Becoming a mad scientist

[PeterFW]

Hello!
There are moments you have to step back and think about what you are dooing.
Today i had one of those...

Were the hell dit i put that uranium?
Maybe i should tidy up the place... i should not loose this stuff...
No, i do not have to!
The other geiger counter will help me find it in the piles of rubble on the bench!

Ok, it is not that bad, they are only very, very mildly radioactive uranium glass pebbles.
You could eat them, flying on a plane gives you a bigger dose.
But still...

Greetings,
Peter

[TimFox]

Two mantras for the mad scientist:
1.  Fools!  I'll destroy them all.
2.  Mad!  They call me mad.

[SL4P]

Is CRAZY the same as MAD ?
If yes, then I'm well along the way to ignorance nirvana.

[Artlav]

What do you mean "people complain", officer?
There is no law against playing music with lightning bolts!

[rolycat]

Two mantras for the mad scientist:
1.  Fools!  I'll destroy them all.
2.  Mad!  They call me mad.

And not forgetting:



"I'm not mad, I just get these headaches."
 - Achmed the Mad*

* acclaimed author of the Necrotelicomnicon and Achmed the I Just Get These Headaches's Book of Humorous Cat Stories

[Prime73]

[PeterFW]

I just remembered, i still have this video up...
This was my application project for the league of doom, sadly i never to the quantum flux stabilised...

[Artlav]

Sigh.

"This video is private.
Sorry about that."

Nothing to be sorry about, Youtube. It's not your fault.

[PeterFW]

Nothing to be sorry about, Youtube. It's not your fault.

Im sorry... the link should work now.
I must have set that to private and forgotten about it. I do not know why. 

[T3sl4co1l]

Are you also on / aware of SMDB by any chance?

I don't spend much time there these days, but any self respecting (self hating??) mad scientist should be at least familiar; www.sciencemadness.org/

I can't say I condone experiments involving heavy elements such as uranium, but I won't generally oppose them, either.

Tim

[coppice]

Mad? When most scientists realise how little they are going to be paid for the rest of their lives they're bloody furious.

[mtdoc]

Mad? When most scientists realise how little they are going to be paid for the rest of their lives they're bloody furious.

Very good and very true!  And one of the reasons I got out early.

But they do have this to entertain themselves with:

The Journal of Irreproducible Results

[westfw]

http://www.narbonic.com/
"But we're not limited by the POSSIBLE, are we?"

[sdg]

Have hump, don't mind being near corpses (even living ones), will travel.
Just in case one of you gentlemen is hiring...

[DenzilPenberthy]

You're only a mad scientist if you're testing a mad hypothesis

[TerraHertz]

The other geiger counter will help me find it in the piles of rubble on the bench!

Ok, it is not that bad, they are only very, very mildly radioactive uranium glass pebbles.
[/quote]

Sadly, the geiger counter will be useless. Uranium glass (I was disappointed to discover) has such low activity I can't see any noticeable count, even right next to the scintillator. A UV lamp would be more useful for finding them.

[TerraHertz]

That cover art is really annoying. 100KV+ on battery charger leads? Why is the current taking the air gap, rather than via his hands?
Was the artist truly that ignorant? Or is the picture just a mean attempt to troll the technically aware?

[Artlav]

Why is the current taking the air gap, rather than via his hands?

He just altered his biology to run on silicon instead of carbon, making the body resistance near infinite. Duh.

[PeterFW]

Sadly, the geiger counter will be useless. Uranium glass (I was disappointed to discover) has such low activity I can't see any noticeable count, even right next to the scintillator.

My SBT-11 alpha tube has no problem picking it up, i get at least 75 cp/m above background radiation at ~2cm distance.

Edit:

Even the STS-7 (very closely related to the SBM-20) has no problem finding it at 25 cp/m, but you have to take your time.

Only my pin diode detector falls short, but it has only a 1/100th of the detection area and will have a better spatial resolution

[TimFox]

U-238 is an alpha emitter, and alphas have a relatively short range, especially compared with gammas.  Most radiation detectors are more appropriate for gammas (photons), so using a detector designed for alphas is better.

[max666]

U-238 is an alpha emitter, and alphas have a relatively short range, especially compared with gammas.  Most radiation detectors are more appropriate for gammas (photons), so using a detector designed for alphas is better.

The daughter nuclides won't all be alpha emitters anyway, so you will pick up their radiation even without an alpha detector. And alpha particles generally only travel a few centimetres in air.
But I guess for close range positioning, an alpha detector could be useful, like say finding the lost uranium on your desk under all the piles of Cobalt-60.

[TimFox]

The complete decay chain of U238 down to stable lead Pb206 involves a series of alpha and beta emitters, but no gammas.  Betas have a range intermediate between alphas and gammas.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_chain#Uranium_series  for the "Uranium series".  Betas are easier to detect than alphas, but not so easy as gammas.  Specifically, the detector must have a thin window to allow betas to pass through.  Most of the total energy of the decay is in alphas, but a substantial amount is in betas.

[dexters_lab]

the world would be a dull place without some mad scientists!

