Okay, so yesterday I didn't have even half as many views as the day before, so I have to admit what I did yesterday wasn't the thing I needed. Today I'm going to go with the one where I mention the U.S.A half a million times and post U.S.A as a tag too. Cause there are a bunch of people from the U.S.A who want to read about the U.S.A.
If this will work I'll tell you guys tomorrow... and now I'm going to say thanks to the U.S.A for the views. I'm not going to say anything bad about the U.S.A from now on. In fact U.S.A rocks. Okay, so U.S.A., do your job now and get me some views.
Dang, I'm so frustrated... I have to finish my project, and just now the physicist from the Uni called me that he needs a Multimeter from me and I have to bring him that too. I have to finish this post and I have ANOTHER project to do besides the one I already started... and one of my old friends came up with the idea that we start playing Dungeons and Dragons on the weekends too... which I actually look forward to, but it still adds to my guilt of not starting my project sooner. :D I think I would actually love to go to work all day instead of this. I'm really getting bored of the Uni, especially now that exams are here. I usually chicken out when exams are on the doorstep though...
And fu*k it, I'm rambling. (Insert: U.S.A. for no reason at all)
By the way. Since it's exam time, I'm going to post something that most of the professors at our university are crazy about...
Here are some stuff I learned about radioactivity - without going into any of that technical stuff.
First off, I have to tell you guys, that most of America is so afraid of anything that has to do with radioactivity, they wouldn't touch it with a 100 feet pole. So this is why a professor told us, that if someone is intelligent enough, they will work in this field in the U.S.A, cause chances are most of the jobs that have to do anything with it are probably empty. Also, the biggest percentage of the people working in the field there are probably from other countries...
Okay, another fact about radioactivity is that it's everywhere around you. Most intelligent people know this, and also know that not everything radioactive will cause cancer.
The thing is, some people develop a higher resistance to it, if they live in an environment that has higher radioactivity than other would have. And let's face it, there are a bunch of villages around the world- yes, here in Romania too - where most of the houses were built with radioactive materials. And people still live in them, and funny thing is, when confronted with it some of them don't even want to give up their home.
Okay, so guys, now that you know these, you also probably realized what radiation actually is. First off, it's a term that includes heat, light, radio-waves, microwaves and other kinds of ENERGY.
And now back to the more interesting stuff. As I said, everything around us is pretty much radioactive. The Earth was always radioactive, and the natural environment is probably at the same stage it was about 10000 years ago. Also, if there weren't any radioactivity around us we wouldn't even exist.
Anyways, here are some common items that are radioactive...
1. Bananas!
Your (not mine, cause I don't like em) favorite phallic fruits are radioactive. In fact that's what makes bananas healthy. The dose of potassium it will deliver to your body once you stuffed it down your throat. Is it any coincidence then that bananas are favored by cyclists and that Lance Armstrong got cancer? Yes it is, you insensitive bastard.
2. Kitty litter
There's a lot of naturally occurring radioactive stuff in the ground, which anything coming out of the ground -- granite and clay for instance -- has a good chance of containing in trace amounts. Kitty litter's mostly clay, though the likely reason it gets singled out isn't the clay at all, but the cat. That's right, it's not the litter you should fear, but the remains of Captain Squishy-Face's last tuna dinner. The early '90s boasted two separate incidents of tripped radiation alarms at local dumps (heh) being traced to bags of used kitty litter. The kitties in question had ingested iodine-181 as a cancer treatment and were, uh, excreting radiation. Thank God I hate cats too...
3. Watches
Contrary to the sci-fi cliché embedded like an alien in the thorax of our collective consciousness, radioactive substances don't glow in the dark. But combine, say, radium with a phosphor and paint it onto a watch dial and you've got a super-cool watch that glows basically forever -- unlike those lame ones that have to sit under a light for an hour to glow for ten minutes. You've also got a potent source of radiation strapped to your body, so if you have one of these antiques (radium was phased out by the 1960s) then do yourself and your future flipper-babies a favor and keep it away from your testicles. These days perma-glowing watches use tritium, whose weak beta particles can't make it past the watch glass. Same with night sites for guns, which use tiny glass vials of tritium gas to make the dots in which you line up your perp.
4. Smoke detectors
Turns out you don't fight fire with fire, you fight it with radiation. The alpha particles emitted by americum are an integral part of the ionization chamber used in many smoke detectors. These particles are too weak to penetrate glass, skin, or even more than a few inches of air, so unless you're foolish enough to disassemble a hundred smoke detectors for your homemade neutron gun, have no fear.
5. Dentures
Modern dentures are typically made from acrylic plastic, but at least until the 1980s, porcelain was also very commonly used.In the 1940s, manufacturers began adding uranium to the porcelain powder used to make dentures. The idea was that the fluorescence of the uranium would help mimic the look of real teeth under a variety of natural and artificial light conditions. Uranium had the advantage over some of the alternative materials because its fluorescence is unaffected by the high temperatures used to bake the porcelain.
6. Cloisonné Jewelry
I bet you guys are familiar with these jewelry. Hell, chances are that if not you, then one of your ascendants owned jewelry like this. They were highly fashionable and beautiful too, after all. The various colors are due to the metallic oxides that have been added to the enamel. In the past, uranium oxide was used to produce an ivory, yellow or gold color. In January of 1983, the New York State Department of Health issued a press release warning that some pieces of yellow-orange and off-white (beige) cloisonné jewelry were radioactive. While it did not consider the jewelry a hazard, the state recommended that the public discard it or return it to the place of purchase. After the press release was reported in the January 25, 1983 issue of the New York Times, the matter was taken under consideration by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. One early course of action taken by the NRC was to contact officials in Taiwan and request that the Taiwanese exporters cease the distribution of cloisonné.
Other objects that are radioactive are: fertilizers, anti-diarrhea medicines, some older spark plugs, low sodium salt, cigarettes, and yes, you'll get quite a dose of radiation if you fly with an airplane too. ( I guess that's why pilots have such a big payment? It's a miracle if they reach their fifties?)
