Tariffs, BANI and Coffee Agronomy

When enough people ask the same question, it’s probably time to write down an answer, especially when your mom asks. And it’s this: “Will you be raising your BBotE prices because of Trump’s tariffs? How much?”

ANSWER: Not at this time, nor can I even guess how much of an increase might be needed if I did. When you change one number in networked, dependent complex system, the answer is almost guaranteed to not have a linear relationship and that’s frustrating.

Before getting too far into things, I would like to share the BANI model that my friend Jamais Cascio came up with to supersede the old VUCA one that didn’t seem quite up to snuff anymore. You may recall VUCA, or at least one person’s highly idiosyncratic interpretation of it, if you’ve had the misfortune to be talked at by members of the executive caste who somehow think they are mighty warrior philosopher-kings. But let’s revisit Jamais’ framework of how things go funny because I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.

  • Volatile ⇒ Brittle: change, sometimes rapid, exceeds the ability of systems to cope, with the possibility of collapse
  • Uncertain ⇒ Anxious: what you didn’t know is now something to fear, which can either paralyze needed reactions or cause responses that are out of proportion or wholly inappropriate
  • Complex ⇒ Non-Linear: what was once merely difficult to understand now drives first and second order effects that are wildly out of expected proportion
  • Ambiguous ⇒ Incomprehensible: situations that were once merely hard to discern become impossible to even guess at for behaviors much less outcomes

In my opinion, things haven’t broken yet but we’re deep in BANI country. I am reminded of the logistics explainer I wrote a six days before COVID lockdowns hit California in 2020 because container shipping was already grinding to a halt, fucking up all the Just-In-Time supply chains. I stand by the remark I made that a Q -like finger snap to eliminate COVID would still mean months of logistics snarls needing to unwind forth and who knows how long for “normal” to return…if it ever does and did we even understand how “normal” worked in the first place? Flipping the tariff switch on and off repeatedly at different levels may have generated Trump’s desired first order effect “I’m bored, world leaders talk to me NOW!” But we don’t know the second order effects of what vigorously shaking the snow globe of the world economy is going to be, nor how fast they’ll propagate, nor how long they’ll persist. It’s that tremor in the strands that lets you know the spider is coming.

But let’s think about coffee in particular and the factors that go into it and see how vulnerable they are.

Coffee is, obviously, an agricultural crop and should be thought of as something closer to orchards than corn fields. This means you have a longer lead time than merely putting a crop in the ground and wait for harvest in the fall, as you need those coffee cherry trees to grow and mature. This is a 2-4 year long maturation process before your coffee will actually yield anything and not ideal until ~7 years, which is why farmers with orchards are always playing the long game, why they’re always looking for stability and making very conservative bets. A tree is a serious investment of time and resources and you want a guarantee on the return or you aren’t gonna do it. All that said, the youngest possible trees that are now producing went in the ground as Trump left office the first time.

ASIDE: Could be worse, could be olives. As the old adage goes “You plant an olive for your grandchildren” as it won’t even begin to produce useful fruit for 30 years, much less hit maturity and full production. This is why mentions of cutting down or burning an olive tree or orchard in ancient works come up so often. It is meant to shock the reader/listener. It is an unthinkable atrocity, The Thing You Do Not Do, obliterating the hard work of generations and destroying the future itself! Clearly, the perpetrators are monsters practicing Total War.

To plant an arabica coffee tree, you need the right to some land to plant it, which means you either own or are leasing it. Either way there’s taxes that need to be paid on it, though governments tend to give farmers a bit of a break on the grounds that they know it’s a loss at the beginning. Next, you’re going to make sure you’ve got the water and nutrients you need for that tree grow. It helps if you chose the location of your farm to give you these things by default.

Arabica coffee is a finicky plant that wants plenty of rain for one part of the year and it to be dry the rest of the time. Also, it want’s just the right temperature and soil conditions and altitude, such a diva of a tree. Basically, arabica is constantly telling you that you’ve taken it away from the highlands of East Africa and it’s mad about it. We’d mapped all the places that match arabica’s preferred growing requirements and figured out the optimized growing preferences of arabica by the 19th century, establishing what’s called the Coffee Belt. These are generally in tropical/sub-tropical areas, generally mountainous, generally on good volcanic soils on the slopes of volcanoes, or downwind from rather active volcanos, with monsoon-like rainy & dry cycles.

There are two problems with the Coffee Belt as defined in the 19th century. First, climate change is moving the ideal moisture and temperature regimes to higher latitudes (where the soil might not be as good) or higher altitudes (where there’s less arable land on the mountain as you go up, AKA the Jamaica Blue Problem). Second, we kinda sorta already turned the all the Coffee Belt that we could into plantations a century ago. So, making new farms outside of optimum Coffee Belt regions is economically risky. Arabica will grow in places that are missing some of those preferred components but you will also notice the difference in the flavor. In my experience, growers can get away with skipping out on one of arabica’s preferred qualities but if lose two or more it really starts to show in the quality. And when you start messing with preferred growing conditions, you stress the plants in a way that doesn’t just effect flavor, but its disease resistance and farmers already have so many problems with blights.

In the last decade or so, searching for more land, most of that planting was in Brazil. Brazil, in case you weren’t paying attention, is big. There is a certain development bias of “there’s always more land, just go clear some jungle” that has generated not just giant cattle ranches but coffee plantations. As has been related many times before about jungle clearcutting, most of the nutrients in a given hectare are sitting in the trees, not the soil, as the jungle continually recycles itself. Once the trees are gone and you plant a crop, you don’t have very long until that soil is depleted and you have to either add fertilizers (another logistical input and expense) or you have to move your farm to a new plot of cleared forest, repeat ad nauseum. Brazil’s has a decent amount of rain, but it’s iffy on soils, altitude, and volcanic quality. They can grow A LOT of coffee, but good coffee? Not so much, which is why most of it get used as bulk for blends.

Bulk sale of lots of coffee, even if it isn’t the best, does has a distorting effect on markets to depress prices over all. One of the things USAID did in their counter-narcotics functions in Central & South America was to encourage farmers to plant coffee, by supporting that lag time to productivity, rather than go with the fast but dangerous drug cartel crops & money. They also supported a connoisseur marketplace that cared about the terroir of given countries and specific growing regions within them. Hell, part of the reason I make BBotE the way I do as a region sampling is an outgrowth of this. But when you pull that support and Brazilian bulk coffee floods the market, there’s no easy way to compete as a small farm in Guatemala. So you fold up shop, or the cartel outright takes your land over, and you may need to flee. I couldn’t help but notice that as bulk coffee prices progressively dropped, the “crisis at the border” in Trump’s first term seemed to intensify with migrants mostly from Central America. With no particular details, this is more or less the story of how a neighbor’s friend ended up in America.

And all that is just for arabica. There are other varieties of coffee but we chose arabica as our primary cultivar because it is the best flavor for the least effort. Robusta is very easy to grow and tolerant of conditions arabica would swoon like a waif prima donna and die in. It’s practically a weed to the point we’ve had to destroy it in the Rio Grande Valley more than once, but most people don’t like the flavor nearly as much. It has a higher caffeine content but also is regularly described as tasting like a tire store smells. Like many other crops, hybridization with more robust varieties can make arabica more versatile and blight resistant, something we’ve done many times. The excelsa & liberica varieties taste wonderful in my opinion, but they require closer to a decade of growth to start yielding useful fruit and their trees are in the 10-15m tall range which makes harvesting much more difficult; you need a cherry picker lift rather than a ladder. This also means that a disaster that wipes out an excelsa farm, like Taal erupting yet again or another supertyphoon, will take that farm out of production for at least decade if it ever comes back at all.

Now multiply all that by the supply chains for both farm/transportation fuel, coffee roasters, ship & truck parts to keep transportation moving, bottles, and even the paper & ink for shippers and goddamn stickers. So I have a few more things for you to consider:

  1. Most of the cost of coffee in America is transportation or real estate, not beans.
  2. Single geographic origin beans are more tariff vulnerable than bulk blends.
  3. Fuel costs are likely to not change much for producers or transport, but they certainly may on fertilizers.
  4. The supply chains for all the support equipment that makes a cup of coffee all become more expensive and/or unreliable. That’s a lot of metal and manufacturing the US doesn’t do. As an example, consider where the bulk of the coffee roasting machines and their parts are made. That’s right, China, Italy, and Germany.

I am just a humble safety professional, not any kind of economist or farmer, but I do pay attention to stuff. The coffees you love tend not to become expensive when things get tough, they instead just vanish into bulking. I have no idea what this means for the future price of BBotE as we are very much in brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible territory.

My Most Evil Coins

I have often described myself as a human giftschrank. That I keep ahold of the poisonous knowledge that others need to forget to have a happy life, but that it is important to keep around for when we need it. When someone needs to “rediscover” some horrible event to bring cautionary tales back to everyone else, someone like me needs to be around to remember and tell the story. But in a pics or it didn’t happen world filled with misinformation to intentionally make it hard to define ANY history, the giftshrank’s word is not enough.

This is one¹ of the reasons why people collect cursed objects. As I am a coin collector, this is why I have my Evil Coin Collection. A tangible, small, mundane object that is a handhold to understand the enormity of the horrors that happened. Damnatio Memoriae requires destroying all physical evidence to make the memory fade but, as discussed in the Coins of Transition: Revolutions & Civil War, it’s hard to get everything. Also, it’s nice to have props to assist in telling stories, even if people tend to let the coins drop from their hands when they learn enough that they can feel the blood & fire.

The cursed coin that inspired this and that I suggested I should get if I ever had a few extra bucks lying around is the one guinea, from roughly 350 years ago. Starts at $5k at last check, so that one might have to wait for quite a while for enough quarters to accumulate in the sofa. This is the annoying thing about gold coins for me. The thing people want out of them is gold and don’t give much of shit about anything else. Which means they happily melt them down or just throw them in a pile to invest by weight. Shits are not given about what the coin might teach. The guinea, the creation of the Royal African Company for the exploitation of the gold fields of Ghana, is the numismatic representation of the slave trade itself as that was far more profitable than gold. The UK has done their best to erase all memory of it yet while still very much enjoying the spoils. Imagine going through life seeing Elephant & Castle Station on the tube map and never wondering why it’s named that. You’re wandering through the old Company headquarters.

But let’s move on to coins I actually have.

Starting with a real winner, a 50 centimes of King Leopold II of the Congo Free State!

1891 Belgian Free Congo 50 Centimes, Reverse – from the Phil Broughton Collection, 2017
1891 Belgian Free Congo 50 Centimes, Obverse – from the Phil Broughton Collection, 2017

If you’ve read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness you’re already well aware of how the Belgian crown created their protectorate of a “free state”. Something the Belgians would administer for the uplift and education of the local population such that they would be prepared to have a democratic state of their own. This wasn’t colonialism, goodness no, how dare you suggest such thing of noted humanitarian King Leopold II!?!

The corollaries to British justifications of how and why the Mandate of Palestine would work after WWI with the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire are just embarrassing. Perhaps less blatantly racist but not by much. But why did the Congo Free State exist at all? ANSWER: rubber plantations (and whatever other resources they could find to extract). It is hard to do justice to the company town, closed economy, and debt-peonage coerced labor of the Congo Free State’s “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Slavery!” system, but as this is a Coin Rant let’s look at it through the lens of that coin. You’re already in not great conversational territory whenever the word “plantation” comes up, but let’s toss in another one certain to cause arguments when you add a few drinks and That Guy to the dinner table: quota.

The really abbreviated version of Belgian quota system and the all too predictable perverse incentives go like this. You owe a debt to your overseer/company/Leopold II for food and housing that is payable in either money or product. Why do you owe a debt? Well, it seems that the benevolent association now owns the land you’ve lived on since time immemorial and they’re now charging you for the pleasure. Also, all those benefits of European society, like the church for your spiritual uplift and that factory that was just built in here to process the resources of interest, aren’t free. You’re going to need to pay for those things you were made to have too. Much like the minimum monthly payment on a credit card, a the quota was a way to service that debt. In theory, you would be paid money for any resources extracted in excess of the quota.