A sample of uranium mineral / ore will be emitting pretty much everything, dont forget about secondary emission... google for Bremsstrahlung

there is no shame in enjoying what your passionate about, i'm planning a trip to Chernobyl / Pripyat for myself and some friends

If your interested in radioactive stuff there is plenty on my youtube channel

[mathsquid]

Two mantras for the mad scientist:
1.  Fools!  I'll destroy them all.
2.  Mad!  They call me mad.

[bsudbrink]

Father's day present this year:

[Rerouter]

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results

Where a true mad scientist finds the things that give different results every time and works to understand why.

*looks over to exeriment running in the workshop composed of 15 different ebay chemistry apparatus connected together in a frightningly bodgy way and shakes fist*

[Cyberdragon]

This old thread needs to be updated with our favorite mad youtubers...

Mad scientists often do crazy things for the hell of it...

"So I was in my garage making explosives..."

Y'all know who I'm talking about...

[helius]

If you haven't yet seen it:

[Nominal Animal]

What does the "mad" in "mad scientist" refer to?  Angry? Crazy? Insane? Crazy/insane how?

I'm more of a nutty professor type myself (although I'm neither a professor nor made out of nuts), but I do love to science.

[Rerouter]

generally to earn the mockier "mad" you either need to reach a point where anyone looking at what your doing without context would turn and run. even if you have all the safeguards in place.

Or you get to the point where you Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (old movie reference), where you see the problems and not the symptoms and approach things in ways people attacking symptoms see as crazy.

[Nominal Animal]

generally to earn the moniker "mad" you either need to reach a point where anyone looking at what your doing without context would turn and run

My work is usually the opposite: people get exasperated with me for overengineering things, and being too paranoid about security and robustness (I tend to trust no-one, not even myself). What does that make me, the sane but dull scientist?

where you see the problems and not the symptoms

You mean, as in answering the underlying problem rather than the question someone asked?

and approach things in ways people attacking symptoms see as crazy.

Oh, that. No, I don't qualify then, because they see me and my work as not cost effective rather than crazy (even when I show how much it saves in the medium to long term).

[VEGETA]

The only one worthy of the title "crazy mad scientist" is Hououin Kyouma. He created really interesting gadgets which can be done by us if we really put effort into it.

[MT]

Becoming?!...

[apblog]

Are you sure aren’t actually a mad engineer?

http://cowbirdsinlove.com/46

[ebastler]

My work is usually the opposite: people get exasperated with me for overengineering things, and being too paranoid about security and robustness (I tend to trust no-one, not even myself). What does that make me, the sane but dull scientist?

The obsessive-compulsive scientist? 

[dmills]

That LANL archive on madscience is fascinating!

Seems the NIF was at least somewhat about pit physics with the civilian fusion research a nice side effect (No real surprise there, the MTF stuff will have been much the same).

Also some good stuff on fast pulsed power for things like EBW and slappers, and  a very funny squabble between LANL and the air force over cleanup of an old ICBM site that suffered a fire, the requested changes to the report by the airforce (Which are attached as an appendix) have some very funny attempts at spin  (Basically the airforce wanted to consider the AVERAGE activity in the rubble they wanted to dispose of, (which would make it low activity waste) where LANL were looking at PEAK activity which makes it special nuclear material waste. Seems the costs of disposal change somewhat when there is meaningful amounts of Pu in play.

Now, where did I put that Lithium 6 foil?

Regards, Dan "FOR SCIENCE!"

[Eka]

Are-U-Me?  Also an old RPG reference?

generally to earn the moniker "mad" you either need to reach a point where anyone looking at what your doing without context would turn and run

My work is usually the opposite: people get exasperated with me for overengineering things, and being too paranoid about security and robustness (I tend to trust no-one, not even myself). What does that make me, the sane but dull scientist?

Paranoid Scientist. I've been called that.

where you see the problems and not the symptoms

You mean, as in answering the underlying problem rather than the question someone asked?

They didn't like it when I wanted to add job training subsidies and moving expense subsidies to the available unemployment benefits. That was stepping over department boundaries...  Can't do that even though a comparable sized country was saving hundreds of millions a year by doing it.

and approach things in ways people attacking symptoms see as crazy.

Oh, that. No, I don't qualify then, because they see me and my work as not cost effective rather than crazy (even when I show how much it saves in the medium to long term).

Penny wise, pound foolish. Ran into it often.

I hate the way some doctors like to treat symptoms rather than dig down and figure out what is really going wrong. The pharmaceutical industry and reliance on them to do all new drug development isn't helping. When NIH had the money to do research, real cures were found, not symptom masks that provide income streams for the companies that develop them.

[Nominal Animal]

Paranoid Scientist. I've been called that.

I think I am more of a paranoid professor/teacher type, then, because I can never just state how things are. I seem to have to explain the basis or reasoning, too.

I hate the way some doctors like to treat symptoms rather than dig down and figure out what is really going wrong. The pharmaceutical industry and reliance on them to do all new drug development isn't helping. When NIH had the money to do research, real cures were found, not symptom masks that provide income streams for the companies that develop them.

It is easier to just oil the squeaky wheel, than actually investigate.  Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity or laziness, or something like that.

But yes, the pharmaceutical and health industries provide treatments, not cures.  Curing their customers would deprive them of a steady source of revenue. It isn't cost-effective.