The devil is in the details

Return of Radioactive Man

Once upon a time (like here and here ), I told you about some experiments that I was teaching Evan how to do. These experiments involve using a rather icky radioisotope, 125I. As I mentioned then, it turned out that we needed some "official" training to do the experiment, so I needed to be officially re-trained before doing the experiment. Soon after we did that work, Evan started to be really busy with his qualifying exam and I was preoccupied with Denmark and a variety of other things. Now that all of that is behind us, we are re-starting the radioactivity experiments.

The whole thing started innocently enough: I sent an email to the guy from the radiation safety office who we've worked with before, to ask him whether our radioactive workspace was certified for use and what the requirements would be for me to train Evan (so that his documentation would be correct). His reply? "We need to meet in person to discuss this." I put Evan into the email loop and set up a meeting for this afternoon.

Radioactive man and Evan showed up promptly at my desk at 2. It turned out that this meeting would serve as "training" for Evan and time to talk with me...or something. It was quite possibly the most useless meeting of my life. If you'll remember correctly (or learn from the links above), my "non-radioactive walkthrough"/re-training lasted for an hour and a half in the special radioactive room upstairs. Well...apparently Evan did not need as much training. First, radioactive man showed us how to find the radiation safety website on my computer. Then he talked with us a little about what we were supposed to do (asking only really easy questions.) And then he just kept talking.....

We learned about how much radioactivity one is exposed to when eating bananas (P32), yogurt (C14), we learned about radon, we learned about radioactivity when eating venison and when eating mushrooms. We learned how the amounts of radioactivity released from a nuclear reactor compared to that in food in general and that released from burning coal. We learned how much of an extra exposure a married person gets from sleeping next to someone every night (since everyone is a little radioactive...) Radioactive man just didn't want to leave. Finally Evan managed to get him out of the lab, and we both agreed that he is a little weird. Then E. and JP started laughing at me and trying to guess why Radioactive Man was trying to linger around. I'll admit that he DOES look at me funny, but I refuse to believe anything else they say, because radioactive man is just too creepy.

posted by Immunegirl @ 7:13 PM