An exploration of ultracoffee, radiation safety, and more often than not a beer or two.
Let me get this out of the way upfront. I didn’t even spend long enough in Kiev and I want to go back before it’s too late. My time in the city was all too brief and all too enjoyable, among people who are putting on a brave face over deep insecurity and fear. Get …
Continue reading “Herr Direktor Funranium Goes to Chernobyl & Kiev, Part 3 – Kiev, Hero City”
When you have the incredibly photogenic and not bulldozed ghost city of Pripyat to take pictures of, it’s easy to forget the other towns and villages that were once there, or still are in the case of the city of Chernobyl. Generally the name “Chernobyl” is associated in everyone’s head with the the reactor that …
The very short version, to paraphrase Ghostbusters: if someone asks if you’d like to go to Chernobyl, you say YES! Fair warning, there are going to be units related to radiation dose discussed in this post. For an idea of what they mean and to put them in perspective, I recommend this excellent infographic by Randall …
Continue reading “Herr Direktor Funranium Goes to Chernobyl & Kiev, Part 1 – Pripyat”
I am freshly returned from Ukraine suffering the worst case of jetlag I have ever had. Needless to say, I am a moderately functional human only by the grace of Black Blood of the Earth. Speaking of which, you’ve still got one more week of production left in this window before American Thanksgiving. After that, …
This is a story of desire for recognition in a cold world governed by arcane calculations and the eldritch math of the airlines. One man’s fight to have a more comfortable seat. I am, of course, speaking of the classic folly of doing a mileage run. TL;DR version: I’m not doing that again, or at …
Continue reading “Phil’s Trip To Nowhere: A Mileage Run Tale”
Normally, I wait until late November to post this but since three people asked last weekend of all things I reckon I should put it up now. You people are making the rest of us look bad by having your shit together for the holidays in October. We, the rest of humanity, aspire to your levels …
Here is your advance warning of my next, entirely too brief, trip: from November 9-14th, I will be going to visit Kiev, Pripyat and Chernobyl. This is a somewhere I’ve wanted to go for a very long time so I’m treating this as a slightly belated birthday present to myself as I collect one of …
Scheduling information first: the short ordering window that closes on September 19th, before I get on a plane to Boston, is now open for most items. After the 19th, another ordering window will open so you can continue to place orders, but nothing for that one will ship until after I return on October 5th. …
Continue reading “BBotE Vacation Alert, Big Trees, Bad Air, and Camping Theory”
Let’s begin with the improvement you can’t see or, rather, won’t see anymore. At some point a “helpful upgrade” was done by BigCommerce who provide the architecture and servers for the store side of Funranium Labs. In the course of this upgrade, they managed to break the 3rd party SSL chain and depending on the browser …
Continue reading “Recent Improvements, New BBotEs, and Vacations”
I’m putting this here to, potentially, stop questions. I, honestly, remember near to nothing about the medevac we had in late 2003. Hypothyrodism due to protracted exposure to cold and dark takes a lot of forms and mine was memory loss and appalling Yoda like grammar. I remember very little about September 2003 and near …
PLEASE NOTE: there is a very good reason there are no pictures associated with this story. As some of you may know, I teach a radiation safety course at a local community college. A while back, we were discussing bioassay techniques (read: ways determine if there’s been an uptake of radioactive material in the body, …
Continue reading “Great Moments In Teaching – Fecal Samples”
Once upon a time, the radiation safety officer (RSO), let’s call him Bob, had been out performing the inventory of source material* and ran across a bit of excitement. In this particular lab, they had approximately 10 grams of uranyl acetate, a very common contrast stain for electron microscopes. The poor unfortunate grad student who was …
Continue reading “The Picric Acid Tale or “Why I Can’t Have Four Day Weekends Anymore””
Adding this slice of life from almost a decade ago at LLNL to the permanent record of Funranium Labs as a reference point for Test Subject Vision Scientist (subcategory: Male) [SCENE: Early April 2008, Lawrence Livermore Nat’l Lab. The transition to the new managing private consortium, primarily run by Bechtel, has proven to be very uncomfortable …
The other day I was trading tales with the former BBotE Ambassador of NYC, @EditrixW, and after sharing my new favorite Beatles cover song from Mongolia we drifted by COMPLETELY REASONABLE CONNECTIONS to the reason why my Lovely Assistant and I haven’t played Scrabble in quite some time. You see, we used to play it in a way I …
Continue reading “Klingon Scrabble and Odd Units of Measure”
As mentioned in the previous post, I fled the mainland for a week to escape Super Bowl madness in the SF Bay Area to the lovely Big Island of Hawaii. As my Lovely Assistant had never been to that island before, we split our time between Hilo and Kailua so she could experience both sides. …