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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Yes, that’s the second arc.

    In the first accident there were no half-spheres, the neutrons were being reflected back using bars of tungsten carbide placed around the exposed core.

    Wiki photo from a recreation of the first incident:

    In the second accident, a year later, the reflective material was the two beryllium half-spheres. Shims were used to ensure the two halves were never fully closed, which would trigger the nuclear chain reaction.

    Supposedly, this guy liked to show off and had done this demonstration a dozen times in front of different audiences, wearing jeans and cowboy boots and using his screwdriver instead of the shims.

    Some report that Fermi told the guy and others that “they would be dead in a year” if they kept doing that… and voila.

    The good thing is that he at least was hunched over the core, so he mostly shielded everyone else in the room from the worst of the radiation by absorbing it himself. 9 days later, he was dead. The guy closest to him was in the hospital for several weeks with severe radiation poisoning, but at least survived but died fairly young, in his 50s, which may or may not have been related…


  • That was hilarious. Also kinda spooky to think that, if Japan hadn’t surrendered, Demon Core-kun would have been the 3rd nuke dropped over them.

    The cartoon only covers the second story arc though, the one with the screwdriver.

    In the first arc, the core is “nude” and they’re stacking neutron-reflecting bricks around it to bring it close to criticality. A scientist drops a brick by accident on top of the core and boom, blue light and you’re dead (takes 2 weeks for your body to notice though).








  • You really took the bit between your teeth blaming the lycan there, didn’t you Mr Fox. The lab guys are pulling teeth to get the results, but we’ll soon know who’s bite marks are on that girl who bit the bullet. You wouldn’t be lying through your teeth now would you? Because I’ll sink my teeth into you and bring you down if it’s the last thing I do…

    …said some detective with a hyperfixation.









  • Maybe the French word does have that origin, and other languages adapted it “differently”?

    In Italian for example, this is called cooking “al cartoccio”, where paper is “carta” and butterfly is something else entirely.

    I was trying to check Larousse but it keeps blocking me so meh. Perhaps both are true, as you said.




  • No, I’m in that boat too.

    I’ll pick up different songs as I hear them, but my brain after a while defaults to 4 non blonds - what’s up.

    I have no idea why, I don’t particularly like the music, I never listened to it much, and still it got imprinted into my brain somehow.

    Out of the blue, my brain just starts playing
    And so I wake in the morning and I step outside
    And I take a deep breath and I get real high
    And I scream from the top of my lungs, “What’s going on?”