In practice, this never happened as the quotas were too high to ever meet. For rubber, this was payable in:

  1. Impossible amounts of rubber,
  2. 50 centimes, or
  3. A hand, as a penalty for failure.

Except there was very little coinage in country to pay that 50 centimes with since Leopold had no particular intention on following through on the promise to setting up a functional country. As such, it was only legal for white colonists to possess coinage and the money supply was kept short ON PURPOSE to skew toward payment in rubber. Since the quotas were routinely unachievable, the perverse incentives creates a hand based economy. And let’s not forget the military ammunition resupply scheme: no more ammo unless you can prove every bullet was a kill…by providing the hand of the person you shot. Therefore, you have a conversion rate of 50 centimes to a human hand to a bullet. Raiding parties to go collect hands from other communities. Baskets of hands being turned over to overseers. Behind The Bastards did a couple episodes on the king responsible recently and wow.

I’m not sure you could economically incentivize a genocide more except, in theory, they did want resource extraction. No one ever said that evil had to make sense.

This one is important even though it’s exonumia (not an actual currency) as a voting token. It contains all the horrors of how pay-for-play voting worked within the Nazi party, perversion of charity, it’s the only “coin” with Hitler’s visage, and it marked the Anschluss & end of democracy in Germany and Austria. All in one coin.

March 13, 1938 Nazi Party Voting Token, Obverse, with the motto “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer” – from the Phil Broughton collection, 2018
April 10, 1938 Nazi Party Voting Token, Reverse, with the motto “Treue um Treue” – from the Phil Broughton collection, 2018

What makes it extra terrible to me is that these grew out of the original charity fundraising coins called “Winter Tokens” help buy food and fuel to help starving and freezing people through that harsh Great Depression winters. Later, the Nazis took the old charity system and formalized it into centralized, party based one that made sure all the money flowed through the party and that those in need of charity were dependent on the party…in theory. In theory, this also kept Teh Poors away from the doors of polite society and party members. In practice, that money tend to go nowhere that unless it satisfied the vanity of a party official. This program was such a success that it was adapted to party voting with a “buy more tokens to vote more” model.

If this sounds familiar to folks in the UK, this is exactly what the Tory party conference did in the last two party leader elections. The voting tokens also came a level of door to door coercion of “How many tokens can I put you down for? Your neighbor bought 5. Zero? Are you sure? [makes note for a future brownshirt visit]” Of course they weren’t going to play “fair”, they just wanted to squeeze for cash. Mine is a one vote token. By paying a bit more you could get a ten vote token. Even more than that, a hundred votes! Okay, remember all the party lapel pins with the swastika on it that you see the civilian dress baddies wearing in movies? Those had a base level of 10k votes.

The party liked to sell that anyone could join, anybody could help guide the future of the volk, together! When in reality only the wealthy industrialists and nobility backing the party were going to have any say and, of course, no one got to have more votes than the Führer. As Benny said…

To be clear, these were strictly for party elections, kinda like parliamentary party leadership conferences, except these votes had consequences the whole nation. The point was to negate the value of voting outside of the party, supplanting the government itself. And they did it with these coins.

Oh, the dates on the coin. 13 March 1938 would be when the brand new Chancellor Seyss-Inquart of Austria announced that Austria would be annexed into Greater Germania. 10 April 1938 would be the popular vote for full annexation and transformation of Austria in the Ostmark. And with that, there were no more votes other than Nazi party votes.

As I read what I’d written above again, months later a whole bunch of @zitron.bsky.social newsletters in my head, I realize that the voting token model the Nazis had sure sounds like different classes of stock, and their respective voting rights, at Facebook/Meta. Or OCP and their shareholder-citizens of Delta City.

 

Yes, I have other coins that make people twitch but I’d like to actually put this post up after much delay. The 1 jiao from Manchuko certainly gets attention when you hand it to Korean or Chinese friends, but that’s drifting back to the Coins of Revolution & Civil War again which can also be viewed as Coins of Occupation. Sometimes occupations become actual governments and nations, but usually not. Their coins are an attempt to legitimize a transitory state that no one particularly wants, though for different reasons.

 

1: The usual reason to collect such things is mystique of transgression. The whole “I have something I shouldn’t have/is dangerous” or “This would make people mad if they knew” thing. If you have to hide your collection, if you aren’t teaching with it, consider that perhaps you shouldn’t have it.

In Memoriam: Jen Miller & Extra Life Overtime

For those those that were paying attention on social media or watched the Extra Life 2024 streams, you may be aware that my good friend Jen Miller, AKA Test Subject IT To Porn (though she was much more than that), died rather suddenly in October 2024. If you have purchased any BBotE off the store side of the website, please know that Jen touched your life. Every single BBotE label was either edited or outright created by Jen and I cherish that.

Phil & Jen grab Goku's Ass
Phil & Jen give a positive assessment of Goku’s ass- photo by Robyn Von Swank, 2108

More than that, Jen was either the instigator or accomplice to so many adventures. Jen lived a “Yes, and…” life style that we can all aspire to. While I can’t say she lived without fear, she very much embraced the opportunity for novelty. Every damn time Jen and I saw a statue, we made sure to clap hams on that statue’s ass to make assessment. I don’t remember either of us suggesting we should do it, it just happened. She made Japan possible for me, I wasn’t nervous to be there as long as I was with her. She remained angry to the very end that I did not record her slumping drunkenly into the butt crack of a salaryman on a train as he DESPERATELY tried to make eye contact with me and thus turn Jen into my problem. Recording such things is not something friends do in my book but she’d wanted this Authentic Life Experience documented.

With Jen, I realized the concept of Feeble Excuse Local Tourism. When you live in a place, you never go to the tourist locales and thus you don’t suck the marrow of your home thoroughly. Without her, I don’t know if I’d have ever made it to Alcatraz. For her, I made a trip to the Point Chicago Memorial happen and she came 400 miles north to see it because it was Important.

Jen was a college friend’s partner who I didn’t reconnect with until after I got back from Antarctica. Gabe, AKA Test Subject Mortician, brought her with him for a wedding and they both crashed with me when I was living in Livermore and working at LLNL. In more recent years, Gabe has been making his way through med school to become a medical examiner/pathologist while Jen minded the fort working with an unappreciative cadre of edgy clients, coworkers and banks where she kept the plates spinning for their not entirely approved of edges of the economy. And it is for Gabe that I write this because he now has to keep on keeping on without his partner for 20+ years.

On Veterans’ Day Weekend TEAM SENSIBLE SHOES played a series of rather difficult Shadows of Brimstone missions for Extra Life 2024 but we didn’t, in our opinion, manage to fulfill all the pledges we owed folks. So, this MLK Jr. Weekend starting at 10am PST Saturday we will fire up the livestream again to keep on playing. Except this time, our Tiltify campaign is going to Gabe to help him deal with the unexpected expenses of Jen’s death and re-establishing his life to finish med school. Multiple wildfires all around him ain’t exactly helped. If you would like to donate and/or add to the chaos of our play this weekend, please go here. This is not the entirety of the incentives, more will go live on game day proper on Saturday, along with the twitch livestream. And, of course, I will be liveskeeting it on Bluesky.

If you enjoyed my bullshit on the Better Offline CES podcasts, I am only encouraged more in honor of Jen. I miss her. We all do.

Radiation Roadtrip 2024

Sometimes there are treasures that are worth driving 2000 miles for. I had to write this post first to help explain why it was worth making this trip.

In the autumn of 2022, I lamented the destruction of a precious object. As a health physicist, I am also a member of the the local chapter of the Health Physics Society. One of the many things that local chapters do all over the nation is educational outreach, where members go out to schools and do practical demonstrations of ionizing radiation & detection concepts. This is known as the Radiation Roadshow and our demo kit for it came with a variety of meters and radiation sources. The most important one was the giant red-orange Fiestaware turkey platter that was large enough to function as a planar source so that you could easily demonstrate inverse square law detection principles across an entire classroom. Seriously, very obvious changes in the number of clicks on the GM meter as you approached it from a distance of 10m away.

One day in 2019, colleagues went to retrieve the kit to go out to a local middle school and discovered the platter hopelessly, irreparably shattered. No idea how it happened but it was gone and without the platter the demo loses a lot of its strength. And thus the Radiation Roadshow stopped. :(

I had lamented the loss regularly, but that day in 2022 a brave soul, Jackson, spoke up and said “Shit, there’s stacks of those near where I live. How many do you want?” My honest answer was “All of them. Each platter is the core of another roadshow kit I can make. I will fly out to Kansas and drive back with them all because if they’re gonna break in transit I am going to be the one who breaks them.” I was not going to trust the precious platters to USPS, UPS, or FedEx and I sure as hell didn’t trust the airlines. The last time I found a precious Fiestaware item, it sat in my lap as my personal item all the way home from Fairbanks, AK.

And so, Jackson went forth to Abilene, KS to hit up the antique stores to buy them all. Alas, they were all gone but there was a Revigator and did I want it…

Me: I’ve never seen one outside of a museum. How much?
Jackson: $400
Me: Ouch. If you can talk them down to $300 hell yeah.
Jackson: Already got it for you for $250.
Me: Do you mind holding on to it for me for a bit until I can come get it?

Lucky for me, Jackson’s basement is full of treasures that need to be hidden from kitties and there was room for my Revigator. I’m glad there was because it took me until August 2023 to actually get out there to pick it up. Now you may ask, “Phil, why didn’t you just have Jackson ship it to you?” As we have previously discussed in this post, you can totally ship naturally occurring radioactive material and generally licensed radioactive sources. However, because this is an even rarer antique than the platters, I elected to stay with the option “I WILL DRIVE 4EVA 4 ROCK” and do the iron ass challenge to get my Revigator home. I mean, just look at this beauty.

A light blue Revigator
A Revigator in an unusual blueish glaze color. – from the Phil Broughton Collection 2024

As many people asked at the time “Why would you want that? Is it safe to have in your house?” I want it because I have a weird love for radiological medical quackery and pseudoscience theories related to Vital Energies and my collection is far from full. As to it being safe, go back and read the Fiestaware & Uranium Glass post again. It’s fine, a count rate indistinguishable from background on the outside, though I wouldn’t recommend drinking the “revigated” water nor huffing the inside of the stoneware jug as you can see here.

A count rate of 71800 counts per minute using a b20 GM meter. Normal background around here is ~30cpm. – from the Phil Broughton Collection 2024

The reason you have such a high count rate inside but nothing on the exterior is because the ceramic has a layer of uranium ore on the interior that is constantly evolving radon, which is primarily an alpha emitter. Eau d’Radon is something we generally try to avoid, but if you really need to try it out just hang in an unventilated basement in Michigan for a bit.

But there is more than a Revigator to share from this trip. It was merely the reason for the trip to start in Manhattan, KS. Kansas contains a remarkable amount of nuclear history, not the least of which being that we decided to put a good chunk of our ICBMs there. But before we had ICBMs we had bombs and they belonged to the Air Force. This made the other branches sad and they wanted nukes of their own. This is how we got the Army’s atomic artillery, the M65, which you may remember from watching clips of the Upshot-Knothole Grable test. Let’s watch it again because they’re a helluva thing (we’ll skip the longer extra propaganda-y one).

There is a park opposite of the main entrance to Fort Riley in Junction City, KS that has one at the very top of a hill of other artillery pieces.  It is not the “Atomic Annie” used in the video above, which is on display at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, but one of a handful of surviving specimens of the M65. By apocryphal tale, it is aimed toward Eisenhower’s former home in Abilene, KS. (NOTE: there is no way it could ever have fired that far.) It’s worth seeing it while you can, as folks have been pillaging it for scrap metal with a side order of vandalization. People need better hobbies but it’s tough being a teen and/or E-1, so a 70 year old hunk of metal gets the business.

