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Eh. So I’m a banana.

I’ve been wearing this around Second Life for a while. It’s so me.

In SL, you can be anything you want to be. A dinosaur. A flower. An astronaut.

And seemingly 90% of players want to be slutty-looking girls with huge tits. Including the men.

It’s so depressing.

Anyhoo, it seemed like the right graphic to put next to this story from the excellent Watt’s Up With That blog. It’s a timely repost from a February article.

The Cliff’s Notes version: lots of foods are radioactive. Bananas are especially radioactive. Radioactive enough to set off the bomb-detection doo-dads at our ports. Radioactive enough to give you a measurable dose if you stand next to a crate of the treacherous yellow bastards.

So proponents of nuclear energy use the banana equivalent dose as a way of expressing the risk of various radiation exposures. How many bananas would you have to eat to get similarly irradiated?

We don’t have any numbers coming out of Japan yet (and when we do get them, I freely admit those numbers might be bad), but to use an example from Three Mile Island — after the accident, the NRC found traces of radioactive iodine in the milk. I’m sure it was a story at the time. That’s the kind of place you get radiation poisoning — not so much from breathing it, but the stuff gets in the air, gets in the grass, gets in the cow, gets in the milk.

So how much radiation was in the milk? You’d have to drink seventy-five twelve-ounce glasses of contaminated milk to equal the radiation dose from eating a single banana.

A little perspective from a giant animated bruised banana. Good weekend, all!

Comments


Comment from Can’t hark my cry
Time: March 19, 2011, 12:06 am

Snort! Probably time to start popping some corn. Speaking of which, how many cups of popcorn. . .

Somewhere, there should be a convenient food conversion chart for this.


Comment from BuckNutty
Time: March 19, 2011, 1:53 am

Heh, I love it


Comment from Oceania
Time: March 19, 2011, 2:33 am

Most K40 is excreted renally …
Try a similiar activity of I131 and it would be a different story …


Comment from Oceania
Time: March 19, 2011, 3:40 am

Talking of dose …. someone (who will remain anon) here once said:

“Hell, where I live, average annual dose is between 400 and 650 milliseiverts.
According to the IAEA, I should have been dead decades ago…..”

Yeah, and I’m a ‘green glow in the dark’ Paddy Days Leper!


Comment from Kurt P
Time: March 19, 2011, 3:49 am

Here’s a video I saw once- and had to find again after the flame-stream media went into ZOMyGAWD-we’re-going-to-have-three-eared-kidzz-who-kan’t-read mode.

It kind of puts those four (maybe) welting reactors into perspective.

http://blip.tv/play/AeaDFAI
Or maybe we should cue Dr. Strangelove?


Comment from Dr Strangelove
Time: March 19, 2011, 4:37 am

With the proper breeding techniques … Mein President!

Kurt, excuse me, but surely your own government has your best interests at heart? Your prevailing notion should be one of nostalgia that your world governments have safety tested 2500 warheads each with a nominal amount of Pu of around 10 kgs in the atompsheric and underground testing periods.

Such a sacrifice for the future of the human race is needed meind fiend?


Comment from Elphaba
Time: March 19, 2011, 5:32 am

You crack me up!


Comment from David Gillies
Time: March 19, 2011, 6:30 am

Yeah, banana dose was kind of an inside joke when we were studying nuclear physics. I was doing that just prior to Gulf War I when everyone was pretty excited about Saddam’s WMD for the first time. That was fun. Lent a real sense of urgency to the thing.

Dose effects are strongly non-linear, mind, both in total exposure and dose rate. The 20 mSv/hour they’re quoting for inside the Jap nuke plant itself is not good, but you’d probably run out your department’s overtime budget for the week before it had any real effects. The tens of sieverts an hour they were quoting for the close vicinity of Chernobyl immediately after the containment structure failed is more like the sort of event that should have Gloria Vanderbilt Jr. ruffling his botoxed brow while digesting a crash course in rad hazards. Rule of thumb for prompt doses: up to 200 mSv, and you might feel at the top-end like you have the flu, and you might get leukaemia one day, but you’ll make it in the near term. A sievert or so will make you plenty sick. You might well die in Khartoum. Kyoto? Not, although no-one will insure you against cancer ever again. Three Sv? Now you’re in real trouble. You might make it with good medical care and a dose of luck. That’s the LD50, really. 6 Sv? Walking ghost syndrome. Dead but you don’t know it. 10 Sv+? Prompt incapacitation, CNS derangement, GI tract melts, nasty but not as nasty as 6 Sv ‘cos it’s over quicker. 80 Sv? What the putative ‘neutron bomb’ was meant to do to forward-echelon T-80 crews if they broke through the Fulda Gap. Ever seen what a good blast of Raid does to a cockroach? Yep.


