A Morning Wish For Each and Every One of Us

I have no idea what the inscription in the top-left says, and neither does the AI that generated this image.  Let us not worry about such trivialities when there is caffeine afoot.

How Much Radioactive Material is Missing in New Jersey?

Bottom Line Up Front: Imagine a hardware store with a large-ish display of smoke detectors on a shelf, somewhere around fifteen hundred of them.  That's ballpark what was lost.  (And no, positrons are not alphas, and the shelf of smoke detectors would be a distributed source and not a small point-like source, but close enough for this grapefruits-to-tangerines comparison to give some idea of the magnitude involved here.)  It's enough to warrant some paperwork, but not any cause for real concern.

Finally, no, you're not going to spot it from a flock of drones flying randomly around NJ airspace.

Links:

• NJ mayor links drone sightings to missing radioactive material  And mayor's off the cuff remarks link him to missing cranial material.  Still, the article does give the name of the radioactive source:
• General Electric Medical Source HEGL-0132 (inset pic), a 55MBq calibration device.  What's a MBq?  How does this compare with a smoke detector's source?  How's it work?
• Becquerel, the SI unit of radioactivity, article a Wikipedia.
• A smoke detector has about 37kBq, according to this source.  (a surprisingly difficult number to find in a pile of "This Is Completely Safe!!!  Do Not Ask Further!!!" search results)  55x10^6/37x10^3 = 1486.  Think of it as a 12 wide by 11 high by 11 deep display stack of smoke alarms.
• How Germanium-68/Gallium-68 generators work, also at you-know-where.
• Just for completeness, here's the NRC's "uh, we lost something" paperwork on the incident.
• Finally, a J-school article Missing Radioactive Material in New Jersey Not as Bad as It Sounds.

Were I going to New Jersey, I'd worry more about New Jersey than I'd worry about this radioactive source.

Are Bubble Lights Dangerous?

By trivial examination and application of Betteridge's Law, No.

But for an interesting dive into the topic, here's a video where one is broken open, set on fire, etc.  aaaannnnnd....  Nothing bad occurred.

Enjoy your lights!  And you darned kids, don't put your mouth on that thing, or do anything else stupid, and there won't be any stupid.  Onward with Christmas!  The more electric and bubbly, the better.

Time to go plug in my bubble night-light, a gift from The Big Sis a few years ago.

Picking a AA Battery

Hey, it's Christmas and everything needs batteries.  Project Farm just put out a video to answer which is best, be they alkaline, lithium, or rechargeable NiMH.  20 minutes, well worth the time (if you're into such).

TLDW + my humble experience: Lithiums have amazing capacity.  Eneloops are the best of the rechargeables, and at 12+ years I can vouch for that.  They're pretty much all that I use.  Alkalines?  Who cares.  Too many of them will leak and ruin good equipment.  Duracells especially – exorcise those cursed objects from your household ASAP.

Finally, I thought after a $185 repair bill to replace my HVAC's thermostat due to Duracell leakage, that I had finally gotten rid of the last Duracell in the house.  Nope.  Last week I found one more, in a little flashlight I kept in my briefcase for years.  One more old faithful tool destroyed by the Curse of the Duracell.  Hopefully that's the last of them.

Radio Free Carrabelle Strikes Again!

Several folks from the Tate's Hell Amateur Radio Club showed up to work the Franklin County Emergency Management tent at Holiday on the Harbor in Carrabelle yesterday.  Good weather, good friends, good turn-out.  Most of the radio action centered on listening to deer hunters bootlegging it on 2m, but hey, they weren't in anyone's way.

Mostly though, it was a re-do of last spring's event, but this time with Christmas trappings.  Pretty fun all around.  Didn't stay long enough for the fireworks though, but here are some from two years ago.

ps: Link to story is now up at The Times.

Book Mention: 7 Seconds to Die

Sounds pretty grim, like some kind of hard-boiled spy thriller.  Unfortunately the actual story is even more grim.  7 Seconds to Die is a history of the little-known Second Nagorno-Karabakh War that happened just four years ago.  What seemed like a resumption of a nasty border dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan turned into a swift forty-four day clean-sweep victory for Azerbaijan.

So how did this happen?  Holding the high ground in the mountainous border region, Armenia rested on its laurels with what they imagined to be similar Soviet-era military technology as Azerbaijan.  Unbeknownst to Armenia however, Azerbaijan was re-equipping and re-training for the 21st Century with drone technology supplied by Turkey and Israel.  If this all sounds like a dress-rehearsal for the current Ukraine conflict, that's because it is.  The chief difference with the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War is that only one side had embraced the new drone technology.  The result was like a 1945 WWII armored division going up against green WWI troops from 1914.

The questions now are, why have so few people heard of this war, and what lessons can we learn from it?  For most of us here in the West, largely reliant on Western news media during the tumult of 2020, the war was over so quickly that it never quite made headlines.  As to the lessons, beyond "Don't rest on your laurels!  Keep up on technology and training," you'll have to read the book for specifics.

There Has Been a Mix-Up