Of course, there are still silos around. I will leave it to the geoguessers to figure out which one exactly this is. Because signal was so awful, my phone was unable to log the location with the photo so I can’t really tell you if your guess is right either.

Me, standing on top of a missile silo – by Jackson Laibach, 2024

But then the long drive home had to begin. While one could, theoretically, do this drive in single go I am not a young resilient idiot anymore and I didn’t have a relief driver. Luckily, I had folks to visit along the way and old promises to fulfill. In the long ago, my introduction to the paleontology community on social media came from two things: answering the question “What’s your favorite dinosaur?” and curator concerns about fossils from the Morrison Formation. The answer to the first question was “I’m more of a mosasaur kind of guy” and that is how I got introduced to Anthony Maltese, the curator at the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center, AKA @mosasaurologist. In addition to being The World’s #1 Xiphactinus Superfan, Mr. Maltese is responsible for some of the more dynamic articulations of fossils you’ve seen on display in museums around the world. I would be lying if I said my inner six year old wasn’t jumping up and down in squealing delight to get to go behind the scenes and check out fossils in his office. Because one of the things I was there to do was to make an assessment of just how radioactive all the things he had in there, collected from the Morrison and other interesting formations, might be. And GOOD NEWS his office is not a radon bath, though we were a bit surprised about some of the specimens that were reading above background.

(ASIDE: I need to add two extra bits of knowledge to your mind. First, we don’t mine for uranium like we do gold. There’s no uranium veins or a uranium mother lode to trace. Yes, there are igneous uranium-rich ores that are the source material but we depend on plants to extract, bioaccumulate, die, decompose, and wash away to concentrate uranium over untold millions or billions of years. This is why when we go mining uranium, we’re usually looking for sedimentary rocks of former swamps and wetlands, not igneous rocks. It’s also why burning coal and natural gas further concentrates residual uranium and daughters to make descaling maintenance operations have surprisingly high dose rates. Second, and this might seem dumb, you don’t go looking for fossils in igneous rocks. You might find trace fossils, AKA the leftovers when lava incinerates a living thing and leaves an impression, but nothing like mineralization.)

This is where students usually get exasperated with me and the world for telling them that some fossils are radioactive, with some being noticeably more radioactive than other similar fossils from the same period but in different rock formations. The world is an amazing and complicated place. This is some handwaving biology and geology, but you can get radioactive fossils a couple of different ways and, to be clear about the radioactivity, we’re talking uranium/thorium and daughters here:

  1. While alive, your fossilized critter bioaccumulated a higher than normal amount of radioactive material into its bone/shell/hard bits that endured through mineralization.
  2. The general environment where the critter’s remains came to rest had enough radioactive material around that it got incorporated into the fossil during mineralization.
  3. Radioactive materials found the fossil surface a good place to deposit out from the ambient sedimentary formation.
  4. The matrix material the fossil is in is oddly full of radioactive materials and it’s just messy contaminating everything.
A radioactive dino rib in rock with meter over it.
A theropod’s rib visible in Morrison formation, reading 165cpm and rising – by Phil Broughton, 2024

It’s hard to functionally tell 1 & 2 apart but 3 & 4 are much easier to discern. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing a piece of carnotite, you’ve see the situation from 3 & 4 where all the uranium sort of plates itself out onto the surface of sandstone in a very crumbly yellow mineral. But the uranium could also go for the surface of the fossil rather than the surface of sandstone. For Mr. Maltese’s specimens, it appears that those select specimens either has residual uranium containing matrix or that some surficial plating of uranium compounds onto some part of the fossils happened. Very cool, but also not what either of us were expecting. We expected bulk radioactive fossils as had been documented in other fossils from the Morrison. Nothing to do but go seek out the fossils in their natural habitat! By which, I mean go hiking for a bit to find dinosaur fossils just staring you in the face from rocks of the Morrison Formation. I, once again, have to give Mr. Maltese thanks for making Li’l Phil’s dreams come true. I am very proud of myself for not falling off the rock outcrop while I used my meter because I am a professional.

two small shacks
The “Totally Nuts Company” store in Manitou Springs made from two conjoined TB shacks. – by Phil Broughton, 2024

But that’s not the end of the radiation fun in Colorado, goodness no, because the next stop is Manitou Springs. It feels like such a familiar place to me because it has very strong tourist town vibes like the Santa Cruz Mountains I grew up in. But more than that, it’s as if the burnouts of the 1960s split into two tribes where one decided to surf and hike and ended up in Santa Cruz & Marin, while the others who liked to ski and hike ended up in Manitou Springs & Vail. Like all resort towns, it has had to evolve with times and making sure their core attractions still appeal. Santa Cruz and the San Lorenzo Valley weren’t spas but they did offer the “tree & sea” therapy to try to help people clear their lungs from foul city air and swim in the bracing waters of the Pacific Ocean. Manitou Springs began as a mineral springs spa with a side order of the ever popular medical sales pitch of dry, mountain air to help people with tuberculosis. The hotel attached to the sanitarium/spa did not actually want the TB patients in the hotel, but they did want their money, so they built shacks for them to live in and delivered food to. A few of the shacks are still around downtown.

The other thing that is still all over town from those early days are the fountains from all the springs. Manitou Springs is a hydrological oddity in that it has a variety of springs each seem to have a different predominant chemical composition other than the high baseline manganese in all of them. Don’t worry, they’re all well posted and often have beautiful civic architecture to make a sip enjoyable, if uncreatively named. Soda Springs dispenses high CO2 water. Lithium Springs has that feel good hit of lithium. Then there was this ugly scar of concrete in a little pavilion area where a fountain clearly had once been.

Anthony: Wanna guess what that used to be?
Me: That was Radium Springs, wasn’t it?
Anthony: It’s like you know how this works.

As I’ve discussed in several previous posts, just because humanity didn’t know what radiation is doesn’t mean we haven’t always had a relationship with it. In the case of radon, this was part of the mix of “plutonic emissions” where people would take the vapors for curative or oracular purposes. Nothing like a little bit of oxygen deprivation, olfactory nerve deadening, and lung dose to really bring the visions on. This has always been a selling feature of visiting mineral water spas, to either drink the waters or immerse yourself in them, as these waters had clearly absorbed vital energies from the underworld and you could absorb them to be as healthy and strong as Achilles. Which brings us full circle to the reason this trip started in the first place, the Revigator. It offered people the ability to have the health enhancing effects of the radon water from the spas in your very own home at a fraction of the cost! What a bargain! How convenient!

Which is one of my old refrains: The bullshit never changes because, down through the years, people remain people. Only what we apply the bullshit to changes.

Incidentally, within a couple weeks of getting home, I was able to get ahold of one of the red-orange Fiestaware platters. The Radiation Roadshow Kit is reborn!

Phil holding a Fiestaware platter in goatse pose
An elated Phil holding a red-orange Fiestaware platter over his chest. – by Phil Broughton, 2024

Antique Rot

Man, I could have sworn I wrote down a description of Antique Rot before.

When a undiversified town loses it’s economic base, it also loses it’s youth to new opportunities elsewhere. The town and it’s population are now aging and dying. One of the ways to hang on for a little bit longer, maybe squeeze another generation out of it, is to sell the patrimony the place. This is done with antique stores, slowly selling off all the things left behind, even the fixtures from abandoned buildings. People love old fixtures. So, what you’ve got left is a gas station, a post office, and a market (possibly all three in one) and a dozen antique stores. This is unsustainable. There’s only so many antiques is a place.

From here, there’s a couple paths left:

  • End Stage Antique Rot – Population drops to 0, nothing left to sell and no one to sell it. You’re a proper ghost town now and nature will slowly reclaim it.
  • Kitsch Revitalization – Selling the ghost town/old timey experience. A popular option along the old Route 66.
  • Antique Vampire – Get more antiques from other towns to keep your town going.

I’m sure someone with a better head for urban development and demographics can explain this much more exactly than me. If an economist and/or anthropologist hasn’t already tackled Town Death, I’d be shocked. At the very least, Terry Pratchett did in Reaper Man. But one gold prospecting trip to the area around Randsberg, CA crystallized it in my head, in addition to creating the term “funranium” as described in this post.

This part of the Mojave was home to on and off gold exploration from the 1890s until 2006 after it had been converted to a strip mine and then was officially played out. All that’s left are cyanide leaching spoil piles. While there are FASCINATING new minerals forming in them, I really don’t recommend playing in them. Yes Jackson, I’m looking at you specifically as I type this.

The Decembering 2024, Once More With Feeling

One of the ways I mark the change of the seasons is when I get my first order designating it as a holiday gift. It’s my sign that I need to revise this post for a new year and gird my loins for the MAXIMUM PRODUCTION that’s soon to come. This year it happened on Election Day, so game on!

To the people that are very proactive and organized in their holiday shopping, I’ll answer your question now: yes, you can place an order now in an earlier production window for a holiday shipment. Please leave a note saying “Delay shipment until $DESIRED_DATE” with your order so I know you want it later rather than ASAP.

It was only -38F that day. It's a dry cold.
My Ceremonial South Pole Hero Shot & Xmas Card 2002. I still love that shirt.

The last pre-Xmas BBotE production window will close on December 21st. All things being equal, everything shipped domestically by the 20th should end up at their destinations by Christmas Eve. I can’t control the weather, catastrophic floods, volcanic eruptions, special military operations, etc. but four days is usually quite sufficient to get all domestic shipping to its destination.. Express mail gets more and more necessary in the last days. I’ll do my best, but that’s all I can do.

International mail has somehow become a lot more squirrelly with customs this year. Delays with them failing to contact recipients have become common, seemingly everywhere at once, even with express mail. International folks, I recommend ordering by the 13th and hoping for the best. APO/FPO/DPO folks, you probably get a little more leeway to the 18th.

Worse come to worse, gift certificates are always an option. 

To reiterate shopping advice from the previous years, here’s a few things you should probably think about if you decide to place an order for a holiday gift from Funranium Labs:

  1. Steins of Science Availability is Limited: I am maintaining some inventory, but not much. A few more should show up in the next week. If you really, really want one and the one you want is not available, contact me sooner rather than later so I can do my best to get one for you ASAP.
  2. BBotE Is Perishable: When refrigerated, it has a shelf-life of about three months (possibly longer, but I’m only going to quote three).  If you’re going to wrap it up and put it under the tree, this is a present to put out on Christmas Eve and the promptly put back in the fridge after unwrapping. Alternatively, embrace the idea of the holiday season and decide to give it to the recipient immediately, for all days are special. For shipments going directly to people as gifts, I stick a consumption guide in the box, with a note of who ordered it for them, and stamp the box “REFRIGERATE ON RECEIPT”.
  3. Let People Know BBotE Is Coming: I know part of the joy in presents is the surprise of what you get. However, joy is not the emotion most people feel when a bottle of mysterious black liquid shows up on their doorstep, especially if it’s been sitting there for a week outside because they were out of town. Give them a heads up, that something’s coming they’ll want to stick in the fridge. As I said in #2, I also tuck instructions in the box for a gift going directly to the recipient and a note stating who sent it.
  4. The pre-order slot dates date are “Ship No Later Than”, not “Ships After”: But I get your orders out as soon as I can after they come in. If you want to order something NOW to ship later, effectively reserving a spot later in the production queue, you can do that but please leave a note with your order telling me when you want it to ship by.
  5. International Shipments Always Go Out Express Mail: Because I don’t want BBotE to get stuck in postal facilities or customs, express is the only way to ship to minimize their time in bureaucratic hell but it still happens.
  6. APO/DPO/FPO: If you wish to send something out to someone with an Armed Forces address, there’s good news and bad news. Good news – it’s no more expensive than priority mail. Bad news – I can’t guarantee any date as to when things will arrive. Outside of active war zones, things move somewhat normally; inside war zones and on ships at sea, things get iffy. Also, depending on routing, some nations (I’m looking at you, Turkey) have bounced BBotE back to me on the basis that it is, and I quote, “Morally Questionable Material”. Amazingly, my shipments to Korea and Okinawa seem to arrive faster than they do to other places on the west coast of the US mainland. Go figure. In short, I’ll do my best but you’ve been warned.
  7. Local Pick Up: If you’re in the Bay Area and have the time, drop me an email. Happy to meet up and hand of BBotE directly, but I need at least 72hrs notice to make sure I have what you want available.
  8. Turkey, Italy & Brazil: It breaks my heart to say this, I can’t ship to these countries. Italy, I absolutely do not trust your postal system. The level of theft shipping things anywhere south of Rome is, frankly, appalling. If you ask me to ship to Naples, I make absolutely zero guarantee of it arriving. Brazil, your customs causes shipments to languish for so long that the BBotE goes off before it arrives, even if shipped express; steins seem to be fine though. Turkey, well, I discussed that problem in #6.
  9. BBotE Production Is First Come, First Served: My maximum daily production output is 12L per day. Thus, people who request 12pk cases will lock up production for an entire day.
  10. BBotE Has No Kosher Or Halal Certification: While Robert Anton Wilson did confer the papacy upon me, and all the other people in the Porter College Dining Hall at UCSC in 1996, this does not permit me to sanctify food. I do have a helpful Dominican priest in Salt Lake City who’d probably be willing to bless your BBotE for you, but that’s still not helpful for most people. Sorry. 

