Atomic energy toy

[Tough Guy no. 1265]

Phosphors in the tube fluoresce then, and not phosphoresce :-)

[Tough Guy no. 1265]

Probably illegal based on the stupid idea that it could be used as an aid to building a nuclear bomb.

[Tough Guy no. 1265]

Do you have a digital camera?

[Nightjar]

Brian is probably best placed to answer questions on what his browser does, but that page is packed with image based links, which I expect would all need to be converted to text equivalents. I don't know what his browser does with scripts, but there are a lot of those on that page and the audio from the advert may well delay the text being read out.

[Tough Guy no. 1265]

Ah now that makes sense.

If there was an advert I didn't see it as I have a very good ad blocker :-)

[Nightjar]

Yes, but not the will to register with a site that would allow me to upload images from it to the web.

[Tough Guy no. 1265]

You don't have your own? Luddite :-P

You can also put attachments in here, it'll just piss off the geeks.

-- =

A teacher wanted to teach her students about self-esteem, so she asked a= nyone who thought they were stupid to stand up. One kid stood up and the= teacher was surprised. She didn=E2=80=99t think anyone would stand up s= o she asked him, =E2=80=9CWhy did you stand up?=E2=80=9D He answered, =E2= =80=9CI didn=E2=80=99t want to leave you standing up by yourself.=E2=80=9D=

[Jim Newman]

Radium paint is predominantly an emitter of alpha rays, as these have only a short range through matter due to their large mass and high charge, they would be stopped by the glass and metal of the watch.

The tritium gas used in trimphones are beta emitters, but the energies are quite low, so they're all absorbed by the phosphor coated glass tubes.

[alan_m]

Most of the servers will just remove the attachments.

[Tough Guy no. 1265]

Mine doesn't as it's also a binary server.

[Tough Guy no. 1265]

My late grandparents had a trimphone. Never did them any harm.

[charles]

we had one, too. I'm not yet late.

[Jim Newman]

Yes, that's because the glass means it's not dangerous.

[Tough Guy no. 1265]

Unless you drop it, then run :-)

[Martin Brown]

You wouldn't get it past H&S today but that doesn't mean it is the worlds most dangerous toy. I expect some of the early dodgy small steam engines have killed and maimed far more youngsters that anything else.

Uranium ore isn't particularly dangerous unless you crush it and eat it (and even then it isn't all that bad). Uranium photographic intensifier was once commonplace and uranium glass is still easily available today.

Uranium is present at trace levels in many rocks at 2ppm. What is rare is uranium ore with a commercially viable U concentration in it.

Often associated with much hotter radium which may actually represent a fair proportion of the observed disintegrations.

There is a fair amount of depleted uranium about being used as weights and as a screen for radioactivity! It turns out that putting a comparatively thin layer of steel and lead either side allows you to exploit its high density without it contributing to the count rate.

You can handle DU wrapped in a sheet of paper or plastic sheet without any significant risk. Most of the alpha particles are stopped by that and it isn't all that hot to begin with.

My fathers WWII era radium luminous watch would set off radiation alarms and I used it as a source of alpha particles when I built my own cloud chamber. It was a seriously hot thing and very bad for the girls that painted the dials and licked their brushes ...

[Huge]

I was at a "glass fair" yesterday (my wife collects "art glass") and there were a number of examples of uranium glass there.

[Martin Brown]

Unnecessarily over cautious.

So long as you don't break the glass envelope the tritium can't do you any harm. Tritiated plastics are also used in emergency exit signage. The beta emission at 18.6keV is pretty well matched to TV phosphors and very few can get through even the thinnest layer of glass or plastic...

They were used in various failsafe emergency lighting schemes and are also still used for fishing floats eg.

[Martin Brown]

I have a small collection of Davidson uranium glass it is a very pretty bright lemon yellow colour and fluoresces strongly green in uv light.

Mineral samples of pitchblende are available from Cornwall in the UK where it occurs as a trace component in tin and lead mining spoil heaps.

[Martin Brown]

They do both. If you close your eyes first switch off and then look at the tube in darkness you will see that it phosphoresces for a short while after switch off. The modern generation of glo products use doped Strontium Aluminate which is an astonishingly good long life phosphor. The old glow in the dark stuff used zinc sulphide which was rather poor.

This glo torch is a particularly good example - after a day in sunlight the torch plastic body emits enough light in total darkness to find it by if the lights go out suddenly or to see by when dark adapted.

It will still keep glowing for several hours after exposure to the sun.

There are also the chemical glow sticks that use a combination of a peroxide, dye and electron donor to generate cold chemical light.

[Tough Guy no. 1265]

I've never understood why people think it's the end of the world if lights go out.