Saturday, March 06, 2021

Hey, Sisyphus, When's Lunch?

      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.

1 comment:

Cop Car said...

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.