For those of you who read this far, I congratulate you and game on. Let the holidays begin.

Fiestaware & Uranium Glass

Fine. FINE! After the who knows how manyeth time of being asked or having someone referred to me, I am writing this down for ease of reference to just point at.

TL;DR version – It’s perfectly safe to possess Fiestaware & uranium glass in your home and to consume food or drink that isn’t acidic with/from/on intact specimens. If you have broken glass or ceramics, you should throw that away because it’s sharp. It isn’t a problem to have large collections.

About Uranium

Right up front, I want to be crystal clear about this: while uranium is most definitely radioactive, uranium is not a radiotoxic substance. While easily detectable with meters, uranium doesn’t constitute an external radiation hazard. It’s not a problem for uranium to just be sitting there, but it is if you eat it or snort a whole bunch ground into a powder so don’t do that. For internal uptake of material, the amount of uranium you would need to consume before I’d have radiological concerns has a measurement unit of “rail cars”. You should instead always be much more worried about the heavy metals toxicity damage to the kidneys, liver, and marrow from ingestion and inhalation, with a similar low daily/annual uptake limits as lead & mercury, than anything radiological. You’ll be long dead of heavy metals poisoning before radiotoxicity is ever an issue. Even then, it needs to be bioavailable enough chemically to do that damage or you crap it right out. Actually, if you have uranium metal, be WAY more worried about pyrophoricity than anything else. As I’ve said before, fire is a way lower latency problem. In short, radiation-wise, uranium isn’t that scary.

For a little extra detail, one of the other questions that regularly comes up about uranium is “What kind of radiation does it emit?” If handed a lump of uranium ore, the answer is All Of Them because it has all of the naturally occurring isotopes and their decay chain daughters; alpha, beta, gamma and neutron though in very different abundances and biological consequence. The various extant terrestrial uranium radionuclides themselves are primarily alpha emitters. In a few special cases, like U-235, they can undergo spontaneous fission with neutron emissions, though this is vanishingly rare until you put enough of it in the same place to get some chain reactions (be sure you want that before you do it). But uranium never comes alone. Natural occurring uranium is in a state called “secular equilibrium” with all of its decay daughters, which are also radioactive, down to lead. Depleted uranium (AKA depU or DU) is made by first extracting uranium from all of its daughters in ore and then separating U-235 from the U-238; the leftover U-238 is “depleted in U-235”, hence the name depleted uranium. And even if you perfectly extract all uranium from ore, it immediately starts growing new daughters that emit a wide variety of alpha, beta, and gamma energies but it’ll take a while, about a million years, to get back to secular equilibrium.

For Manhattan Project related reasons, commercial items using uranium prior to 1940 have been made with natural uranium. After 1950, they’re mostly made with depleted uranium. The lesson here being it’s not waste if you can find someone to buy it.

But let’s go to the question that brings these items into people’s lives, thus scaring them with the DEADLY RADIATIONS. Why do ceramics glazes and glass exist that incorporate uranium? Why were they mass produced? ANSWER: Because they were pretty, durable, and cheap enough. But more importantly, uranium isn’t something new to our use in art and artifice. We didn’t isolate the specific element uranium from ore until 1789, but you are disrespecting our ancestors tremendously if you don’t give them credit for spotting a pigment they liked and could use. We didn’t have knowledge of the nature of radioactivity, and uranium having that property for all of its isotopes, until 1896. Discussed that a bit in this Choose Your Own Radiation Adventure. Because uranium is so versatile with plentiful oxidation states and many electrons to share in molecules, you can get a uranium based pigment in almost any color you like for your ceramics and glass, thought the most common on the market are orange and green, respectively. This usually results in people panicking that it isn’t okay to eat or drink off of uranium glass or uranium glaze ceramic, or even handle it, or even have it in your house due to radiophobia. Now that I told you about the heavy metals toxicity in paragraph three, maybe you’ll regard it in the same hazard class as pewterware or lead crystal. If so, fantastic, because that’s much more appropriate.

Uranium Glass

Uranium glass citrus reamer. Just simply the worst idea. Don’t use these. – from the Phil Broughton Collection, 2024

Let’s start with uranium glass, because that’s more or less the exact same as lead crystal glass, except you’re using uranium rather than lead to make that fine crystal. The difference is that, depending on how much uranium you throw into the mix, that crystal ends up being a transparent yellow to green colored glass (1-10% by weight) to an increasingly opaque mint green to milky white glass that looks like Vaseline, AKA vaseline glass. Some vaseline glass can be over 25% uranium by weight. Much like lead crystal, you don’t drink acidic things like wine or orange juice out of them as it leaches the metal out of the glass into your drink. Stick with nice neutral pH things like water or non-tiki drink cocktail. And for fuck’s sake, don’t drink grapefruit juice from great-grandma’s crystal either, ya dingus.

I wouldn’t think I’d need to say this but, if something tastes sour, it’s acidic.

“Our Lady of The Glow” – Uranium glass figurine of St. Mary, illuminated by blacklight. From the Fr. Gabriel Mosher collection, 2023

For completeness, uranium glass wasn’t limited to drinking vessels and food prep & storage, goodness no. Anything else you could do with normal glass is something you can do with uranium glass, which is to say so many functional household products, art objects, and jewelry. Sometimes that is the PERFECT green for your Tiffany piece. One of the hallmarks of uranium glass is that it fluoresces when exposed to ultraviolet light. Once again, please give our ancestors (even ones recent enough for you to have met) a little credit for not being all that different from us; if you have something that will glow weirdly in a dimly lit club with blacklights, we are gonna wear that shit to the club. We didn’t stop wearing uranium glass jewelry because everyone decided it was bad, but rather we developed the ability to make plastics loaded with other phosphors that glowed much better and in a variety of colors. The reason we don’t make many uranium glass objects anymore is that possessing the quantities of uranium to do it on an industrial scale gets you regulatory attention these days and the market demand just isn’t there to make it worth dealing with that. We don’t make nearly as many lead crystal things either. I blame plastics and organic chemists.

Fiestaware

Moving on from glass to ceramic glazes, which are a kind of glass if you’re inclined to think that way, I said the most common color was orange. Specifically, people associate uranium with the original red-orange glaze of the Homer Laughlin China Company’s simplified art deco line of ceramics called Fiestaware. The red-orange was part of the original 1936 color offerings and continued until 1972, with a bit of a hiatus from 1943-1959 because of the whole Manhattan Project and no one can have uranium but the federal government thing. While many collectors are interested in the shapes of the Fiestaware line, the red-orange was the most eye catching and popular color at the time (and still based on price variation between colors of the same design). When the product line was resurrected in 1986 for the 50th anniversary, the uranium based red-orange glaze did not return.

A whole bunch or red-orange glazed ceramics
Some of my red-orange glazed ceramics. Not all of it is Fiestaware. – from the Phil Broughton Collection, 2024
red-orange ceramic plates
The backs of the two red-orange saucers. The one one the left has the Fiestaware stamp. – from the Phil Broughton Collection, 2024

But, not to cause undue concern, Homer Laughlin was hardly the only company using uranium in their ceramic glaze. Fiestaware was not the first line of ceramics to incorporate uranium but their red-orange glaze was so popular that it attracted imitators, all of whom used varying levels of uranium content to try to hit that color. However, red-orange isn’t the only uranium glaze color. The next most common after the red-orange is black, then yellow, and then, well, every color. The weirdest uranium glaze color I’ve found so far is a kind of pastel lavender candy dish that definitely sets my meter off. A predecessor and competitor of Fiestaware was the Bauer Company of Pasadena, CA who began operation in 1909 and using uranium glazes. While they didn’t use the term “Bauerware” to describe their items, the collector market does and some of their black glazes have a considerably thicker and higher uranium content than Fiestaware red-orange. If you are Fiestaware collector, you’re gonna insist on that stamp on the underside of the item which you can see on the left-hand plate in the picture; if you just need a check source for your rad meter that’s a commercial product so you won’t get hassled by the TSA, you just need uranium content and don’t need to be that picky. Just to be complicated, not all Fiestaware items got the stamp on them because of course they didn’t, why make a collector’s life easy?

Eating food off of Fiestaware and imitators does not mean you’re consuming uranium. Ceramic glazes are remarkably durable and, unless you make a habit of using diamond edged utensils, you won’t be abrading that glaze in any way that you’d be consuming it. Much like uranium glass, acidic foods can leach uranium out of the glaze but that’s a less convincing scenario that people drinking wine from uranium & lead crystal. If you break the ceramic and turn it to a powder, yes, the uranium would be available to you for uptake but I have to ask serious questions about why you are snorting and/or eating sand. Do you have someone that looks after you and should I have a word with them?

Entry to the Men's Restroom at LA Union Station
Entry to the Men’s Restroom at LA Union Station. Note the tile work which is much more vibrant in person, even the modern reproductions from remodeling. – image courtesy of SLOAN Bathroom Solutions

The question I usually get asked, with a radiophobic edge to it, is “Why would people use uranium in Fiestaware AT ALL?” Like I said back in paragraph six, please give our ancestors some respect for recognizing a pretty color and the stuff that makes it, even if they didn’t specifically know what uranium was. We are no different than our ancestors in liking pretty things though our taste in fashion & style spins a bit faster. Ever since the 1986 relaunch of the Fiestaware line, people have lamented the lack of red-orange and that every attempt to get something close just isn’t quite right. This is where I’ll encourage you to think about all the gorgeous “southwest style” ceramic decorative tiles that were so popular from the 1910-1950s in Art Deco and Modern design combined with Spanish Revival architecture. Borrowing, or at least being very heavily influenced by, the tribal painting and sand art styles gives us things like the tilework at the entrance of Los Angeles’ Union Station. I would love to go searching Hearst Castle with my GM meter. While I haven’t been able to prove it, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the artisans that made these tiles did it at Bauer. Wanna guess why that sand art features deep blacks and vibrant oranges and yellows? Uranium has always been a part of the artistic tradition.

But really, go visit LA’s Union Station. It’s beautiful for so much more than just the tile work.

Collections & Radon

The last radiophobic question which I regularly get asked that I want to address is “Isn’t it bad to have a collection of these? Doesn’t it all add together to make a huge dose in your home? What about all the radon they make?”

[rubs temples] Yes, the ALARA principle always applies. By bringing these items into your home, yes, this is extraneous dose that you didn’t have before. But the other half of the ALARA philosophy is “take no dose with out commensurate benefit”. You may feel that aesthetics are not a good enough benefit for recreational dose. Fair enough, don’t buy any.

