@bcrypt To combat jet lag, you can fast for 12-15 hours before breakfast in the destination time zone. Your food clock can reset your circadian clock - basically your body goes "oh, I haven't eaten in quite a while, it must be morning!"

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/resetting-your-circadian-clock-to-minimize-jet-lag-2016090810279

@bcrypt

Radiation is just energy that has a radius -- something that goes out equally from a central source.

Sound and light are both radiation.

However, when you hear the word "radiation" it usually means energy that is harmful to us as organic beings.

There are two basic types of harmful radiation: Hot things, and ionizing radiation.

Hot things are just that: Hot. It could be a lightbulb in an Easy Bake Oven... the heating elements in your oven/dishwasher/water heater/whatever. Or it could even be very loud sounds. Or earthquakes. Or very high wattage lasers.

But that's not what most people think about when they hear the word "radiation."

Most people think about nuclear reactions. Atomic bombs and power plants with giant curved cooling towers.

These things do create heat... but they also create ionizing radiation, which is what geiger counters measure.

The three basic types of ionizing radiation that nuclear reactions create are: Alpha particles, Beta particles, and Gamma rays.

Plus, they throw out neutrons. Technically neutron radiation is neither hot nor ionizing, but they do cause problems.

Real quick: Ionizing means that it'll mess with the number of electrons in an atom's electron shell. This will temporarily mess with the chemical properties of an atom, usually breaking chemical bonds.

Ionizing things have a lot of very specific interactions, but in general, ionizing radiation turns things to mush.

Alpha particles are the bare nucleus of a helium atom: Two protons and two neutrons without any electrons.

Alpha particles have a TON of energy, but nearly no penetrating energy. They barely go through 4 inches of air, can't penetrate through a sheet of paper, and are kept out of your body entirely by the layer of dead skin cells that everyone has. Even if you are extremely diligent about exfoliating.

Beta particles are high energy electrons. These can go through 12 inches of flesh, and are blocked by a foil of most metals.

Gamma radiation is EM energy: very high frequency light, in the same way that radio waves are very low frequency light. They'll just knock electrons off of any atom they hit. Depending on their energy, they can go through several inches to several meters of solid materials, and it's technically better to measure their ability to go through an object as attenuation rather than pure penetration.

And then there are neutrons. They just get collected by atoms, which will change the atomic weight of an atom. The electromagnetic balance stays the same, so there's no ionization... but it becomes a different nuclide; a different version of that atom's element that has a different half-life.

In other words, free neutrons turn non-radioactive materials into a radioactive material.

Now, your body exists in an environment where it has to deal with ionizing radiation constantly. There are cosmic rays raining down from all directions, ultra-violet radiation from the sun itself, and radioactive versions of very common elements, like Carbon 14 and Potassium 40. (in fact, the whole idea that bananas are radioactive comes from the fact that they're relatively high in potassium... but in reality, a single banana is about 1/1000th as radioactive as the average human.) The ground emits radioactive elements as a gas, with at least a milligram of radon in every cubic meter of air.

Scary? Yes and no. This is all counted in the background levels of radiation. Yes, a few electrons are being ripped from chemicals in your cells, but your body has backups, and backups to those backups, and triple checks the DNA to make sure it hasn't changed... and on the rare cases when it does cause lasting damage, you have Helper-T and Killer-T cells that will clean up the messes.

So, as long as you don't get a huge dose of radiation all at once, turning most of your body into mush (called Acute Radiation Syndrome), or you don't have a much-higher-than-normal-background-rate that would cause cancers to out-evolve your immune system, radiation really isn't all that dangerous.

Just, you know, never eat an alpha-particle emitter if you can help it. They can't get into your body... but they can't get out of your body either.

@bcrypt

Not all water freezes at 0C or 32F.

@bcrypt From the 1880s to the 1980s (when it was displaced by lithographic plate making), typesetting for press was commonly done with a machine that used a keyboard to drive the assembly of template molds (matrices) into assemblies that would then cast molten lead into slugs (lines of typeset text), combined and used to print pages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotype_machine

@bcrypt a bill I suggested passed the New York City Council 2 months ago, and therefore next year the city will publish the locations of thousands of defibrillators for bystanders to use when someone has a heart attack

https://www.harihareswara.net/posts/defibrillators-in-nyc/

@bcrypt I’m pretty sure the MyPillow logo was a rip off of the Pimp My Ride logo https://hachyderm.io/@dbgmode/110924942793090433

And yet MyPillow had gall to sue another MN based bedding company in 2018 for trademark violation for using a small script “i❤️my pillow” logo

COOL FACT, I SAY

@bcrypt as I learned yesterday, the most viewed human man on television of all time .. is.. wait for it..

David Hasselhoff.

I swear!