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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • This sounds rather vain and I hate it, but when I was younger I was fairly attractive. Flashing a quick smile - the genuine kind, with your eyes, like you do when you’re happy to see someone - to women especially, but even men, would do wonders when I needed help.

    Like in a crowded coffee shop - catch the busy waiter’s eye and smile, there was a huge likelihood my table would suddenly come next.

    Of course being nice helps, people want to have pleasant interactions, but being attractive adds to that and gets you noted quicker.















  • Yes, that’s the second arc.

    In the first accident there were no half-spheres, the neutrons were being reflected back using bars of tungsten carbide placed around the exposed core.

    Wiki photo from a recreation of the first incident:

    In the second accident, a year later, the reflective material was the two beryllium half-spheres. Shims were used to ensure the two halves were never fully closed, which would trigger the nuclear chain reaction.

    Supposedly, this guy liked to show off and had done this demonstration a dozen times in front of different audiences, wearing jeans and cowboy boots and using his screwdriver instead of the shims.

    Some report that Fermi told the guy and others that “they would be dead in a year” if they kept doing that… and voila.

    The good thing is that he at least was hunched over the core, so he mostly shielded everyone else in the room from the worst of the radiation by absorbing it himself. 9 days later, he was dead. The guy closest to him was in the hospital for several weeks with severe radiation poisoning, but at least survived but died fairly young, in his 50s, which may or may not have been related…



  • That was hilarious. Also kinda spooky to think that, if Japan hadn’t surrendered, Demon Core-kun would have been the 3rd nuke dropped over them.

    The cartoon only covers the second story arc though, the one with the screwdriver.

    In the first arc, the core is “nude” and they’re stacking neutron-reflecting bricks around it to bring it close to criticality. A scientist drops a brick by accident on top of the core and boom, blue light and you’re dead (takes 2 weeks for your body to notice though).