Earlier I discussed the internal uptake of uranium which is worse than external exposure because the primary emission, alpha particles, actually matter for dose. By rough estimate from Oak Ridge, an average piece of Fiestaware has a combined beta & gamma contact dose rate of ~.4μSv/hr. The public dose limit in the US is 100μSv/yr, which means don’t go to bed snuggling it for 250 hours in a year, you pervert. Any distance you put between you and it drops the dose rate by the inverse square law for gamma and the beta drops to zero in air fairly quickly. So, the distance of it being on the table or in the china cabinet drops that external dose contribution to nothing.

Also, if you have a big enough collection, uranium isn’t just a radiation emitter but it’s also incredibly dense. Which mean your collection provides it’s own shielding, with the pieces in the front of the cabinet blocking the emissions from the pieces in the back. There you go Kasey, I just gave you the excuse you’ve always wanted to go get more uranium glass.

But the radon, oh radon, curse of the Appalachians, Rockies, and central North American Craton. BAD NEWS: your uranium containing item is continuously evolving radon as it decays. GOOD NEWS: if you have the instrumentation to notice this, I assume you’re monitoring for fun in your china cabinet and are happy about this development. Bringing a collection of uranium products into your home will, yes, increase the amount of radon production in your home but it’s a pittance compared to what Planet Earth provides to you on a daily basis. If you are worried about it but still want to collect uranium glass and glazed ceramics, then I am pleased to tell you that the solution is just the same as if you lived in Wisconsin: fans. Open your windows and turn on the fans to flow some fresh air and the radon will be gone. As for the radon daughters that may have deposited in the dust of your infrequently used treasures, give them a rinse before using.

There you go. If you still have concerns about uranium glass or ceramics in your home, this is something to take up with your therapist. And I would really like to never hear another story about a school freaking the fuck out and calling the hazmat team to deal with a Fiestaware plate that a student brought in…again.

My se7en Book Report

Because Peter Clines is a wonderful person and sent me the Penguin Readers edition of the movie adaptation of se7en, I feel obligated to complete the activates section at the back. We still owe Peter a visit to a town called SHAME in our next Extra Life play.

sev7en Penguin Reader edition – from the Phil Broughton Library, 2024

CHAPTER 1

1a) Vanity
1b) Sloth
1c) Greed
1d) Lust
1e) Gluttony
1f) Wrath
1e) Envy

2a) Homicide
2b) Fingerprints, Victim, Evidence
2c) Retired, Precinct

3a) Detective Somerset lives alone.
3b) Detective Somerset
3c) Detective Mills wants to work the fat man case.

I’m sure they all recant their sin and live happily ever after with lives PLEASING TO THE LORD. I think Mr. Clines is a great teacher for assigning the class this uplifting book about the triumph of the human spirit!

[runs out of the classroom to start vacation]

How I Got My Laser Eye Injury

It has been brought to my attention that I have never actually written this story down before, merely told it in person to many students for valuable lessons and also for laughs over cocktails. It is a litany of bad ideas from several people that all came together at once to reach out and zap me.

DISCLAIMER FOR THE SQUEAMISH: My eyes and vision are fine. There was some slight retinal bleaching in the peripheral vision of my right eye. If I hold up a large plane of white paper in front of me, like when helping a friend make posters for Ren Faire, there’s a small patch of yellowish tint in the lower right corner. Not a big deal, but damage is damage.

[Scene – A very overcast morning in the spring of 1999. Exterior driveway between Building 6 & 15 of $LASER_COMPANY, roughly 10am]

It was a day much like any other in my four years, five months and eighteen days of working there, not that I was counting or anything. After checking on a couple laser labs and talking to people, I needed to go across the way to visit the optics coating facility. So, I walked out the side door of Building 6 to cross the driveway, go down the stairs and over to the loading dock of Building 15. As I was walking across the driveway, I heard a weird noise. Something was rhythmically clicking away a bit faster than once a second. My thought process went a bit like this.

Me: What is that noise?
Me [a few seconds later]: Ohhhhh, I know that noise. That’s the flashlamps of a Quanta-Ray system going off.
Me [immediately after, spinning on my heels to head toward the source of the sound]: Why am I hearing this outside?

It was at some point while walking that way and waving my hands and yelling “SHUT IT DOWN!!!” that I took my laser hit from a scattered, fractional beam from the shenanigans going on (I didn’t notice the damage from the hit until several months later). I am going to try to describe what I saw in enough detail that hopefully you can reconstruct the scene in your head, because I don’t want to use my non-existent art skill in Paint to draw this.

Quanta Ray PRO350 with frequency doubling, emitting a 532nm beam – Sales brochure image from Quanta Ray, unknown date

The back of  Building 6 had their shipping and receiving area and the rear parking lot. In the parking spaces closest to the shipping & receiving area, several spaces had been taken up by a Quanta-Ray’s power supply, a Rubbermaid cart with a large Quanta-Ray laser balanced on it, and it was connected to some Caltrans utility trailer looking contraption downstream and in line with the output aperture of the laser. Beyond the contraption trailer was a VP of Sales’ brand new cherry red Jeep Grand Cherokee. There were umbilicals for chilled water and power running across the parking lot back into the loading dock. Three men are standing behind the laser with another rolling cart being used as moveable workbench, fiddling with the controls for the laser and the contraption it was connected to on the trailer. Two of them were wearing laser safety eyewear. The third, one of our sales engineers who is named Bob, was not wearing any.

After making sure everything was shut down, I assessed the scene and realized something had gone wrong beyond simply “this entire situation”. This was a sales demo for prospective customers gone horribly awry. I identified myself as the Laser Safety Officer and that I had some questions. The customers looked very much like they wanted to be anywhere but here.

Me: May I see your glasses?
[Customers 1 & 2 hand me them]
Me: These are argon filters. Are these your glasses at you brought with you?
Customer 1: Yes.
Me: Shame you’re working with a Nd:YAG laser, not an argon one.
Customer 2: Better than nothing, right?
Me: These are utterly useless at 1064nm. You both should go make appointments with your ophthalmologists. But at least you understood that you need gogs. Bob, where are yours?
Bob: In the lab.
Me: Would that be the lab that this laser was in before you wheeled it outside?
Bob: Yes.
Me: Bob, why is this laser outside? What are you even doing here?
Customer 1: You see, we had an idea…

I want to say that, on first blush, their idea was admirable. They were trying to come up with a less destructive way to remove striping from roadways. You have to grind that stuff off, which damages the road surface, leading to increased wear & tear and thus potholes. Their solution was to do it with a laser instead.

Me: Let me see if I understand this right. You want to mount a high power laser on a cart, towed by a Caltrans or contractor truck, to burn the striping off roads?
Customer 1: Yes, ingenious isn’t it?
Me: The striping with REFLECTIVE paint?
Customer 2 [looks with concern at Customer 1]: Umm.
Me: I’m sure you can find a way with enough power.
Customer 1: But look, it worked!

The customer motioned for me to look at the parking lot space stripe that a whole bunch of of round spots on it which had, indeed, burnt the paint off the asphalt.

Me: Bob, $FACILITIES_GUY is going to kill you. He just repaved and striped this parking lot a couple of weeks ago.
Bob: [looks morose, as he’s starting to get an inkling of how bad this looks]
Me: But you’ve been having some trouble, haven’t you?
Customer 1 [surprised]: Yes! We can’t get beam no matter what we do.
Me: That’s because you’ve blown the coating on one of your steering optics.
Customer 1 & 2: How do you know?
Me: Because your beam is not being steered to raster the stripe on the ground. Instead, it’s been firing a flat beam forward and doing a raster scan of [gestures] that Grand Cherokee.

Bob and Customer 1 & 2 looked up to see the stripe of exposed metal on the door of the VP of Sales’ car where the paint had been burnt away. On closer inspection, we later learned that the Quanta-Ray had burnt through the wheel well and cut the brake line. At this point, I decided I want to really rub in what a terrible idea all this was to them. How they had failed on so many levels.

Me: That’s $VP_of_Sales’ car, isn’t it Bob?
Bob: [groans] Yes.
Me: Pretty sure that’s your boss, Bob.
Bob: Yeah.
Me: When did you start doing this?
Customer 1: Around 8am.
Me: And when did you start having problems?
Customer 1: 8:30ish, maybe?
Me: Ah, so you were lasing through break time. Bob, what’s behind the car?
Bob: Building 15.
Me: $VP_of_Sales doesn’t normally get here until after 9am and the roach coach always pulls up at the loading dock of Building 15 at 8:45. So, hopefully you were aiming above eye level for all the employees on break. Also, that exposed brushed steel on the Cherokee is a mirror for near-infrared, so you’ve been shining that beam right back at yourselves. You definitely should call your ophthalmologists. But what’s behind you, Bob?
Bob: The fence.
Me: What kind of fence is it?
Bob: Chain-link.
Me: So, not a solid fence then. What’s on the other side of the fence, Bob?
Bob: [now staring at the ground in shame] The elementary school.
Me: If you’re very lucky, recess happened before your optic failed but we’re still gonna have to send a letter to the school about a potential exposure. Of course, that brushed steel mirror isn’t flat, which means your reflections went all over. Bob, what’s above us?
Bob: [picking up where I was going] Planes.
Me: How many airports worth of airspace travels over us?
Bob: SFO, Oakland, San Jose, the tiny municipal ones.
Me: You forgot a really important one. Our neighbor, Moffett fucking Field. Firing a laser into military airspace is an act of war. Are you declaring war on the United States, Bob?
Bob: [stands silently]
Me: Bob, what else is above us?
Bob: [looks up] Clouds.

Because timing is the essence of comedy, that would be when it started to rain on the quarter million dollar laser system, destroying it. Bob no longer worked at $LASER_COMPANY two weeks later.

MORAL: Of all the bystanders you could injure, DO NOT HURT THE SAFETY PERSON.

~fin~

Evolution Of Safety Equipment – The Berkeley Box

For folks that haven’t been lucky enough to experience the “Phil Points At Things That Aren’t There Anymore” Manhattan Project Tour of Berkeley, there is a secondary bit of education that comes courtesy of having 160 years worth of chemistry buildings still standing to point at. I similarly do this for students when getting them to really consider the work they are doing so the appreciate the gear they have, care for it and USE IT. It goes like this:

You don’t have electricity, you barely have plumbing. Nothing in this lab around us except for the glassware exists.  No pipette. No magnetic stirring hot plate. No mostly inert polyethylene counters and worksurfaces. No PPE to wear other than leather smocks and gauntlets. No fume hood. How do you safely do your work without horrible exposure and early death? The processes you’re doing are likely 19th century or earlier in vintage, so how would you do it?

Honest answer a lot of the time was “Get someone else expendable and common to do the nasty bits/manual labor and, if too precious and gentlemanly, do it yourself, hope for the best and accept the shortened lifespan as a worthy sacrifice on the altar of Natural Philosophy.” There is a reason that as recently as the 1960s the average lifespan of chemical engineers was roughly 45 years from the actuarial tables. I blame crucibles of boiling BeO with no ventilation to speak of but that’s several decades past the point they should have. As I’ve said many many times, our ancestors weren’t dumb; they just had different tools and mores than us. They knew toxic when they saw people drop dead. They may have not known specific metabolic pathways but they understood cause and effect, naming various “industrial diseases” for the tasks, not the poison, not the cancers. Things like fossy jaw, tinknockers’ disease, various metal fevers, and foundry blindness. At the research level, which was generally an aristocrat’s game across most nations in the last 300 years, the answer was to do your work outside or in a very open air environment like a particular drafty walls optional/easily blown off shed or a forge. You may be familiar with such designs from modern practitioners of the art.

(Tom is a friend. “Jank Science” is his style, very proud of being able to do what he does with meager items & gear from the pool supply store and lab trash bin. Fairly safely at that.)

