What..

What does it mean for something to be radioactive?

Well, the word seems to suggest something interesting.. radio active – means it generates radio signals, right? On what band, at what frequency? Probably depends on how tight the spring is wound.. neutron flux makes metal radioactive. Why?

The right nuclear reactor would dance between fission and fusion, never reaching critical mass on either end of the coil, it seems to me. Just like the perfect battery would dance between acid and base, storing energy on both ends. Is this what a lithium-ion battery is? I’ve begun reading my grandfather’s electrochemistry book, I’m looking forward to at least a somewhat deeper understanding of the magic that is electrochemistry.

(In the meantime, I hope my friend Alex will soon be reading some biochemistry.. then we can discuss recreational chemical use with somewhat more meaningful metaphors and a better understanding of what is dangerous and why)

Ultimately, I am me. I know that I am unique – and so does the U.S. government – apparently they are doing biometric authentication using a scan of the colored part of the iris now.

Interesting, isn’t it, that that is different for every person.. no matter how many times you shuffle the genome around, you always end up with a new deck of cards? Kind of says it’s not just a turing machine.

One Response to “What..”

  1. anansi133 Says:

    Radio waves, X-rays, the visible spectrum, the juice that comes out of a wall socket, and the nasty stuff that comes from an a-bomb… all of these things are radiation. Imagine if your eyesight weren’t limited to six colors in a rainbow, but if you could see *everything*: the world might look pretty noisy.

    When we say something is “radioactive”, that generally means that it’s ionizing radiation: it kicks around the electrons orbiting some of the atoms in human tissue, causing them to behave differently. We often experience this as a kind of burn, though it’s a different sort of damage than that caused by infrared (heat burn) or ultraviolet (sun burn).

    There’s different “colors” of ionizing radiation, I mostly have read about alpha and gamma radiation, you could learn as much as you care to know from wikkipedia, I wager.

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