"Wrong Emphasis on the Wrong Syllable"

I'm just putting this here because I would doubt Facebook or Twitter would archive very well. Mike Myers, in the movie "View from the Top", has a line "You put the wrong em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble". I was just watching the 1933 movie "Moonlight and Pretzels" at the Northwest Chicago Film Society showing, and a character in that movie does the exact same joke!

Refrigerator payback

My current fridge (a Hotpoint Foodcenter 24) is older than I am. It was originally the avocado color shown in the ad; at some point someone painted it black but only the front and the sides they could reach; the top back and sides were not. The spread control is appreciated but not used. The giant dust bunnies of a never cleaned coil underneath was not. I measured the yearly annual cost of this fridge at $290 a year with a kill-a-watt; at that rate, a really nice replacement will begin paying for itself in six years. The previous owners had this fridge for 15 years and paid over $4000 in electricity for the privilege.

http://books.google.com/books?id=2UwEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA10&ots=b1-UE37tSn&dq=hotpoint%20foodcenter%2024&pg=PA10#v=onepage&q&f=true

7.72 microRads/hr

A 39 day long sampling of every minute leads the geiger counter to a long term average of 7.72 uR/hr. That's 56658 sampling points. That's about what's it's always been.

http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

New Moon of Pluto

http://www.cbat.eps.harvard.edu/cbet/cbet002769.txt

whatever, it doesn't matter, the blog is dead in practice if not in theory. The hits now a days are image searches and the occasional conspiracy web site, plus the audio transformer hits. I can't do my job and life and this.

Great Saturn Cassini video

Go out and see the Astronomy Picture of the Day for June 13th. It's an awesome video of the Saturnian system from Cassini. If all the cosmic ray hits, perspective changes (from Cassini's orbital motion), and dust donut hole moves(due to panning, filter changes, and zooms) are original to the raw images, then I salute Chris Abbas. What a great job.

Now compare that to my crappy gif animation I made of Enceladus and Dione near the rings from 5 years ago. http://dwarmstr.blogspot.com/2006/03/saturn-enceladus-and-dione-animation.html

Natural background radiation in Chicago

A recent inquiry brings up the question of what's the normal natural background radiation rate in Chicago? Using the EPA's online tool, we see the budget for naturally occurring sources listed as
(all numbers per year)
26 mrem for cosmic radiation
2 mrem for elevations up to 1000ft
46 mrem from terrestrial K, U, Th in soil (aka not Colorado Plateau or Gulf and Atlantic Coasts but normal US soil)
0 mrem from radon&daughter products (I'm excluding it here from this calculation but it's a sizeable percentage of your yearly dose)

74 mrem total, which comes out to about 8.4 urem/hr or microrems per hour. The long-term average in my basement office runs at about 7.6uR/hr.

From Duval, J.S., Aerial gamma-ray surveys of the conterminous United States and Alaska, you can see here that the approximate average exposure rate from naturally occurring U, K, and Th in the ground is about 4.5uR/hr at 1m above the ground for Chicago. I say about because the survey didn't look at heavily urbanized ground. But with the high resolution data and a geologic map you should be able to predict what it should be.



The Straight Dope unfortunately printed an error about it in 1980, claiming the rate in Chicago was 2 millirems per hour. That's really off; it's 1/250 of that.

CFL lifetime report

I just noticed that a second CFL failed in my torchiere conversion I did back in the winter of 2008. I use this light about 7 hours a day consistently. That makes it just under 8000 hours. The first CFL failure I seem to have not mentioned; I think it happened about a year ago.

Re: Las Vegas Anomaly

A couple of images from that area.

The Las Vegas Anomaly

It seems all the iPhones as part of the once-unknown location tracking log all have visits to locations in northwest Las Vegas, all at the same time. Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden at O'Reilly Radar have dubbed this "The Las Vegas Anomaly", an elegant turn of phrase that will undoubtedly be incorporated into science fiction stories just as soon as writers get wind of it. Speaking as someone born and raised in Las Vegas, I have no clue why those locations are listed. There's not that much between the Kyle Canyon and Lee Canyon roads on US 95. A golf course, a small park, and scattered homes.

Re: Magnetic Cable holders

Well, I had one issue with my magnetic cable holder: an incompatibility between the hot glue and the adhesive on a particular 'model' of holder. The ones with the adhesive and foam backing cleanly separated from the hot glue after a week or so under a slight load. I scraped the foam and adhesive off and reattached the magnet and the holder. I think part of the problem was difficulty in getting the hot glue thin enough before it set--this is a problem when attaching it to metal surfaces, which act as very efficient heatsinks. But other problem is the glue was not too gluey.