A forge is actually important to the next step of safety control evolution. When you’re working with something nasty and toxic, you want those fumes/vapors/gas drawn away from you. You could have a dedicated person to blow bellows or wave a fan at you, but that’s not great nor is it necessarily enough to overcome the breeze that might blow it right back at you. A forge had a chimney to draw the smoke from blacksmithing and a potentially intense heat source as well. And so, people liked to do their work on the hearth in front of a fireplace with a low fire to generate the draw to pull vapors up the chimney and away from the workspace. This also had the benefit of allowing you to work indoors which is nice during the colder months of the year and in bad weather. The indoor lab’s first safety feature is born!

South Hall, UC Berkeley – By User:Falcorian – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1735605

If you have a pre-1900s building on your campus, look for the building with A LOT OF CHIMNEYS. Like, way more than you think any building should have for mere comfort. That building is likely the 18th or 19th century home of the chemistry department. At UC Berkeley, that is South Hall, the original sciences building (this picture does not do justice to how many goddamn chimneys it has). For ease of evacuation, the chemistry labs were on ground floor. This is normally a good idea, except there were four floors and those chimneys connected to a fireplace on each floor. Depending on wind, nasty things might not go straight up the chimney; instead it might get shoved back out into the offices of physics and geology professors on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th floors. As soon as possible, the chemistry department was exiled to a new building entirely dedicated to them called Hildebrand Hall. Not the one that’s there now, AKA New Hildebrand, but Old Hildebrand; all that remains of it is the gingerbread house dovecote, which used to be at the top of the building, sitting in the plaza.

Gilman Hall, as seen from the campanile – Gabriel Classon (gabeclasson on Flickr), CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Changes in architecture can the dictate changes in practice and vice versa. Never underestimate how much Style & Cool play in safety applications. A colleague once had a surgeon tell them point blank “I’d rather be blind than wear those (laser safety eyewear). Then I wouldn’t have to see them.” A few decades on from the mid-19th century French styles of South Hall and the giant wooden gingerbread house of Old Hildebrand, amazing innovations in plumbing, structural steel, concrete, and electrification had happened bringing Gilman Hall into the world. The other thing that had happened to UC Berkeley was Julia Morgan and the Spanish Revival style with the California School of Mines, AKA Hearst Memorial Mining Building. From both a chemistry and California point of view, this is great because a terra cotta tile roof is very hard to light on fire and “Do what Julia did” sorta turned into the design motif for several subsequent decades of buildings. But see those notches in the roofline of Gilman and the building the foreground with the windows that open into the rooms? They’re called dormers and one of the things we had learned to do since South Hall was to get rid of the fireplaces & chimneys and to banish the nasty chemistry to these spaces. While you don’t have a chimney to draw fumes away, you have the convenient outdoor workspace to shove shit out onto and close the windows or, if you can’t and need to work fast, you can set up one of these newfangled desk fans to blow things out. Some buildings with dormers elsewhere I’ve seen had more complicated enclosures that I will describe as “greenhouse like” to help you shove the nasty things into and vent them outside, rather than the workspace with humans in it.

This brings us to the postwar 1940s. In the wake of the Manhattan Project work done with dormers as state of the art ventilation and exposure control, the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission tasked the Harvard School of Public Health with finding a way to control ventilation, filter airborne contaminants, and minimize emission and general crapping up of absolutely everything. The result of this were the first HEPA filters. At Berkeley, these HEPA filters merged with the dormer enclosures and added ducting & fans to pull air away from workers, through filters, and exhausted far away on the roof. This first generation of chemical fume hoods were derisively known as Berkeley Boxes, with the implication you weren’t doing manly Real Science if you were using those. The dramatic drop in exposures, hospitalizations, and early career aggressive cancers lead to fume hoods being widely adopted very quickly and the negative connotation going away. The sash and plenum design of fume hoods, in an improved but still recognizable form little changed in 75 years, are still referred to as Berkeley hoods in the industry.

The Oldest Remaining Berkeley Box – by Phil Broughton, 2024

Which is why this entire post was written. Last Friday, I remembered to take a picture of one of the two surviving earliest Berkeley Boxes. If you have some experience of chemical fume hoods, you might be scratching your head at the choice of materials to make this one, plus the many retrofits made over the decades to bring it up to evolving standards. Some things you grandfather in other things, like the hoods you handle radioactive materials in, you don’t. This one is slated for demolition to be replaced by something newer and actually functional. This is one of the bittersweet things I learned long ago in my History of Science & Technology class, that in the progression of technology and processes we quite deliberately do not preserve the previous iterations. The fume hood isn’t the science, it’s one of the tools you need to do science safely; you need it functional and upgrade as needed/when you can and space is at too much a premium to lose to old broken stuff. This particular Berkeley Box has held on as long as it has because it was good enough for teaching purposes and there was no money or need for better. This isn’t a landmark or anything but it’s important to document and remember, like I’m doing here, of where we’ve been and why things are like they are now.

Don’t mourn this Berkeley Box. Appreciate it for the many decades of work it did teaching generations of students, being replaced by a better modern fume hood it paved the way for.

Camino Primitivo After Action Report, Part 2

With Spring all sprungen and allergies going off, I am having a weird sensation of being unstuck in time. It is hard to believe almost a year as passed since we walked the Camino Primitivo, seems like it was just the other week, with a side order of anxiety that I am not training to get ready for the Camino. As if I need to be getting ready to do it again at the end of May. What it does mean is that I need to do some more work on Part 2. If you’d like to read Part 1 first, go for it. In the interest of keeping posts under 3000 words, just barely in this case, yes, there will be a Part 3.

FOOD

“Phil Causes An International Incident” IASIP Title Slide, I can hear the music playing just looking at it.

My takes on food in a place are always going to be a bit weird due to my dietary restrictions: unless it’s whale, I can’t eat seafood. Well, I can eat seafood but the consequences of what I will do to someone’s bathroom for the next several hours may constitute an international incident. This is how I introduce to you the concept that despite spending all your time walking in the hills and mountains of Asturias and Galicia on the Camino Primitivo, you’re rarely all that far from the Bay of Biscay and the regional cuisine is very proud of it’s seafood. This was very unfortunate for me.

When you’re a peregrino, in addition to having access to the alburgues to sleep in at a cheap rate, many establishments while have a peregrino food special that is discounted. Or it will be the normal price but a much larger portion to help give those calories back to you. At the end of our first day when we stopped at Escamplero, we hobbled to the restaurant & bar to see what was available to eat. The special was a cauldron of Asturian sausage soup that was sausage which Fr. Gabriel and I couldn’t finish a single serving of between us. A week of walking later, when served a similar cauldron, I demolished the entire thing myself and was considering asking for more. Unfortunately, because we were so close to the Atlantic, the delicious and hearty regional soups are sometimes made with shrimp or with fish stock. I didn’t ask one time and hooboy was that a mistake. Didn’t sleep much that night and spent most of it in the toilet, violating the nose of whichever Russian bicyclist had to use it after me.

If you are someone that can eat seafood, the locals are very proud of their pulperias. Fr. Gabriel was foolishly abstaining from seafood because I couldn’t eat it. I told him he was dumbass, don’t inflict my limitations on himself, and have some damn octopus. The last time I saw him that happy putting something in his mouth, it was the first time he had Hangar One vodka at St. George Spirits. But I don’t want you to think I spent all of my time in Spain being poisoned or denied delicious things. Goodness no.

Museo de Jamon in Madrid. More of a temple than a museum. – by Phil Broughton, 2023

Skipping forward to our final days in Madrid, we had a hotel that was next to Taco Bell. We did not eat there. Instead, we went to the Museo de Jamon, which is not a museum but a restaurant. Admittedly, the near pornographic display of so many fine Iberico hams certainly felt museum-worthy. Per our server, tourists regularly show up there expecting a museum and he wanted to make sure we were there to eat. The next day, for our final dinner, there was a place that specialized in paella, because Fr. Gabriel felt to would be crime to go to Spain and not have paella. I looked at the menu in awe because while there were seafood based paellas on the menu, they were a distinct minority. I was excited by this and told our server.

Me: You have paella without seafood!
Server: Yes?
Me: This is amazing!
Server: Proper paella is made with snails and rabbit.
Me: [excited] Is that on the menu?
Server: No, but you can make paella with whatever. The key is to get the rice right.
Me: The United States doesn’t seem to have gotten this message.

So, I get it now. I finally understand why everyone is excited to order paella. I someday hope to get eat paella again but careful watch of menus in the last year since coming home hasn’t given me hope. America, get your shit together.

Fr. Gabriel tries to claim stolen valor from the Paladin town sign. – by Phil Broughton, 2023

Back on day two of our walk, Fr. Gabriel likes to joke that he is level 2 Cleric with one level of the Knight prestige class, but he is not a paladin no matter what this town’s sign says. But more importantly, it was time for lunch and we were very ready to drop our packs and take off our shoes, we stopped at the Villa Palatina Superior Hotel. There was a sign on the restaurant patio that said they had won a prize, in the International Cachopo Competition, for the Best Cachopo In The World. We didn’t know what a cachopo was, nor was our Spanish good enough for them to adequately describe it to us, but we intended to find out. But we did know if it was the Best Cachopo In The World, we would be fools to pass it up. With our limited Spanish, we figured out it was something fried  with a potato item as well, which sounded good enough by us. Spain dared to ask the question “What if we could incorporate cheese into weinerschnizel with double the meat?” and the answer is the culinary delight cachopo (or caxopo). We ate cachopo several more times on the Camino but none were as good as theirs. They legit won that award.

WHAT’S WITH ALL THE Xs?

Once upon a time, I picked up a bit of bar trivia which I then happily shared that any time you find an X in Spanish that you’d found a borrow word from native languages that came from New World back to Spain. Chocolate (xocatil), Mexico, etc. Yeahhhh, that’s horseshit and walking through Galicia taught me better, or at least it’s not quite the simple. The concepts of the nations of Spain and Mexico aren’t that simple either.

Think of the words “Oaxaca”, “Mexico”, and the name “Xavier”. How do you pronounce the X in those words? If you’re an English speaker who doesn’t know any better, you likely default to the clashing hiss /ks/ sound. But if you do know the local pronunciations, you know that X is actually closer to breathy H sound. For added fun, you may also know that the Spanish form of Xavier is Javier, with the J as H sound most people are accustomed to in Spanish. So what’s with up with X here?

First, we need some history. Mexico wasn’t always Mexico. The Spanish Empire established a variety of viceroyalties in the New World with very creative names like Nueva España, Nueva Leon, Nueva Granada, and most important for this tale, Nueva Galicia. Nueva Galicia was somewhat unique in the Spanish Empire as it was mostly settled by folks from old Galicia who got sent into the rugged interior. I assume the thinking was along the lines of “Send the hillfolk to settle the hills.” Once they arrived and met the native populations, they then proceeded to ask the important questions that any visitor to a new place asks:

  1. What do you call this place?
  2. What is that delicious thing we just ate?
  3. What was that thing that killed Bob?
Road sign showing the way to Augasantas and the church of San Xorxe, – by Phil Broughton, 2023

Because the local languages the settlers from Galicia ran into had some phonemes that the Spanish ear didn’t quite pick up, they used X for those sounds they weren’t quite sure on when they did their transliterations. This is because Galicians ALREADY USED X IN THEIR SPELLING. In Galicia, X is already in use for the English H sound, /ks/, something vaguely Z like, and sometimes even S like. When the English borrowed Xavier from their most convenient Spaniards, the folks in Galicia, they took the Galician spelling of Javier and the promptly mispronounced it. All those words the Galicians wrote down in the hills of New Galicia rolled back down across the plain to Veracruz, on to boats, and then back to Madrid where these new words got adopted into more general Spanish.

This is the linguistic equivalent of the classic joke of “You can’t have X, we have X at home” except X isn’t just a placeholder here, it’s the actual letter. Spain, you didn’t have to go to hills of Mexico to bring X into your language, you only had to go a few hundred kilometers to the northwest of Madrid. But there’s a reason they didn’t, as expressed to me by the desk clerk at our hotel in Madrid:

“They don’t speak Spanish. It’s [with a face of disgust] Galician.”

