Very little, and it’s mostly in the form of light shining through the door.
“Radiation” just means anything projected through space. It includes potentially harmful neutron, gamma, and x-ray radiation, but it also includes sunlight, new ideas, and the petals of flowers.
The word “radiation” does not mean “magic death cooties,” and just because a device emits radiation doesn’t mean it can hurt you without falling off a counter and hitting your foot.
A huge misconception about the SARS-Cov-2 Coronavirus is that it’s similar to seasonal fluenza. Well, both are respiratory infections (as are colds) but that’s where the similarities stop. And the more we learn about this new virus, the stranger it appears.
There is, however, one way that SARS-Cov-2 is like the flu — an infected person is most infectious before they develop symptoms. This has been known about flu for decades, and why it hasn’t influenced public health advice much during the pandemic is hard to fathom.
Harlan Ellison told the story of how once he, L Ron Hubbard, and a gaggle of other “Golden Age” writers were sitting around drinking and complaining (as writers do) about how impossible it was to survive on the going wage of a penny a word. As Harlan told it, Hubbard joked that the only way a writer could survive would be to start his own religion. The others laughed and spent the rest of their inebriation inventing ever more outlandish ideas with which this hypothetical scheme could squeeze blood from the stones of the gullible. Some time later, Ellison told us, they were all horrified when Hubbard actually went out and did it–complete with all the outlandish blood squeezing.
This would have been some time around 1950, so a penny in those times would be worth almost eleven cents today. Friends, I can tell you with authority that genre writers today do not make almost eleven cents a word. The pro rate today is six cents a word, and the pulp market no longer exists, so it’s no longer possible to do what Hubbard did at his peak and sell 25 pro-rate stores a year.
I will never get a change to tell D.C. Fontana what she meant to me as a little boy growing up in turbulent times, or as a grown man tempted by the writing bug. Dorothy, who wrote under the byline “D.C.” because the world isn’t what it ought to be, has died at the age of 80.
In Houston, we have a saying that every citizen is expected to know: “real chili has no beans.” But we have another saying that’s more germane to the topic at hand, “Turn Around, Don’t Drown.” We see it on the traffic signs all around town, and every time there’s a major storm, we see the results when our fellow citizens fail to heed this simple wisdom: don’t try to drive through high water. Every time, vehicles are totaled by the hundreds, motorists are stranded or have to be rescued, and all to often, people die–tragically yes, but as we are all quick to add, also needlessly, foolishly, presentably.
Except that isn’t always true. Not at all, in fact.
When early rocket pioneers started strapping volunteers to missiles, how did they know those volunteers would need spacesuits? Of course, in both the Soviet Union and the US, animals subject we tested first, but in fact, we already had aircraft flying almost to the edge of space before that–and aircraft flew higher than humans can survive even during World War II. How did we prepare for this environment? How did we know we needed to?
Well in fact, people had been flying in balloons since the 18th century, and some later balloon flights led to deaths. But long before this, in 1644, Torricelli described the first mercury barometer, writing “We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of the element air.”
Torricelli and his mentor Galileo knew full well that we live on a spherical planet, but Galileo gave an erroneous explanation for the difficulties in using the suction pump to draw water up a well even though Aristotle had known that air has weight.
A man was tragically killed this week in Manhattan, trying to climb out of a malfunctioning elevator. Tragically, because what he did was very stupid. Understandable, but stupid. I’m writing this to make sure you know better.