Comment from cmblake6
Time: March 19, 2011, 9:03 am

In the words of the Marinus van der Lubbe International Firebombing Society: “The only way outta here is straight up!”


Comment from Dr Strangelove
Time: March 19, 2011, 9:18 am

Something for Oceania:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeHTziiFVx0

Is America the Evil Empire?


Comment from David Gillies
Time: March 19, 2011, 4:38 pm

I just got a flash from The Simpsons: Homer the Vigilante

Kent Brockman and Talking Head:
KB: Professor, without knowing precisely what the danger is, would you say it’s time for our viewers to flee in terror from an imminent attack by a radiation-maddened Godzilla?

TH: Mmm, yes I would, Kent.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: March 19, 2011, 7:11 pm

Supermoon at the max over the English coast at this very moment. Sucker is HUGE. And yellow.


Comment from mojo
Time: March 19, 2011, 7:48 pm

“…as each male would be required to do prodigious, um, service in this area, the females would have to be of an extremely… stimulating nature…”


Comment from Oceania
Time: March 19, 2011, 11:32 pm

OMFG! Where did you find that?!

Those were the days – where they filmed Oxford Debates. Oh how it has been turned to custard with the likes of slopehead Al Gore’s Stoner Speech ..
Anyone got a vid of that?


Comment from Nina from GCP
Time: March 20, 2011, 12:49 am

In January I swallowed 119 millicuries of I 131–for the third time in less than 4 years…wonder how many bananas that is?!

Speaking of bananas, I’ve got some downstairs. Think I’ll go eat one.


Comment from JeffS
Time: March 20, 2011, 2:10 am

If you’re a banana on SL, Stoatie, do you go by the screen name of “Mrs. Peel”?

[Gawd, I’m amazed no one thought of that one already! 🙂 ]


Comment from Mitchell
Time: March 20, 2011, 5:41 am

Off topic, but something you might want to look in to Stoaty:
99 Designs.


Comment from Can’t hark my cry
Time: March 20, 2011, 12:43 pm

Bananas. Yes. There’s this:

http://bentobjects.blogspot.com/2010/05/bananas-at-bedtime.html

(I’m putting in this line of text in the hope that it will distract Akismet, which hates when I post links)


Comment from Mono The Elderish
Time: March 20, 2011, 11:05 pm

yep stoaty, gotta love the off-color moon….


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: March 20, 2011, 11:40 pm

That bent objects dude is genius, Can’t hark. I’ve seen his stuff before, but not is site.

And I’m not really a red in tooth and claw capitalist, Mitchell. I can see all the other designers beating me up and stealing my lunch money.

There’s a reason I was a salariman all those years.


Comment from dawn
Time: March 21, 2011, 5:10 am

I hope you write the heck out of this new war we’ve got ourselves in over the weekend. Is a war more moral because the French started it?

The French never finish a war, do they?


Comment from Oceania
Time: March 21, 2011, 8:02 am

Well, the French have never won anything that they have started.

That said, neither has the USA come to think of it.

It is just a new massive cluster phuck in the sand.
Dead Arabs, Operation In Libya (OIL) is already underway with amphib groups ready to land to oust BP and rewrite oil contracts for American companies …. ironic I hear you say? Why yes. Just waiting for the DUst to settle.

More to do with who is selling Libyan OIL to whom, where, and at what price.

Watch Libyan Government money in various bank accounts in the US, UK and EU mysteriously ‘evapourate’ overnight … if it hasn’t already.


Comment from Rich Rostrom
Time: March 22, 2011, 12:50 am

Oceania: Well, the French have never won anything that they have started.

Aside from World War I, the Italian War of Liberation (1859: Napoleon III beat up Austria, allowing the Italians to unify their country. He collected a pourboire (tip) by annexing Upper Savoy and Nice.), and the conquest of Algeria…

That said, neither has the USA come to think of it.

Aside from the Barbary Pirates War, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War. But that’s because we don’t often start wars.


Comment from Oceania
Time: March 22, 2011, 1:42 am

I hope that you are not saying that the French started World War I?

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