So, there you go. Galician had to be purified by the crucible Mexico to be allowed to come back. Also, PROTIP, any Spanish colloquialisms you may have learned in Mexico may not play particularly well in Madrid. And unless you like getting the “Did you just scratch your ass and offer to shake my hand?” face never, ever ask where los baños are in Spain. Try los servicos, but even that’s too crude in the north where they prefer los aseos. My personal translation is “ass place” and I refuse alternate etymologies.

FLORIDA MAKES SENSE NOW

Once people who once they start learning anything about the Conquistador Era of colonization, which the French & English then refined, they often boggle at how the Spanish arrived at the utterly horrific system of turboslavery that they did. To which I give a sad chuckle and say, oh, this doesn’t just happen. The Spaniards weren’t uniquely evil and creative in the New World. No, they’d been practicing at this for centuries already. This system, which is called encomienda, is was how the Reconquista was won.

During the Reconquista, to help secure the ever advancing, newly conquered southern frontiers of the kingdoms of Spain, they need to encourage migration and settlement to secure these new lands. The Crown would make land grants to people willing to settle in these area, often as a reward for military service, sometimes in thanks for being a financier of the Crown. It was still risky so you weren’t going to do that without a serious incentive, but the Crown had one. You weren’t allowed to enslave Christians but you were permitted to do so to any Muslims or Jews you might find there. As an A+ demonstration of perverse incentives, this was a stronger conversion drive than the Inquisition ever was but it also weakened the value of these grants. So, NEW DEAL, the grantee, the encomendor, was allowed also granted the ability to command the labor of a negotiated number of people within their granted lands. TOTALLY different from slavery, just negotiated contract serfdom. Of course, the peasants that were already there continued to be peasants except they were officially registered as associated to your grant in association with the local parishes and the dioceses. Not allowed to leave, still were peasants that owed rents, but not slaves. But the most important part of this system is that the encomienda exists at the discretion of the Crown and the encomendor owed the Crown for the privilege. The other incentive was that the encomendor rights were hereditary, giving rise to the “sword nobility” which would become a bit of a problem for Spain in a few more centuries.

This is the nasty philosophy behind every conquistador expedition to the New World. These weren’t just explorers, these were founders that seriously fucking owed the VC backers in Madrid. Marc Andreessen might not torture you and your family to death if you fail to found a unicorn company, but the Spanish Crown certainly would their captains sent across the sea.

Because 1492 was a helluva year. To folks in the Americas, this marks Columbus reaching Hispaniola and opening the New World to Spain. Back in Spain, 1492 marks the Fall of Granada and thus the end of the Reconquista. There is an argument to be made that had Columbus not returned to Spain that shit might have gotten dire. That Spain might have needed to keep the good times rolling right into North Africa or, more likely in my opinion and in keeping with the Iberian character, promptly fallen into bitter civil war. This is because with the end of the Reconquista a whole bunch of heavily armed and experienced soldiers who had suddenly lost their livelihood of conquest and future hopes of retirement & labor extraction. And, much worse, there were upcoming generations that now couldn’t become encomenderos, which was the ideal system to deal with the Excess Son Problem. Thank goodness there were these new continents to send them to!

To take us back to the earlier discussion of the Mexico before there was a Mexico, the population that left Spain to go to the New World was not an even distribution across the country. Much like if you take a random sampling of 10 Americans odds on favor you’re gonna get a Californian, you can’t avoid madrileños in the Spanish settlers but the Kingdoms of Asturias, Extremaduras, and Galicia are disproportionately represented. So many from Extremadura in fact that, unlike the rest of the Spanish federal states, they have a motto: Home Of The Conquistadors. To disparagingly explain why, for centuries upon centuries these were all regarded as places that were great to be from. Unless you really, really liked being a shepherd and being rained on continuously, perhaps you might want to seek your fortune literally anywhere else, doing anything else rather than in the ass end of Europe. This population was the backbone of the Reconquista, then of the conquistadors and they understood how the encomienda system worked. This is why Fr. Gabriel marveled at all the familiar names as we walked because all those Asturian and Galician families ended up in Nueva Galicia, and thus in New Mexico and the Philippines too.

One innovation that the Spanish Crown made for the system in the New World is that all lands belonged to the Crown and native peoples were declared to be have equivalent status as Castilian subjects, so the similarly were supposed to be exempt from slavery but they weren’t exempt from compelled labor as subjects. Instead, what we think of as conquistadors were more properly encomendors but were usually also military captains commanding troops. So, they’d be entitled to a contracted amount of labor from the native populations in the lands they’d been granted, but the trick was figuring out how to compel it (SEE ALSO: all the murder, infinite wars, and divide & conquer). And, hooboy, they better figure it out fast because the juice was running and they OWED the Crown; if you couldn’t pay in a timely manner, the Crown would be quite happy to name a new encomendor whose first order of business is to return you in chains to Madrid. The other innovation was that encomiendas in the New World weren’t hereditary, it only lasted two generations, in hopes of generating the settlements and freeholds that generated even more tax. One would hope that you and your family had found a way to become fabulously wealthy forever by the time your grandkids lost the contract.

Which brings me to Florida. Walking a lush path in Galicia one day, where it was hot & humid and the weather couldn’t decide if it wanted to rain or not, I bitterly remarked to Fr. Gabriel “Okay, I understand why someone from here might have gotten on a leaky boat, gotten to Florida and decided it wasn’t that all that bad.”

In general, encomiendas worked out pretty well for the Crown and the encomendors, less so for the native populations. So well in fact, Spain was granting them to anyone from anywhere provided you took a Hispanicized version of your name and swore to the Crown (the name the Russian fur trader José Bolchoff comes to mind). But there were some places where it just didn’t seem to work out, like La Florida. Successful encomiendas didn’t get a new encomendor and in a few generations it stopped and it wasn’t eligible for another. While Alta California was the new most remote place on Earth, relative to Madrid, at least it was pleasant and profitable, just…very far away. I have always said that Florida was a state founded on real estate scams but did not quite understand how this went all the way back. Florida was much closer to Spain but its rich resources consisted of [checks notes] tropical diseases, various bitey things and death at the hands of local tribes. The encomiendas in Florida failed every single goddamn time but the Crown seemed to find a never-ending string of suckers, mostly from Asturias, Extremaduras, and Galicia willing to give it a go. Ponce de Leon may have been the first true Floridian in that not only was he a failed encomendor but, after death enticed more to come to his deadly swampland with fanciful tales.

Until the advent of air conditioning, the settlement of Florida was barely more than pirate hideouts and cursory anti-piracy efforts. Some might argue not much has changed.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE – Kneejerk Spent Fuel Solutions

People who believe they have True Ultimate Power want nice, simple, sound bite executable solutions that obliterate nuance and complications with BOLD & DECISIVE ACTION. Were those actions good and appropriate? Ehhhhhh.

[The twenty-third in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers for my CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE quizzes. There’s never really a right answer but some might work out better under the constraints of the scenario. It’s like poetry, really.]

To those of you who looked at these choices and said, more eloquently, “These are shit” you are correct. But these are all options that have been considered precisely because they are easily conveyed as sound bite solutions. To make it worse, I would like you take a moment and consider the slate of choices that the current American president or British PM would like offered to them. Please consider how much thought they’d put into their choice. Yes, it be like that. You all put in WAY more thought. This is not to say that these soundbite “easy” solutions don’t have one whole hell of a lot of complications entailed with executing them. But True Ultimate Power means you are no longer concerned with trifling things that might stand in the way of your will.

Like treaties. @nuclearkatie said she is convinced she’ll spend the rest of her life explaining the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter, or London Conventions for short, forbid dumping radioactive waste in the ocean to people. We first tripped across this in the CYORA: Radioactive Dead, for why you might have issues doing burial at sea of radioactive dead sailors, but this isn’t gonna be concern for you. [waves True Ultimate Power wand] That treaty is now gone. We can now build the Great Glowing Reef!

Except no, it won’t really glow. That’s just silly. Declaring that you wanted to pile all the spent nuclear fuel in one pile on the bottom of the ocean isn’t entirely unreasonable. I mean, presumably you’re gonna do it in casks before sending it to Davy Jones’ Waste Repository. Now, where you build your pile depends on what you want to happen to it and for how long. One of the principles we try to follow for disposal on land is “geologically boring formations”. The abyssal plain of an ocean is, in fact, pretty damn boring.

Drop them on the muds of deep flat plain and wait for them to get encased in marine concrete and get further buried until they’re just a weird unit in the stratigraphic column, right?

Eh, as any marine biologist will tell you things move real slow down there. You’re running a race of biology vs. geology vs engineering. Can you get all this entombed by life, chemistry and pressure before those same things break down the casks themselves? If you want this to go faster, you need to do it much shallower water. Like the Florida Keys. And by faster, I mean at the speed of frisky coral growth.

But shallow water is also more vulnerable to weather and assholes dragging anchors through your Nuke Reef. You may create an incredibly productive fishing ground right in the place you don’t want people to go. The additional benefit to having them shallower is that if things start going wrong, or if you want to access them again for some reason, they’re much easier to get at than if you dropped them on the abyssal plain or, worse, into a trench subduction zone.

Speaking of subduction zones, this brings us to volcanoes. What goes down, must come up, in the form of magma to be specific. I know this because this stupid simple idea didn’t have good solid proof prior to my isotope geochemistry work. The mechanics & chemistry are…tricky.  Also, subduction is slooooow. It isn’t a human civilization grade level worry of getting obliterated cask & contents’ signature reappearing in the erupted lavas of the volcanic arc, but they will eventually come up. Hydrate melting LOVES to grab heavy metals are carry them up. Pretty much everything in that cask, and the cask itself, are the exact kind of things that will get extracted in the melt and percolate back through the crust, depositing veins of material. For the first time in billions of years, Earth might have veins of plutonium again.

As for throwing your waste casks into the top of a volcano, well, let’s take a look at what tossing regular garbage in looks like.

On a positive note, your waste cask won’t be filled with water to then generate lots of reactive steam for fun burps like that trash bag generates. It is, however, a great demonstration of the fuming, steaming mess that is a volcano. Damn things are just leaking all over the place. While there’s no treaty to prevent you from ordering all the spent fuel to be thrown into volcanos, you’re gonna get it back waaaaay too quickly and messily. Imagine Old Faithful spewing transuranic and actinide enhanced superheated water everywhere. So, doing this has a few issues but they’re hardly worth mentioning to the person with True Ultimate Power who is more an idea person that doesn’t like to get bogged down with details.

In the CYORA: Abort Launch, I discussed some of the considerations about blowing up radioactive things high in the atmosphere, mid-yeet. This would be an awful lot more and nastier radioactive material in terms of environmental persistence than a mere Pu-238 RTG. At the most fundamental level, full waste casks are HEAVY. The rocket you need to just get the cask to orbit is, well, a lot. An Apollo lunar mission is ~2/3 the mass of one of our smaller fuel casks. So, something larger than a Saturn V is in order. If you want to get quite a few casks off the face of our planet at once, now we’re talking about breaking atmospheric testing treaties to do nuclear propulsion Orion-style. Nuking the launch pad repeatedly to get the nuclear waste out of here seems a bad trade.

And that’s just one launch.

Once you’re off of Earth the real fun begins. As quite a few of you exhaustively discussed, the orbital mechanics and/or reaction mass considerations of slowing anything down enough to drop something into the sun are non-trivial. It’s easier to fling it into the great beyond. Unless, of course, you’re willing to wait. True Ultimate Power merely demanded that you fire that spent fuel into the sun. The speed of yeet was never specified, only destination. Just, umm, be careful that it doesn’t smack into anything else while it slowly drifts down the gravity well. Also, don’t miss. You have orders. It may take a billion or three years though so, GOOD NEWS, no one is going to yell at you if you mess up.

