Long time no see. Next time I’d better threaten an absence rather than just disappearing.
Having trouble finding exactly the hard data to illustrate my proposal to ransom America back from the Ruling Class. I[‘m sure guys got the principle immediately, but may not think it’s doable. I’m pretty sure it is, but need to be able to prove.
Back to the data mines. Oh, also Uncharted Waters, of course. My digital Martha’s Vineyard, far from you sweaty bitter clingers.
World's Only Rational Man 
Don’t be ridiculous. Of course some of us notice on days when you don’t show up. Myself, I just figured you didn’t want to hear a lot of complaints about it.
Well…complaints would show that you care…sniff.
So, I’ve got an off-topic radiation question.
If the photons are 6 MeV, what is the quality factor for converting Gray to Sievert (or RAD to REM, if you wish)?
I’m entering radiation therapy, and I’m getting 60 Gray in the form of daily 2 Gray doses (more or less, I’m rounding). That’s the target radiation to the specific bits they are trying to nuke. With the usual attempt to kill the tumor slightly faster than killing me. If I say the quality factor is 1, then I think the “lethal dose 50” for a 1 hour dose is 4 Gray. So, they will probably come close to their target of nuking stuff.
They are using IMRT, Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy. This produces 3D radiation intensity patterns using many intersection beams (like an inverse CT). They can position the radiation peaks with roughly 3 mm resolution, I think. The 6 MeV photons come from an X-ray head, fed by electrons from a linear accelerator.
While I go through this stuff, I may as well entertain myself by learning more about radiation doses.
Anyway, I’d appreciate help with my quality factor question. Thanks.
Just for you, Engineer Bob: http://xkcd.com/933/
The quality factor for photons, whether x-rays or gammas, is always considered 1. At least in my field. And N-16 gammas are right in the ballpark of your x-ray treatment. High energy photons like yours are more penetrating than lower ones, but that just means less Gray deposited per unit mass, thus less Sievert. If anything, the QF of your irradiation would be (very slightly) less than one.
Your treatment is almost identical to what a rad-tech officemate of mine recently received. He missed some work, and was really dragging around for a while when in treatment. But he’s regained his strength since then, and seems in very good health with an excellent prognosis. I hope and pray your treatment will be the same.
W.O.R.M., there’s a huge assumption for your plan to ransom the country from the Ruling Class:
They prefer money to power.
Now, obviously, they prefer both to either to neither, but if they had to give up one and not the other…I bet a lot of them would rather have power than money.
Absolutely right. Assuming I ever get the followup post assembled, you’ll see that the folks I’m thinking of bribing are rank-and-file government employees. Possibly government-dependent contractors. The offer is to shut down entire government departments…but continue paying the employees for several more years. Even then the totally useless drones…and the power freaks…would prefer to keep the cushy jobs. But productive folks who can do non-gov work could double-dip in income for several years.
Divide and conquer.
Thought you might be interested in an inside video of Fukushima and the progress made. Seemed nice and reassuring to see some transparency…
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/energy/nuclear/tepco-releases-rare-video-from-inside-fukushima-daiichi
If you also make it a hunger strike, and handcuff yourself to the railing on a pedestrian overpass, then I might notice.
But frankly, if you’re not going to bother noticing my many indignant boycotts in protest of your phase-out of the daily sign ons and sign offs, I don’t see why I should notice your strikes.
That’s my contribution to these escalating labor disputes.
Well, Verizon just gave in, and they actually provide (a small amount of) value added.
So I hereby declare this blogger strike over, and the blog owner has given in to the blogger’s demands.
(Full disclosure: the blog owner claims that the union caved.)
Here’s a provocative idea: Guest-bloggers to make actual posts instead of just comments!
I think I once suggested to WORM that he turn this into a group blog with some of the other technical people here as members (that was back in the “Fukshima era” of the blog, or as they call it in the history books, the 福島時代).
But on closer consideration, it’s not as simple as I thought. For instance, if it’s men, then I’ll get confused because I won’t be able to tell which one of them is the only rational one. And if it includes women, wouldn’t she or they be unfairly excluded in the description? And if it’s “The World’s Only Rational Man/Men and/or Women/Woman”–well, that’s pretty awkward branding.
I’m willing to elbow women out of the equation, too…but the World’s Only Rational Human…WORH…urg.
WORP–W.O.R.Person…? Better, but still ugh.
Entity! W.O.R.E….
No, rhymes with “bore”. Dang, this is tricky.
Hey wait a minute… 😉
World’s Only Rational……
…Mentalists?
…Magi? (in the ‘those who know’ sense, not the magician sense)
…Maverics? (meh…too evocative of media liking RINOs)
…Mustangs?
Ah! Got it: World’s Only Rational Menschen!
I’ve always liked “Mathmagician”.
So we add disclaimers. We don’t claim to be fully rational, only approximating it closely enough that we can be on here.
Hmmm….you know, both rationals and irrationals are dense, which means they are arbitrarily close to each other. How does thataffect things, I wonder?
Well, I think it’s very promising that the rationals and irrationals are getting along, even if they choose to be arbitrary about it, but this is the first I’ve heard of any intellectual impairments. I thought the rationals in particular were supposed to be smart as whips . . .
Will have to post on this more. I’ve never claimed to be smarter than everyone else. There’s probably one to ten million people inherently smarter than me. Meaning, better “hardware”. Faster CPUs, or better RAM/ROM, databases, what have you.
It’s the “software” department where people are really, really buggy. They can be amazingly fast and accurate in many ways, but if you open up a new file or program…blue screen. System failure.
Emotions are excellent servants of thought, but horrible masters.
I was just pretending to not understand D.J.’s comment. No, wait, I actually didn’t understand D.J.’s comment, so I was . . . doing an act about appearing to not understand it in order to . . . mask the fact that I actually didn’t understand it. Or something.
Your reason and emotion are kind of like Thomas Aquinas on intellect, will, and emotion. You might dig Aquinas. Hard to top in the reason department.
Sorry: in this case ‘rationals are dense’ means: between any two numbers is a rational number. Similarly, between any two numbers is an irrational number.
Sounds like the nucleus of an idea.
I have no objections to that at all, if mountainbear can keep the f’s to the comments. I’ll try to figure out what arcane incantations this will require.
My only request, apart from profane-free posts, would be that we all occasionally bleg the big-timers for links.
NOTE–Profanity-free doesn’t mean you can’t vent. That’s the main purpose of the blog entire.