what I have learned today.

[Mr Larrington]

They keep flashing up trailers for it during shitvert breaks on the live coverage of the Tour.  I not sure what kind of research they do into demographics but I suspect the overlap between “Cycle racing fans” and “People likely to watch 'Fuck Island'” is pretty minimal.

[citoyen]

Given the article I’ve just read on the Graun website, I’m not quite sure how it’s being allowed to be broadcast. It sounds abhorrent.

It is remarkable that it hasn't gone the way of Jeremy Kyle yet. I know it's very popular with Young People though.

I've only ever seen it vicariously, via Goggle Box. Hasn't ever made me want to watch more.

[ian]

They keep flashing up trailers for it during shitvert breaks on the live coverage of the Tour.  I not sure what kind of research they do into demographics but I suspect the overlap between “Cycle racing fans” and “People likely to watch 'Fuck Island'” is pretty minimal.

It must be targetted, I've not seen these.

Endless car adverts though, for shit oversized wankwagons on perpetually empty roads promising 'urban adventure' and 'mild hybrid power.' I assume 'urban adventure' is sitting in a traffic jam hammering the horn in frustration while counting down the remaining years of your life and mild electric power means it has a car battery.

For all concerned, I'd launch an unlubricated Saturn V sized dildo up their collective fundaments.

[Kim]

"Mild hybrid power" likely means they got into trouble with the regulator for describing a petril car as a "self-charging hybrid".

I've never seen Love Island, but I assume it's incredibly cheap and extensive coverage of annoying young people vying to have sex with each other in a decidedly un-BRITISH climate.

[rafletcher]

Mild hybrids can’t (unlike “self charging” versions) aren’t able to run on electric power only. They replace the alternator with a generator, and just provide a boost to acceleration and faster restarting from the start stop systems.

[grams]

"self-charging hybrid" is a deeply silly Toyota-ism that makes me embarrassed to own one.

The mild hybrid ad is for the Nissan Qashqai. It starts with lots of puff about electric power and embracing the future and makes you think they've brought out an actual electric one. Which they haven't, which is a bit shit given Mitsubishi and Renault both have working EV/PHEV systems they could borrow.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Half-time adverts during the European Championship of Ball Kickology are, or have been for us (I'm not sure if these are UEFA content or channel specific) a plug-in electric vehicle called a VW iD. I don't know if it's a hybrid or pure battery EV cos they tell you nothing about it – there is literally no speech (or other audio) and the only captions are the name of the vehicle – but I know it's a plug in cos you see a woman standing next to it, smiling, while an anbaric glow sweeps along a cable from socket to vehicle. It must be the slowest charger ever, she still hasn't driven anywhere.

[TheLurker]

What a "mild hybrid" is.  Which is this; pointless.  Up until now I had assumed it was one with good manners, "After you Claude.  No, after you Cecil."  Live and learn eh?

[perpetual dan]

Ah. There was me thinking that the midlands was going to make its industrial comeback with the raw materials for beer-batteries.

[Poacher]

What about the adverts for a toy car in weekly? instalments which, assuming the publishers maintain it to the bitter end, will cost the unlucky consumer North of £1200 for something which would struggle to exceed £20 at auction.

[Cudzoziemiec]

That during the Civil War, the Royalist forces besieging the Parliamentary town of Hull had a huge cannon, firing 36-lb shot, which they christened the Queen's Pocket Pistol. When it was captured by Roundhead troops, they renamed it Sweet Lips, after the town's most celebrated prostitute.

I'm wondering if this isn't some sort of ancestral behaviour of WW2 bomber crews painting pin ups on their aircraft.

[grams]

I take it back. I spotted these self charging "e-car" spaces today:



Presumably you just sit there and rev the engine.

[TheLurker]

Woodlice like strawberries, and, quite frankly, they're more than welcome to them.

[Basil]

That Lincoln Street Llandysul is not named after the English city (?) but after the U.S. President.
Always assumed so, but nice to have it confirmed.

[rafletcher]

That X-Rays are luminescent, whereas radioactivity is phosphorescent. Roughly.

[ian]

I thought phosphorescence was a type of luminescence. I might be wrong though.

A good old cathode ray tube will dose you with x-rays as a boon to whatever you were watching.

[Kim]

AIUI:
Luminescence is just the emission of light (well, presumably any EM radiation) without incandescence (ie. glowing from heat).
Fluorescence is luminescence in response to stimulation by light at another wavelength.
Phosphorescence is delayed-action fluorescence, where energy is stored and light continues to be emitted after the stimulation is removed.

