Hammer Bites: Acceptable Radiation

0:00Hammer bites, bite-sized hammers. Join us as we introduce smaller, stand-alone pieces of the hammer puzzle, rewound, repackaged, replayed, re-hammed, and fresh from the vault. In Extheon known, there's loads of bubbling about radiation and atomic bombs with guy encounters all over the place, but at one point there's the mention of acceptable radiation, and that's set off a little explosion in my tiny brain. Is there such a thing as acceptable radiation? The sure answer would be yes. Thank you, and good night. But I want to know more than that, because I'm really that nosy, and it turns out there's three main types of ionizing radiation. That's the bad stuff, and not the type you warm your soup up with.

1:02Alpha radiation is heavy, positively charged particles, emitting from elements such as uranium and radium. Alpha radiation is the least dangerous, and can be stopped completely by a sheet of paper, a very nutty house of hammer t-shirt, or by the thin surface layer of our skin. Times only start if you eat, drink, or snort them like a mad version of Tony Montana. Then, alpha radiation can cause some big time biological damage. Then there's beta radiation, obviously. Back consists of electrons. They're more penetrating than alpha particles because they're 8,000 times smaller, and can even pass through a couple centimetres of water. In general, though, a sheet of aluminium, a few millimetres thick, or hiding under the front door, irips down in case of a nuclear attack, or Frankie Ghost of Hollywood coming around for tea, will stop beta radiation fairly easily. As any fans of the incredible Hulk will know, gamma rays are the angriest. Their electromagnetic

2:07radiation, similar to x-rays, light, and radio waves. Gamma rays, depending on their energy, can pass right through with a human body, but can be stopped by thick walls of concrete or lead. They're the most dangerous of the three, but don't turn your green when you get strappy, but gamma radiation will give you similar scabs to the ones seen in x-the unknown. Radiation is measured in seavots, and one rad is equal to 0.01 seavot. If you've heard of a rad in relation to anything other than a skate park that is. Now, if you used a measuring in curies, rather than pounds and ounces, a seavot is 3.7 times 10 to the power of 10 disintegrations per second, curies, or to put it simpler, one-brained damage house of Hammerhost. Lifetime occupational exposure must not exceed 400 millis seavots.

3:10Anything even close to a whole seavot, and you're toast. Low-level radiation is all around us all the time. Thanks mainly to the cosmic rays from the sun, so you think it'd be safe in Scotland, but the higher the altitude, the higher the radiation, go figure. Apparently, it's an offence under the ionising radiation's regulations act of 2017 to exceed the acceptable self-dose limit. God, whether this is punishable by death or 10,000 years in a concrete box, the documents don't say, but it does explain why the feds are always chasing David Banner on the telly, and not because they thought it was simply bananas. Speaking of which, bananas are slightly radioactive because they're reaching potassium. Well, a bit of potassium 40 to be precise, which is, of course, radioactive. A lorry full of bananas is radioactive enough to trigger a false alarm on a detector looking

4:12for smuggled nuclear weapons. As your body naturally possesses and regulates the extra potassium, you'd have to eat a lorry load of bananas in one sitting, and in these conditions it's not going to be the radiation that gets you. As an aside, in ex-the unknown, it seems everyone has a guide encounter, but is it really that easy to get older one? Well, I ended up on an MI5 list and cut up my arms and algorithm to boot, by shopping for one. And there's loads, but they're quite expensive for a little box that just goes clik- clik- clik- clik. So, in the best blue-peater tradition, I decided to see if I could mate one instead. And it's apparently quite simple, because a guide encounter only uses a tube filled with inert gas at a very low pressure, and some bits of high-voltage wire running inside it. All that need is wire cutters, wire strippers, soldering iron, hot glue gun, loads of wire, and old transformer from an alarm clock.

5:13A guide a tube, I found one of them on eBay. A 555 timer, apparently that's not from your alarm clock. Some resistors and capacitors have various confusing names. Any end-channel MOSFET, whatever that is. A few diodes, including Zina diodes, that have a cool name. And finally, a piezoelectric element, preferably from an old microwave, and not the one you're using. Actually, as I can't mate one with Macano, I think I'd be safer buying one, and not so I can point it at my glow-in-the-dark watch. Let's get one thing straight. You can't get radiation sickness from your phone or your microwave or your watch or your tiki-tiki alarm clock, if there's still in one piece that is. Because they don't have the potential to create ionizing radiation. That's where radiation, knocks the electron, often at them, like some kind of snooker trick, which creates an ion, and ions are the bad guys here when

6:14it comes to his watery meat bags. So, there's the long answer, and I'm going to sound more like Montgomery Burns now, and say there is indeed an acceptable level of radiation.