Comments by "Stephen Villano" (@spvillano) on "Kyle Hill"
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@Tommy1marg that's the hardest lesson to learn or teach, to mentally take a step back and analyze what's going on and to then take the proper steps to get out of the problem one is unexpectedly confronted with.
I've been caught by rip currents, while merrily heading out to sea, evaluating what was happening and cut across the current to get out of it. I've also caught an offshore current, which was marked on nautical maps of the area that I just happened to blunder into (Coast Guard station was near the beach I was at), noticed I was quite distant from the shore and moving around 4 knots toward NYC from NJ. Seeing that and remembering the current marked on the map, I cut across the current and eventually waded back to the beach I was at.
Fighting the current is the recipe for disaster, as water's a hell of a lot stronger than we are!
Laughably, what brought my attention to the problem was, a shark swam between my legs, brushing against my inner thigh. As sand sharks tend to be in deeper water, when I turned toward shore, well, whoopsie that doesn't look good... The lifeguard looked quite alarmed, until he saw me cut the current and start wading back.
First failure, losing situational awareness. Lesson learned.
He who panics drowns.
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I dunno, we've not had any problems of note in the hands of the US Navy.
But, as a retiree from the Army, remembering our history with nuclear reactors, never*, ever, *ever give the US Army a nuclear reactor to run! We contaminated a chunk of Canada, we contaminated a chunk of Greenland, we blew up a reactor in Idaho.
But, we never misplaced a half dozen warheads, that took the US Air Force to do that in 2007... :/
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Yep and it was still quite new. Remember, one way of properly writing the chemical compound of water is HOH, hydrogen hydroxide, it's both a base and an acid, heating it only makes things uglier on metals. The main control rod was what was pulled to hook up to a pulley, it got pulled out over a foot too far and here's the fun part.
A mass of cold water inside of the reactor, around 3x10 feet, instantly vaporized from the insanely high amount of heat added faster than the eye can blink.
The reactor sharing a design flaw with Chernobyl, a positive void coefficient, which meant steam made the reaction even more intense. The root cause of each accident was the same, prompt criticality, the base reason being massively different, but both were shit designs that never should have even been prototyped as too unsafe.
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No, bonkers was, he retained his clearance to access any hazardous radiological devices.
I'm intimately familiar many instances of men and women of well documented off duty intemperate habits that worked with special radiological devices. Still, safe enough on duty, as not sober got ejected, reported and access curtailed.
Of course, the devices were innocuous enough, they were only boosted fission nuclear warheads. Trivial to arm without authorization - as trivial as performing a root canal on a patient safely and effectively via the rectum.
But, they did and still do contain some of our most powerful high explosives.
For the fission challenged, a boosted fission device is basically a baby version of a hydrogen bomb, too small to be called that, whose neutron radiation fissions the rest of the plutonium core and in some cases, the depleted uranium tamper that's frequently mislabeled a "jacket" (a tamper isn't a jacket, it has a purpose of confinement, ablation and focusing of energy).
Oh, iridium isn't anything special, it's the specific isotope with a 78 day half-life that's special. The shorter half-life, the nastier it is.
I intentionally exposed myself to a dose of a radioisotope that had only an 8 day half-life. It was one of two very similar ways to achieve a successful completion of a thyroid scan.
Turned out to be Grave's disease, one form of hyperthyroidism. My immune system attacked my thyroid, it retaliated and damned near killed me. That was a good thing, as it confirmed a diagnosis, a thyroid hormone formation medication blocked most of my thyroid output and I was able to be tapered back from a literal LD50 dosage of hypertension medication to something more age appropriate. LD50 being half taking that dosage does from toxicity of the drug.
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@IllustriousCrocoduck the laugh is, vacuum welding is a very real problem with metals in a vacuum. So, store those weapons in a vacuum, go to use them and find the metals welded together.
As for weapons modified to work on the moon, easy enough, just modify the sights to not account for earth gravity bullet drop or atmospheric density. Now, you poke tiny holes in space suits, blood then seals the holes and one has to hope that the still leaking cosmonaut runs out of red stuff before killing you.
As a hint, on one shuttle mission, an astronaut tore a hole in his space suit glove. The hole was sealed by the blood from the small cut that the tension bar gave him on his hand and went entirely unnoticed until he got back inside the shuttle after the EVA work was done.
So, to disable someone, one's going to have to poke a hell of a lot of holes or really large holes through the micrometeor barrier overgarment and through the suit proper. That overgarment being what you see when you see someone wearing a space suit and it's designed to stop small objects from piercing suit and astronaut that are moving a hell of a lot faster than a bullet.
Better to use a laser or maser to try to soften plastics, causing seals to breach and the faceplate to soften and fail.
Or have a few cases of vodka handy...
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No self-hatred needed. Major depressive disorder or severe bipolar disorder can and has lead to some pretty horrendous deaths by suicide.
I worked military EMS. The very first lesson in dealing with suicidal patients is, don't let anything whatsoever ever, ever get between you and the door. If they've decided, have the means and perceive you an obstacle to their goal, they very well and in the past, have taken EMS personnel and police with them. A great rule to abide by, given some of us are trained to be able to end someone's existence before that person even realizes they're in danger.
A corollary is, if the dog is out upon arrival at a scene, close the fucking door unless you really enjoy getting bitten by Cujo.
Not a lick of self-hatred, only assured death of a suicidal person, who seems to have taken great care not to involve others in their path to self-destruction. Self-hatred, in my experience, was the realm of terrorists, who enjoy taking others down with themselves. Common themes being "I'm a sinner and can do no better or worse" and similar nonsense. Yeah, I dealt with terrorists and conversed with them. A fine experience only rivaled by the joys of masturbating with a cheese grater.