I'm not sure where the x-ray/radioactivity analogy comes in.  X-rays are just the next step up the EM spectrum from ultraviolet.  Radioactivity is atoms falling to bits and emitting things, which may or may not include gamma rays, the next step up from x-rays.  It's pretty hard to generate gamma radiation without radioactive decay, but x-rays and below may be produced by all sorts of methods (the typical x-ray tube being more or less a CRT TV screen minus the picture-drawing bits, with the anode voltage cranked up a bit).

X-rays, gamma rays and indeed particle radiation may all cause things to fluoresce/phosphoresce (hence the radium and tritium paints that combine^[1] a radioactive isotope and a phosphor, old-timey x-ray fluoroscope screens, and some of their electronic equivalents).


_{[1] Note that the ionising radiation itself isn't visible.  At least not at any intensity that you're likely to survive exposure to, and even then it's probably cherenkov radiation or ionising the air that's causing the glow.  I recall reading that x-rays are visible in a dark room as a dull glow at the sort of intensities that people only shared a room with before they realised they were dangerous.}

[ian]

Indeed, x-rays are mostly generated by slamming high-velocity electrons into a tungsten target, x-rays are emitted as 'braking radiation' as those electrons rapidly slow down through collisions with tungsten nuclei. Old school x-ray generation resulted in some visible light photons, so there was a glow from the x-ray tubes. Being able to see the x-ray tube, of course, turned out to be a bad idea. Apropos of nothing, x-ray is the coolest name for something ever.

Cherenkov radiation is a similar-ish but not at all phenomenon that results in visible spectrum photons when particles end up travelling faster than the speed of light* in a medium (basically, when they pass one medium to another, and the phase velocity of light changes). Again, if you can see it, it's probably a really bad idea to say 'ooo, that's nice, let me get a photograph.'

Back when I used to work a 32-phosphorous, mostly a moderately high energy beta-emitter, so spits out a fast electron and an electron antineutrino, it was notable that exposed sources would attract flies. I assume that was because those electrons were causing some UV fluorescence in the acrylic shielding that the flies could see and humans couldn't. Or the flies wanted superpowers. They could have gone down the corridor, the people there were happily zapping them with full-on gamma rays.

*you can actually travel faster than the speed of light, provided that's not the speed of light in a vacuum.

[Kim]

Old school x-ray generation resulted in some visible light photons, so there was a glow from the x-ray tubes.

Indeed, but... *googles*

It was Röntgen who reported that the glow was visible from the other side of a wooden door.   

https://orau.org/health-physics-museum/articles/wilhelm-rontgen-invisible-light.html

[ian]

In other exciting radiation trivia, we all have a weak gamma source in our house, the americium-241 in smoke detectors (primarily an alpha emitter, but it spits out low energy gamma photons if you fancy giving your cat a case of the Hulk.)

It's the only synthetic nucleotide in domestic use (and is made from plutonium). It decays to an isotope of neptunium with a half-life just over 2 million years. If you want to dispose of a smoke detector from a lab, you have to fill out acres of paperwork and spend a lot of money. If you want to do it at home, you toss it in the trash.

[Canardly]

That the award of a George Cross is worth 1% gross to your employer.

[MattH]

In other exciting radiation trivia, we all have a weak gamma source in our house, the americium-241 in smoke detectors (primarily an alpha emitter, but it spits out low energy gamma photons if you fancy giving your cat a case of the Hulk.)

See David Hahn, the radioactive boy scout

[Mr Larrington]

Disappointed to learn that he died from an OD rather than when his home-made particle accelerator malfunctioned and turned him into a warthog.

[ian]

I'd forgotten about thorium in gas lamp mantles.

Old plates and pottery often have uranium glazes, and you can terrorize people by waving a Geiger counter over them. They're pretty safe though, the glaze is very hard and the uranium salts that provide the bright colours (primarily an alpha source, and not the isotope used in bombs) not very labile.

Of course, smoking cigarettes give you a nice dose of polonium (sadly, that nice President Obama, passed an act – much fought over by the tobacco lobby – forcing them to do something to reduce polonium levels in cigarettes – though arguably, if you're smoking in the first place, health concerns are not top of your agenda).

[Jurek]

Today I've taken delivery of a box of scalpel blades.
They are sterilised.
Sterilised by gamma radiation according to what it says n the side of the box.