"THIS IS LESTER HOLT REPORTING, AND WHILE I'M TOO EMOTIONALLY DISTRAUGHT TO REPORT ANYTHING WITHOUT GESTICULATING WILDLY, I MUST SAY THAT NONE OF THIS MAKES ANY SENSE TO ME."
Posted on 03/20/2011 3:37:01 PM PDT by DBrow
XKCD is an online cartoonist who has a science background. He has a chart that shows how much dose you get from what, and presents the data as color-coded areas. He even includes the dose you get from yourself (potassium-40), flying in a plane, the famous "chest xray" often used for comparison. You can compare doses by comparing areas, very clever.
Every time I post something from XKCD, someone complains about me "pimping my blog", so to be proactive, this is not a blog, it is not MY blog, I get nothing from this. XKCD has built an interesting table and I'm sharing it with FreeRepublic because we have been discussing radiation issues recently.
Thank you for the excellent post.
I will show this to my physics classes tomorrow.
You are welcome. He’s done other charts on the sizes of planets and their gravity wells, the size of the internet, and a bunch of other wonderful nerdy stuff.
THERE IS RADIATION DANGER!
Look at the chart: Sleeping next to someone is less than living within 50 miles of a Nuke. But sleeping next to 2 people IS MORE! Be safe, do not do that often or you risk receiving 0.10 µSv.
"THIS IS LESTER HOLT REPORTING, AND WHILE I'M TOO EMOTIONALLY DISTRAUGHT TO REPORT ANYTHING WITHOUT GESTICULATING WILDLY, I MUST SAY THAT NONE OF THIS MAKES ANY SENSE TO ME."
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The newest radiation detectors are so sensitive that a microSievert can be detected. In my college days we discarded measurements that small as background noise.
I think that we get more than a microsievert every time the Earth is rotated under a supernova or other gamma ray emitter.
“The newest radiation detectors are so sensitive that a microSievert can be detected. “
I use a NaI scintillator and a germanium crystal scintillator. They can detect, and measure, a single photon.
The NaI is not as good as the Ge detector, but either can measure the energy of that single photon, so I can discriminate between the potassium-40 in a banana and, say, radioiodine from a medical patient.
When I run the Ge system on a soil sample, K and thallium show up as huge peaks, but nobody in the news is trying to frighten us with the amount of radiation in a pound of soil.
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