this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
526 points (94.3% liked)

Science Memes

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526
Jazz hands (mander.xyz)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
28 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
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[–] [email protected] 137 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I believed it. Sadly it's not real: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/plutonium-jazz

[–] paddirn 39 points 1 month ago (2 children)

It seems believable given the story of the “Radium Girls”, workers who painted radioactive paint on watch dials to make them glow. They’d lick the tips of the brushes when they got too frayed… which eventually led to cancer.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/19/style/radium-girls-radioactive-paint/index.html#:~:text=Women%20painting%20alarm%20clock%20faces,brush%20and%20ingesting%20radioactive%20radium.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Whoa. Eating radioactive material isn't great at all.

From a different time, too: An X-Ray shoe fitter

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago

A department store still had one of these when I was a kid, but it wasn't used. It was, however, in occasional use when my brother was very little in the early 80s. My mom has pictures of him with his foot in it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Thanks, Woke.

[–] Duamerthrax 2 points 1 month ago

They want to cancel bananas now.

[–] rockSlayer 8 points 1 month ago

To be fair, the factory management knew that it was dangerous but didn't tell the workers and encouraged them to lick the brush.

[–] Arbiter 8 points 1 month ago

Sadly??

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Phew.

I came to the comments for this hope.

[–] [email protected] 104 points 1 month ago (2 children)

This sounds like something that was made up for a fallout game.

Of course, so does "bombarding myself with xrays and moving around to entertain the audience looking at my bones" and "including uranium in paint to make watch dials glow"

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

They did it with uranium too? I knew about radium, but not that.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Uranium wasn't used for watch dials, but Uranium Orange is a colour of cermic glaze. It was pretty popular in America from the 1930's to around 1942, when the government needed all the uranium for some big secret project. After the 60's it was made with depleted uranium, instead of natural ore, until someone realized this still wasn't a great idea.

[–] macarthur_park 11 points 1 month ago

Fun fact: fiestaware plates (this was the company that made the uraranium glazed ceramics) are commonly used by radiation safety folks as check sources and for teaching how to use survey meters. This is because they usually aren’t considered a radioisotope source, so there’s less paperwork to keep them around.

[–] davidgro 16 points 1 month ago

Sadly, it is. (But not for Fallout specifically.)

[–] 58008 58 points 1 month ago

I believed this was real until I searched for it 😂 To be fair to my own credulity, Plutonium Jazz would not be the most insane thing people did with radioactive materials back then. The "medicines" alone make Plutonium Jazz sound pretty tame.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 month ago (4 children)

But Geiger counters aren't rhythmic at all, radioactive decay is, pretty famously, random.

[–] lemonmelon 28 points 1 month ago

True, much like memes are pretty famously fabricated.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

... Jazz.

/S

[–] theilleists 6 points 1 month ago

Rhythmic? No, not really. More exciting if the musician could somehow anticipate this fundamentally unpredictable event? Absolutely.

[–] eran_morad 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Follows a Poisson distribution. I guess one could call that random.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Well, its random, like... by definition.

[–] karika 15 points 1 month ago

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/plutonium-jazz

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If there were hazardous levels of radiation, the clicks would be a squeal, you wouldn't be able to match a rhythm to it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Right. If you were to attempt something like this, you'd be better off with something like a chunk of granite than plutonium.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Since "Geiger" is German for "violinist", you can replicate it with a guy who counts how many violinists are present

[–] rain_worl 1 points 1 month ago

147282793856...
[jazz plays]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Sounds like a Cowboy Bebop episode involving smuggled fissile material.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Live performances at Chernobl when?!