robryk @robryk@qoto.org

s/currently work in infosec/currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes)/

Today in cursed units: MeV*cm^2/mg (so, GeV/cm in water but very easy to confuse with MeV/cm in water).

Lymphatic flow in arms seems weird: the stain from failed venipuncture in the crook of my elbow appeared distal, nearly entirely on my forearm.

First world problems: drying cat ears.

Also, surprisingly many people compliment them (not counting kids, 2 in a bit over an hour).

Re the #emfcamp search for a missing device with Am-241 inside, I tried to look up an incident from mid-naughts I vaguely remember, where a group of disgruntled(?) cleaners(?) smashed up smoke detectors and released the Americium (I don't know whether they ended up smashing it into dust or "just" into macroscopic pieces). Sadly, I couldn't find any obvious reference (the easily accessible reports on radiation incidents in Poland go back to 2007, and the ones up to 2010 do not mention any smoke detector incident that required onsite investigation).

I've found though a curious sounding "contamination of a passenger (rail?)car with I-131" in the 2007 report and can't find anything more about it. I'm somewhat puzzled by the sequence of events that could cause that: if someone's getting I-131 orally they stay in the hospital well past the point when it's absorbed (in fact until the activity has dropped down significantly), so I wouldn't expect that to result from e.g. someone vomiting. If that didn't come from bodily fluid, then why would someone be transporting I-131 via passenger rail, in a form that can be easily dispersed?

Ignoring any correlations between general health and weight, I would naively think that #cancer risk would be proportional to weight (or rather, weight of the tissue in question): the chance of creating a mutation that is effective at creating a malignancy should be roughly constant per cell per unit of time, so the total rate of that happening should scale with number of cells.

Is there an obvious reason why this scaling is wrong, or is it not observable due to the health-weight correlation? (I've spent a few minutes trying to look it up, but found a mountain of experimental results correlating BMI with cancer risk only.)

Today in people are nice:

I saw a small corvid that was sitting suspiciously motionlessly on a kerb. I was running for a short distance, so didn't even have a phone with me. Before I could think of whether I should go back for my phone and a box (and hope the bird didn't hide) or ring a random doorbell a woman with a cardboard box appeared.

Or maybe I'm wrong, Leidenfrost causes it not to violently boil, and the colling is fast enough for their purposes?

The most recent #Sachgeschichte (about chains) claims that the cooling bath for hardening is water (it's surely oil: water would visibly boil and Leidenfrost effect would make cooling insufficient).

I've used WDR's contact form to tell them that and we'll see what happens.

(I was very surprised by the requirement and pharmacist was very surprised by my surprise, so I think they were unaware of this exception applying as opposed to not willing to apply it.)

Swiss law on prescriptions is *weird*.

There are categories of medicines (Abgabekategorien) with a clear demarcation between requiring a prescription (A-B) and not (D-E). Notably category C is missing, because it was eliminated in 2019 (it used to be "can be sold in pharmacies only but without prescription" IIUC). Some of the stuff from C went to D, some of it to B.

That would be clear. However, "this medicine was once in C" is an exception to the requirement for prescriptions for medicines in B! (See https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/2018/588/de#art_45) Thus, we effectively still have C, but it's way more confusing.

This story was brought to you by a pharmacy wanting a prescription for KCl from me. (Which I'm really amused ended up in B, given that it has a similar safety profile to table salt afaik: you can overdose on it, it can have bad interactions with your other medications or diseases, it's kinda hard to overdose without really trying.)

TIL that a traffic warden standing with your back or front to you does not necessarily mean "stop" in Switzerland: https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1979/1961_1961_1961/de#chap_7

Hm~ is it about those salts decomposing into something else in solution at high temperature?

Why do PWR reactors use boric acid, as opposed to some random salt of boron? Apparently boron salts are often well soluble, from the nuclear POV we only care about boron being present, and I'd expect salts to cause fewer chemical problems due to their closer-to-neutral pH. In fact some random papers (https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/28/034/28034575.pdf) describe tradeoffs involved in maintaining pH as boric acid concentration changes.

There clearly must be some reason why boric acid is preferred over any simple boron salt. What is it?

#nuclear