It is FAR easier to fling things out of the solar system entirely, for given values of easy. I recommend adding quite a bit of extra delta-V to make sure it’s gone. Fuck Alpha Centauri, they know what they did. Stupid mind worms.

Which brings us to what is by far the most popular option, reprocessing everything forever. First of all, let’s take care of these non-proliferation treaties and policies. Got just the tool for them. Put ’em in a nice big stack before dropping them in.

Shredder Industrial Shredder GIFfrom Shredder GIFs

Remember when I shared the term National Sacrifice Area at the end of the Abort Launch essay? Wherever you decide is going to be the True Ultimate Power Memorial Reprocessing Facility is a place I would consider as much, because that is some nasty, messy chemistry done at large scale. Please read up on Hanford and Rocky Flats for reference. Those two are horrible and they were interested in the extraction of plutonium for nuclear weapons production, not fuel recycling.

PROTIP: Don’t make any more nuclear weapons.

Really, ~95% of your spent fuel is recyclable as a brand new LEU rod. To reiterate, this is terrible bad no good chemistry with bonus gross fission products but some people find it fun. This is all the fun of enrichment and fuel fabrication but you’re also likely going to be running a whole bunch of separate extraction lines for those fission products. The good news is that these area all things we know how to do. The reason we don’t do a lot of reprocessing, other than those treaties we shredded earlier, is that they are incredibly labor and resource intensive. Also, small oops moments add up really quick. Sometimes one oops is too many and then you have to abandon that entire separation line. SEE ALSO: Rocky Flats, Room 141, AKA “The Infinity Room” Oh, and you’ll probably want to build some plutonium burning reactors and detoxification accelerators.

You’ll solve the spent fuel issue but not the issues of radioactive waste. In fact, from one point of view you’re kinda making them worse.

In short @nuclearkatie & @slabbxo‘s future employment are assured.

~fin~

Phil vs. LLMs

Last year, my friend Ed made a post regarding the nascent proliferation of ChatGPT and competitors into various search engines and other products. With a moment’s contemplation after reading it, I just realized how spectacularly bad this could go if, for example, you went to do a search for an chemical’s Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) and a Large Language Model (LLM) gave you back some bullshit advice to take in the event of hazmat exposure or fire.

NOTE: I refuse to use the term AI or even generative AI to describe LLMs. They are glorified versions of Dr. Sbaitso at best.

Your vanilla search for a normal MSDS will return several of varying qualities, that you then read and glean information from. Because an MSDS is primary information, it is authoritative. LLM generated instruction is secondary, theoretically deriving from those primary sources, but also prone to fabrication in places where it doesn’t know enough or doesn’t recognize the presentation. The format of an MSDS has a regulatory mandate behind it, though that varies by jurisdiction. The varying quality of MSDSs usually comes in sins of omission, which ChatGPT abhors, not fabrication, which ChatGPT does as a feature. An MSDS may not tell you what respirator to use; ChatGPT will specify a typical filter that is blatantly incorrect through hallucination. So, a LLM return on that same search will give you advice on how to work with that material that may be very, very wrong. 

It’s nice that I have a new thing to add to safety training now, that people should absolutely not use any conversational LLM generated advice unless they are actively seeking a Darwin Award. What happens when you turn this loose on budding makers starting to tinker in their garage, trying to figure things out, and then gets handed some complete LLM garbage in their search? Sure, they could already get human generated garbage on forums & reddit but they may actually be more reliable now by comparison. I shared the mere concept of this with my favorite industrial hygienist. She said “I have enough nightmares already” and closed the Zoom on me.

As an example, human brains melt at the concept of what to do with chemical incompatibles and water reactive substances during a fire. An LLM has no concept of chemical incompatibility, just how to make an answer that is MSDS shaped. Machine learning will train on the typical response, what to do 99% of the time, except sometimes the sound of approaching hoofbeats is not a horse, zebras are more common than you think, and they will kill you. However, an LLM trained to think about zebras is going to return garbage to you most of the time because it has no way to know better because it’s not thinking. The very first thing we teach students to do before they do an experiment is “check the literature” and step one is almost always hit up Google. I grimly await a lab blowing up due to LLM advice thanks to Google’s garbage automatically generated and promoted output.

I’m sure this seems a bit extreme but I want you to think for a minute about something much more mundane, something that happens thousands upon thousands of times a day: a Poison Control call. Except people don’t use the phone much any more, do they? So, they search for the answer of what to do when their kid has swallowed some sort of chemical. If they’re lucky “CALL POISON CONTROL AT THIS NUMBER” will be the first result. If they’re not and they get some prime health care advice from an automatically generated answer, lives are in the hands of an LLM. I can also absolutely foresee a LLM product being sold to emergency dispatch centers to generate fast answers for what to do while waiting for paramedics to arrive.

Anyway, this is what I think about as various companies hitch their wagons to LLMs for no goddamned good reason. Okay, I’m done ranting for now.

BONUS MONEY RANT: Maundy Money

Per the Catholic Church, and other denominations that notionally agree with their calendar, it’s Holy Week. Pretty much every day in from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday has a special name. For example, as I write this, today is Fig Tuesday because important fig related things happened today in the life of Jesus. Tomorrow is Spy Wednesday where we remember the sneeki breeki of Judas. But then you get to Thursday and it’s called Maundy Thursday. You then have to deal with the classic question from a five year old “What’s a Maundy?” and you are instantly paralyzed with fear that Maundy is a racial slur. GOOD NEWS! Maundy is not a slur unless someone has been innovating in the field and I haven’t heard about it.

But I’m not here to talk about the Easter story, except in so much as it touches on something near and dear to my heart: Coins

In the calendar, Maundy Thursday is the commemoration of The Last Supper and Jesus’ instructions to his disciples to “do this in memory of me”. It is a commandment, which may give us the etymological root of the word Maundy. If you’re the kind of person who is inclined to believe that there is hidden messaging and symbolism in the bible, well, it ain’t exactly hidden in the story of The Last Supper. This is also the point where time keeps on passing and the cultural conversation back and forth with local cultures starts creating new holiday customs. Traditionally, Maundy Thursday is when alms are given to the poor by royalty, in the form of coins or clothing, as they make their way to church and the mighty wash the feet of beggars to demonstrate humility. Nice, right? Well, you can count on the English to make things difficult and also decide to embrace symbology to get out of actually doing the whole humility thing.

If one were to take a very cynical view of the practices by royalty, you might interpret the giving of alms very publicly before entering church as signaling of both their wealth and control. It is hard to interpret the footwashing, the pedilavium, as anything but the high stooping to serve the low, if of course those feet hadn’t already hadn’t been pre-washed for the royal and sachets of pleasant flowers & herbs (AKA nosegays) provided so you didn’t have to smell the poor. The only thing left of the footwashing these days is the wearing of nosegays. The gifts of alms got complicated too. If nice clothing was given to the poor by the royal, footmen were there to promptly take that away the moment the royal looked away because, MY GOD, you can’t have the poor wearing nice things! We have sumptuary laws in place for reason and we must all signal properly, so give that back, here’s a penny, a kick in the head, and be glad for it, beggar. Which brings us to coins.

When distributing coins of alms to the poor, the royalty didn’t just press a penny into each poor persons hand and be on their way. Goodness no! That would involve touching the poor and they don’t deserve the King’s Touch because clearly the poor lack divine favor. No, coins were given in a a special purse to help give that little step of remove and also make it very clear this was a gift from the King. Sometimes the purses were made of very nice fabric because royalty deserved nice things and that’s all they should touch, except, oops there’s that sumptuary law stuff again where the poor aren’t actually allowed to possess things like velvet. So, again, footmen are handy to take that back from the poor and give them something else…maybe. Of course, the other things the sumptuary laws covered were the coins themselves. Have you ever considered that you might be too poor to be allowed to even touch silver, much less gold? Royalty, however, aren’t supposed to touch anything more base than silver, so we have a mismatch problem if the royalty can only give a gift that the poor aren’t allowed to touch. Luckily, those footmen are still handy to help facilitate an exchange to a more suitable currency.

1838 Maundy 2 Pence obverse – from the Phil Broughton Collection, 2024
1838 Maundy 2 Pence reverse – from the Phil Broughton Collection, 2024

In a prior Money Rant, we discussed how the metropole may deny certain denominations or kinds of coinage to their colonies, but this is on a much more personal basis. Prior to the Great Recoinage of 1817, the money handed out in Maundy purses was normal circulating coinage. After that point, pennies stopped having a silver variant in circulation and so the mint struck a distinct set of coins for royalty to give out as Maundy money. Except now, since Maundy money wasn’t circulating currency, the footmen were there to take that purse right back from the poor and hand them an equivalent acceptable sum of money. But the fascination with the royal family as kinda gross celebrity watching really takes off in the Victorian Era and people didn’t want to give the Maundy money back. Victoria was all for fostering this devotion to the Cult of the Crown, so she ordered many extra coins struck so they could be given as gifts. I apologize that my example young Victoria Maundy tuppence is hard to read, but tarnish is a sumbitch sometimes and beggars (HA!) can’t be choosers.

These days, the coins are still struck and the royals still hand them out, but they’re sort of like a WHO LOVES THE FIRM THE MOST?!?! bonus gift in addition to the cash to whoever wins the Most Deserving Pensioner Award from the local parish

EXTRA LIFE 2023 – Encore! Encore!!!

First of all, thank you to everyone that contributed to make Extra Life 2023 the highest amount TEAM SENSIBLE SHOES has raised for children hospitals in the seven years we’ve been doing this. Also, your donations make our Shadows of Brimstone gameplay more chaotic and fun than it is normally as you claim incentives so thank you for that too. Viewers Like You insure that we have no idea what our gameplay is going when we start the marathon every year and this was no exception.

One of our regular bid incentives is a rather expensive one called “Once More, WITH FEELING!” where you make us play the scenario we just did again, except all the enemies are brutal this time. Apparently you all were big fans of the introductory mission because we did it FOUR times, which is a titch challenging when things go brutal with low level characters, especially when one of them (mine) has a curse that guarantees that we get the maximum number of enemies or gives them an elite ability. I cannot remember a game with more injuries and madness rolls due to getting KO’d than this one.

BUT WE’RE NOT DONE!

The Hellmouth
Shadows of Brimstone THE HELLMOUTH item listing (image courtesy of Flying Frog Productions)

You see, at DiceFest 2023 we asked the creators of the game what scenario the recommended we play that would be most entertaining for Viewers Like You to watch. Both of them independently said “The Hellmouth”. The Hellmouth is a dedicated scenario with a nifty 3D printed piece of terrain that constantly spews doom at us which we need to seal. Once we finished our four intro missions, we moved on to this and boy howdy did it give us an asskicking. Hopefully an entertaining one, but an asskicking all the same.

And then someone, for the children, decided that The Hellmouth was so much fun that we needed to do it Once More, WITH FEELING! Unfortunately, time was short, the 24hr marathon was up, and we needed to go to work the following day, so we had to call it. But we felt bad about this as someone had paid money to watch us suffer and wasn’t going to get to enjoy it. There’s also two more random character level ups on the stack as well. We need to give people value for money, so here we go…

TEAM SENSIBLE SHOES’ Extra Life Encore Play – January 13th, starting 11am PST until ???

Now, while Extra Life 2023 officially ended and the page closed at midnight on New Year’s Day, that doesn’t mean your shenanigans are over, demoted to a mere viewer, goodness no. Our faithful team captain has set up a Tiltify page to let you both watch the game feed from Twitch and to claim incentives from the abbreviated list (no more Once More, WITH FEELING! this time). The drink incentives are active now, the rest will open up at 11am on Saturday, this time with proceeds going to the Southern Center for Human Rights.

So, please, join us for a good cause as we wrap things up. While we owe the brutal trip into The Hellmouth, we’ll probably play more than that for you to enjoy with us. After all, we like this game.