I have spent most of this day trying to sort out the heap and piles of piles and heaps of papers on my desk. (With ongoing laundry as a background task.
It has been a dance of a step or two back for every step forward, of task-dependencies stacked or nested five and six deep. I think I have made some progress today, but it's difficult to tell.
The irradiated dime did turn up, so that's kewl. A 1945 mercury-head that got neutron-zapped at the AEC's Museum of Atomic Energy, some time in the latter half of the previous century; it's probably ticked down to just about nothing now -- by deliberate choice of material, most of the radioactivity (from a minute amount of Ag-110 and even less Ag-108) had decayed by the time a visitor to the museum had walked back to their car. What's left? A smidge of cadmium! Still, it got zapped and transmuted, or it probably did -- mine isn't the sealed version, so someone might have swapped out the silver dime in mine for one that never saw gamma rays.
Thanks for an interesting post. It's hard to believe that I'd not heard of the irradiation of dimes. Or...perhaps my memory is in worse shape than I thought. The casings from the 1964 World's Fair reminded me of my QRL cards that I had made up when I was first licensed in 1955 - with a stylized atom in silver on black or red glossy card stock.
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