, 2024
Posted in: astronomy, science.

Zoozve? What’s a Zoozve?

“…we don’t live in a big clockwork, we live in a dance club, and while some of us are doing the same old waltz with our same old moon, there are bodies out there do-si-do-ing their way all over the solar system.”

The Universe, heck the solar system, is stranger than most think. Curiously, I doubt this is actually the first of its kind to be found. A “moonlet” or two was/were found just before the dawn of the Space Age around/near Earth.. as I recall from World Book Encyclopedia yearly updates/addenda “Booklets” or maybe Science News back when it was about NEWS about SCIENCE and not Propaganda (“climate change” hornswaggling).

As The Year Goes Out… Old Ideas

Posted by Orvan Taurus on December 31, 2023
Posted in: history, science.

There are old ideas that have been superseded. They oft seem, today, to be quaint if not utterly insane. And yet, these ideas were there as the best (or at least least-bad) explanations of things from what was known and accepted at the time.

A fellow who went by the name Confutus (Confute – To prove to be wrong or in error; refute decisively.) once explained it thus:

That’s Luminiferous ether, which came from trying to make a correspondence between electromagnetic waves and mechanical waves too exact. Phlogiston was the theory of combustion before Lavoisier got the bright idea of weighing reactants before and after a reaction and found the phlogiston theory had it backwards. Burning things meant combining with oxygen, not giving phlogiston off. Caloric theory, the theory that heat was a weightless fluid was credible, until it was found that heat could be created by friction, and there was an exact equivalence between mechanical work done and the amount of heat created. Epiycles were a decent approximation for the motions of planets, until Kepler found that an ellipse was a better one. And so it goes with other theories. It’s not really fair to deride theories that have been since been superseded. They were usually an advance in understanding over previous knowledge. “We see farther, because we are standing on the shoulders of giants”, as I think Newton put it.

And people ought to realize that today’s ‘knowledge’ will be superseded, but not by diktat.
We should not be expecting or looking for “the next Newton.”
For that was not a Newton, but Einstein.
We should not be expecting or looking for “the next Einstein.”
For that was not an Einstein, but [REDACTED by Historical Continuity Editor].[1]

But.. the approximations are getting better each go ’round.
You can do some really neat stuff with Newtonian mechanics.
You can do some seriously astonishing stuff with Einsteinian mechanics.
Now, ponder what those who might be versed in… trans/post-Einsteinian mechanics might accomplish.

[1] Orvan, you know you’re not allowed to take the Babylon Bee’s time machine on joyrides.