I've come across this incompatibility between hot glue and a few surfaces. The ubiquitous hot glue is EVA: Ethylene-Vinyl Acetate, a thermoplastic. I still need to make sure the adhering surfaces are hot glue compatible. It's really more about the convenience of the glue gun than anything else. I suppose I should be using a more universal glue for my generic adhesive requirements.

Magnetic cable organizer/holder from hard drive magnets

I was talking with a coworker who had a particular design problem. Her network jack was embedded in a counter and the cable ran all the way across a built-in drawer to her desk and would frequently get jammed in the drawer. I suggested to her to talk to the Facilities guys to get some sort of cable management installed (as that's not my bailiwick) but I knew that the problem would persist into the future. I also thought there was little place to install anything that required a drilled hole, as there was AC conduit and such in the area. Then I had an inspiration: the network jack had been installed in a flat steel conduit. And I had a lot of hard drive magnets. So a little hot glue, some adhesive cable holders (that never really held very well), and I've got a solution! And now I'm making a bunch more for better cable management in my server room. I stuck a paper sticker on the magnet side to help prevent some of the surface marring these magnets can produce; a felt would probably be a better material.

Geiger Counter back up

My long-suffering Geiger counter is now back up and running.
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/~dean/float.htm.

Now, as has been pointed out, this particular instance of this experiment is really an experiment, and is run only by me, for only experimental purposes. It doesn't represent any opinion or endorsement or opinion of any entity, whether the University of Chicago Library or the University or anything else. It is not a service. It represents nothing, is not calibrated, and should not be relied upon by anyone for anything. Don't email or call anyone but myself about it.

This instance is located in my office on the A-level of the Regenstein Library, the first basement level of a six-story building. The levels average about 8 microrads/hr here. Outside at Ryerson Physical Laboratory on the fifth floor, levels average to about 12 microrads/hr, which indicate the shielding provided by the Regenstein against the cosmic ray flux.

The problem I've been having with this counter was with the associated AW-SRAD software, which runs under DOS, doesn't appear to support virtual COM ports above COM4. On my Windows XP PC I had installed an Arduino which offered a similar USB Serial converter and I theorize at some point there was a conflict and the Geiger counter with its FTDI USB to serial converter took a high COM port at COM5. After removing the Arduino, I then disabled the real serial port at COM1 and forced via Device Manager->Ports->USB Serial Ports the port to go to COM1.

What's in the steam coming from a nuclear reactor

I've hesitated to comment much on the ongoing Japanese tragedy, but I wish to talk a little about the output coming out from the reactor whenever they open the valves to reduce the pressure inside. In commerical nuclear reactors not using heavy-water for their coolant (aka most non-Canadian western reactors) the pure water coolant is exposed to the intense neutron flux as it passes through the reactor. The neutrons can interact with the oxygen nuclei in the water to form nitrogen-16, a very short lived radioisotope with a half-life of seven seconds. After a few minutes away from the core there is none of it left so the only hazard is near the output pipe, and there are places they store the output for just a little while to let all of the N-16 to decay back into oxygen-16.
The other common isotope coming out is tritium coming from the small amount of deuterium in normal water, leaking through the fuel rod cladding, and other spalling type nuclear reactions in the materials in the core. The tritium is a low radioactive hazard but has a 12-year half-life.

If the reactor is hot, water will decompose into hydrogen and oxygen, especially with the right catalysts.

So if you were to open the output valve on a reactor to relive the steam pressure inside (because the regular cooling is not working), you would get quite a bit of that nitrogen-16. It would be gone by the time a few minutes of wind-time, but it is quite the hazard to the plant. I wonder how much of the periodic bursts of site limit radioactivity is related to that.

The introduction of seawater into the cores introduces the possibility of neutron activation of a number of other elements (sodium, chlorine, etc.) into radioactive isotopes that last longer and can have more of an issue in life time and clean up.

None of this discussion is about the breaking or melting of the cladding and detection of fission products (like what you see when checking people on their clothing for particles), which seems to have occurred in some fashion.

A good primer on what might be going on, without hysteria is over at MIT.

Audio stereo isolation circuit diagram

Two years I made an audio stereo isolation transformer, suitable for getting rid of ground loop problems in a line-level audio connection. Here's a simple circuit diagram that attempts to match the colors of the physical device.




http://www2.lib.uchicago.edu/~dean/blog/isolation-transformer.dsn
Circuit diagram for TinyCAD.