Robots are COOL!

I freely admit that I am a nerd. I like engineering, solving problems, computer games, lasers and ROBOTS. Let me just say that before you judge, seeing six robots try to hang inflatible tubes on pegs was never so much fun. Sounds boring I know, but when you're in a crowd who's loving it, listening to songs from The Scorpions, Van Halen, Lit and AC/DC it's hard not to get excited.

What am I talking about? It's called The FIRST Robotics Competition (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) and..... it's awesome. There are over 2100 teams, 52000 participants from nine countries and they all build robots to complete specific challenges. From what I could see it seems like an excellent way of teaching children about Math, Science, Technology, Teamwork, Sportsmanship, Communication and Self Esteem. All worthy goals, yes?

The competition this year consisted of six robots on a playing field for about 4 minutes. The first 15 seconds of which the robots had to guide themselves to accomplish a goal of lifting a yellow innertube onto any one of 9 metal pegs from about 3 to 10 feet in the air. The next 3 minutes or so, the robots were controlled by drivers to accomplish the task of putting red, white and blue inner tubes onto the same pegs, points were awarded for placing the tubes in certain positions, configurations and heights. The final 30 seconds the robots had to get to one of 4 vertical poles, deploy a mini robot which would climb the pole to press a button at the top, points for first second and third place.

It was very much like robot soccer/basketball since robots could block others from getting innertubes and entering the scoring area, but not interfere with them in the scoring area. There were cheer leading teams, professional wrestling style announcers, and light shows. This was a very much family and student oriented event. If you have kids, I would strongly suggest you check it out, I can personally vouch that while involvement may not be appropriate for the under 6 set, it is highly entertaining for all ages (at least down to 22 months of age).

Good news is nice, but bad news sells papers.

  There have been many more announcement about Japanese workers being exposed to radioactive water, radiation inhalations, food bans and radiation levels 1000 times above normal. I ask you to think and take into consideration the information in this post. More often than not, the stories that you are hearing are indeed reporting the facts, but since so little is understood by the reporters and those who hear the reports, these facts sound more scary than they should. Take heart in knowing that the amount of radiation that an average person is exposed to in one year is 50 times less than the maximum allowable dose for radiation workers. This in turn is only ½ of the lowest dose of radiation proven to statistically increase the probability of getting cancer.


   Some of you have probably fixated on the 1000 times above normal bit. This number may sound scary until you take into account that this figure is a time based figure. Let us do an example taking information from the above chart. The maximum dose of radiation one can receive as a member of the public in the US is 1000 MicroSieverts per year(ignore the units for now). Please note the time dependence. So, a radiation level 1000 times above normal means that a person could receive the maximum allowable yearly public doseage in just under 9 hours. This level would also expose a person the minimum dosage proven to statisitcly increase the probability of cancer in 900 hours (just over 1 month).


  One last thing, I found a very useful chart that puts the whole radiation exposure thing into perspective, I have attached a link to the site that has it. This chart is from WBUR in Boston, created by a cartoonist with a physics background.


  I hope this helps with everyone's understanding, and I apologize for those of you who already had this conversation with me. Please, if you have any questions or concerns, or want to discuss it further, email or tweet me @FrozenLaser.

The Sum of All Fears

I know that many of you pay attention to what's going on in the world, who doesn't? In light of recent events, and my perception that many people, through no fault of their own, have very little understanding of radiation and radioactivity in general, I have decided to write these two short articles to try to decrease the level of FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt). The subject that I am commenting about is the recent dual tragedy of earthquake/tsunami and the resultant nuclear facility problems that have been plastered all over the news. You have probably heard of the "plutonium leak" near Fukushima and that there have been increased levels of radiation found in the rainwater in Boston, I am going to try to alleviate any fears that you might have about these two events. First the rain water in Boston. The amount of radioactivity that was detected in the rainwater in Boston was 71pico-Curies. For those who don't know what a Curie is, have no fear, a Curie is defined as 37000000000 (37 Billion) radio active decays per second. The unit prefix PICO is defined as the quoted number (in this case 71) multiplied by 0.000000000001. Now for the math bit which makes this relevant, multiplying both numbers together we get a number that in essence means that they were detecting about 2.6 radioactive decays per second. If this sounds like a lot, for comparison, the smoke alarm currently in your house has 30600 decays per second. Additionally the radioactive substance detected in Boston is Iodine131. Iodine131 has a half life of 8 days. This means that half the iodine is gone after 8 days, so in 4 weeks the amount left will be a little over 1/20 of what was originally detected.

Now for Fukushima. There was a reported plutonium leakage found in the soil surrounding the reactor. The amount of plutonium that was found in the soil was very small; in fact it would not normally have caused any concern whatsoever since the amount that was found was in no way more or less than what was scattered around the globe when the US and Russia were testing our nuclear weapons. The only reason that they know that this material came from Fukushima is because of the specific isotope (or atomic variation if you don't know that an isotope is) was specific to the Fukushima reactors. I would like to stress that they did not measure any radioactivity appreciably above the normal levels that are usually found in soil anywhere in the world.

As I am sure that this is not the last of the news that will come from Japan, there will most likely be follow-up posts.