Songs for Saturday: Rabbit Holes and Ray Cats

[mdlbear]

Radiation therapy can lead one down some pretty weird rabbit-holes. I was rummaging around trying to find out why treatment dosage is measured in cGray. Why 1/100 of a Gray? (I note in passing that a Gray is 0ne joule per kilogram.) Well, it turns out that the outdated CGS unit of radiation dosage was the Rad, equal to 100 ergs per gram, and it's equal to 0.01Gy. So the field of radiation therapy goes back a long way, and everyone was used to using rads, so they just kept the numbers and renamed the unit. Besides, it means nobody has to worry about where to put the decimal point -- my prescription, which is fairly typical, is 7000cGy spread over 28 individual 250cGy zaps.

One thing leads to another, so I followed things like radiation poisoning, radioactive waste, and a Timeline of the far future, which somehow wound up at Ray cats. To quote the article,

A ray cat[a] is a proposed kind of cat that would be genetically engineered to change appearance in the presence of nuclear radiation. Philosophers Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri originated the idea of a "living radiation detector"[1] in 1984 as a proposed long-time nuclear waste warning message that could be understood 10,000 years in the future...

But how do you ensure that people ten millennia in the future will know why their cats suddenly changed color, and what to do about it? Well, you could make a nursery rhyme about it, and give it a really catchy tune,... The result is titled "10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty)". I'm not sure it's catchy enough to do the job, but it is pretty catchy.

See also, Raycats and earworms: How scientists are using colour-changing cats and nursery rhymes to warn future generations of nuclear danger - CityAM, The Cat Went Over Radioactive Mountain | Method, and the podcast Ten Thousand Years - Episode 114 of 99% Invisible (which has the song in it).

...

To change the subject almost completely, but still sort of related, the folks giving radiation treatments at the UW medical center provide background music via Spotify (to keep you from being bored during the prep and treatment, which takes some 20 minutes on a good day.) Naturally I told them to search Spotify for "filk".

The treatment only runs for the last few minutes; the rest is the techs adjusting your position and orientation so that the markers in your prostate line up within a millimeter or so of where they were the last time. So they were still in the room when Paper Pings came on and I was able to say, as calmly as I could, "I wrote that."

Comments

[siliconshaman]

I don't know about Ray cats.. but I do know that the common ragwort will change colour in response to heavy metals in the soil/water and I think there's a variant of speedwell that will change colour as stress response to UV that could be re-engineered to respond to radiation.

[acelightning73]

Get one of those they mattresses that just unroll. Some of them are reported to give off a nasty plastic smell when you first let them expand. But they'll protect you from coil springs gone astray.

[susandennis]

that's very cool about your being entertained you.

[mdlbear]

Was this meant for another post?

In any case, I've had one of those roll-up foam mattresses ever since the cheap spring mattress that came with our adjustable beds went sproing about a decade ago.

[acelightning73]

Sometimes, if you compose a comment and don't post it, it gets appended to the previous comment you made to a different person's journal. I was commenting to someone who's about to move into a new place, and doesn't like the bed that's in the place. I forgot that DW inherited that bug from LJ's original software. Sorry for the inconvenience.

[mdlbear]

No inconvenience at all. Just a minor incongruity.

[acelightning73]

Most of the time, my incongruities are intentional. This was just an annoying malfunction.

[acelightning73]

I'm sure you're aware of the "teaching songs" Leslie Fish wrote so the survivors of World War Seventeen (who were all in the SCA) will remember important stuff. "Black powder and alcohol" and "Nothin' keeps ya livin' like that blue bread mold."

[kengr]

And don't forget the "Digwell Carol"!

[mdlbear]

I've always liked the one about grinding lenses for spectacles.

"Grind, children, grind..."

[kellan_the_tabby]

*cackling* DELIGHTFUL

[acelightning73]

I suspect we're going to develop ways to utilize nuclear power that don't create such quantities of violently radioactive waste. Maybe we'll get the matter/anti-matter idea ("Warp Nine, mister Scott - engage!") to work, or fusion, or thorium-pellet reactors.

[acelightning73]

Gods, when Leslie gets it right, she gets it fucking RIGHT (like "Hymn to the Night-Mare")

[kengr]

Oh the waste hazard isn't what it's been made out to be. In a "mere" 300 years high-level waste is no more radioactive than the original uranium ore.

But yeah, fusion would be nice, but the easier types produce a lot of neutrons, which will make the reactor radioactive.

D-D and P-T reactions don't produce neutrons. But getting P-T to occur instead of T-T (which produces a lot of neutrons) is very hard. Can't recall if 4P reactions produce neutrons or not. but they are the hardest to do in any case.

Uranium or plutonium pellet reactors would work too. So would heavy water reactors like CANDU.

Matter-antimatter is just a way to *store* power unless we find large amounts of antimatter somewhere. If we don't we have to use a *lot* of power to make the antimatter (far more than we'd get back from using it)

Key:
P = protium, H1, lone proton
D = deuterium, H2, proton & neutron
T = tritium, H3, proton & 2 neutrons

[acelightning73]

The hazard from irradiated tokamak parts isn't that severe, but fissionable materials like uranium and plutonium (with ridiculous half-lives) are lethal for millennia (And think of how Marie Curie died of anemia because she liked to carry vials of fluorescing radium salts in her skirt pockets.). And I hope they've made some kind of provision for hazard warnings around the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

There is something about the fluidized-bed thorium pellet reactors that's a whole lot less dangerous than most other kinds.

And matter/antimatter intermix is the only way to get enough power to create a warp field, and that has to be kept controlled with dilithium crystals.

[solarbird]

So they were still in the room when Paper Pings came on and I was able to say, as calmly as I could, "I wrote that."

Awesome :D