Note for full disclosure, I have no idea, nor inclination of finding just where I put my cheese grater, nor since retiring, dealing with terrorists. But, I've come to understand all too well depression since my wife of 40+ years died in March. It's a pernicious thing I'm working on shaking and have no intention of self-harm beyond enjoying that can of chili I bought today.
That last requiring my sending an NBC-1 report first, so that a NUKEWARN flash can be sent. ;)
Even more seriously, that notion of self-loathing is a condition of its very own that does require a mental health professional intervening, but attributing that to a suicide or suicide attempt is harmful to those in desperate need of protection. Kindly stop it and learn about such conditions before harming others with such bullshit.
I never, ever claimed to be a diplomat, but I'm infamous for my candor.
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@sean..L blackout drunk and bipolar or some depressive disorders can trivially account for that.
But, we could get a six sigma certainty, 99.99966% certainty, all we need to do is learn how to read the blankness of the human mind. ;)
More seriously, their nuclear security office should've alarmed on him, his behavior and likely predictable action upon deleterious personnel action.
It'd the only reason I refuse to support actions against Manning's intentional spill of classified data, for the same reason. Deleterious personnel action is, per federal regulation on nuclear material or classified information is an automatic revocation of access.
I'd only support Manning's punishment if Manning's entire senior chain of command suffered a similar fate. In this case, the signs were present and repeated, but access was continued to make a buck.
That isn't damning, it's displaying a prejudice that could harm security overall and in his case, essentially proved. At the time of exposure, memory or not irrelevant, he ensured a fatal exposure, a successful suicide. One upside is, he didn't allow others even the slightest chance of exposure.
And Kyle pulled a lot of punches, death by that level of exposure is far uglier, nightmare fodder kind of ugly.
As in, given a choice of that way or beating off using a cheese grater, then ride a 10 foot razor blade to then drown in a pool of iodine sounds far more pleasant.
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I've got something that just outright kills people. It's called space and I don't even need to make it, it already is and isn't there. ;)
Second place in killing astronauts goes to their own space suits. One astronaut nearly drowned, courtesy of his own space suit during an EVA. The source of the leak never identified and likely, given the stony silence on the matter, likely operator error.
Once, I donned an M17 series protective mask for a military training exercise. Operator PM for that, upon receipt and regularly after being a series of checks, such as running a finger along the outlet valve and inlet valves.
I skipped the outlet valve, due to intracranial flatulence. That valve got stuck closed.
So, in the dark middle of the night during a training exercise, I get called for an emergency. I came running, fogged over lenses obscuring vision (a big hint of air flow obstruction) and I started to gray out, tunnel vision began and I realized I was being asphyxiated.
Just shy of blackout, I realized in a flash what was going on and literally tore that buytl rubber mask in half - literally. The NBC NCO never saw one torn in half before, adrenaline is a strange thing. He kept apologizing for not checking the mask first, I wave him off, as it's an operator duty that I missed. I paid closer attention to operator checks after that debacle, as I damned near killed my dumb ass.
Likely, a mis-seated connector caused the same for that astronaut. And he didn't have an option to tear off that helmet that was drowning him. Remove the helmet, get about 10 seconds of useful consciousness and a total of about 90 seconds before fatal v-fib that can't be resuscitated from. No experimental animal survived beyond 90 seconds of hard vacuum exposure. The few decompression events experienced by humans revealed only 10 seconds of consciousness.
And in one case, cost a pressure chamber its window, as the supervisor broke out the window to rescue a technician whose faceplate failed under hard vacuum.
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@Bob5mith if it's a self-inflating raft, the charges could be useful - not on the moon, but in spaaaaaaace.
You know, a real life iron man and far less well guided. Brief bursts could work - maybe. Sustained, x=rnd movement.
For that example though, that's a lot dicey. When giving a class, I try to smooth such wide variables out to prove a point, then employ socratic methods to discuss why it was smoothed. One SME or even experienced STEM person now is the SME and the rest, bozos. Bozos win clown games, not real life situations.
But, can have bursts of brilliant insight, which is the value of a group that otherwise is going to spout useless nonsense.
Leading to the adage, committees - no one is as dumb as all of us combined.
A not so gentle reminder that while we might blunder as a group to a solution, it's just as likely we'll come up with the bonehead award for the decade, proceed accordingly, leader. Included in my class, "admit when you fucked up, everyone does and accepts that, they mistrust the 'perfect, dear leader' accordingly, whereas they forgive a fuck up".
And listen to, "This is going to sound dumb", that might just lead to an idea that'll get you out of the shit. It has for me. And I've been in far too many "in the shit" situations over the decades than I care to count. Boy, am I glad to be retired from the military!
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@kinderdm not really. If you saw the part where he kept shifting and halving dirt piles around and taking readings, can you picture doing that with lungs? You'd be cutting out lobes, halving them, halving them again, things don't go back together very well that way.
And precision detectors rely upon time exposures of a non-moving sample and lungs, well, if they stop moving, the heart does too and that dead thing ensues, rather ruining one's weekend plans.
Meanwhile, microsample exposures occurred during the Manhattan Project, where workers were exposed and for the remainder of their lives, their urine contained plutonium. Their lives notably not involving cancer or radiation poisoning. Do a search on "plutonium pissers", their unofficial title.
People survive amazing things, a radiation example being an Iranian city notable for its naturally high radiation levels, Ramsar. All, courtesy of thorium deposits in the ground elevating the background to what everywhere else would be thought harmful, potentially fatal. 20 mSv/year is the maximum for radiation workers, Ramsar residents receive 260 mSv/year and that's been for hundreds of years.*
*Finding the history of Ramsar's been problematic, all of the search engines default strictly to the Ramsar Convention on wetlands, regardless of how you phrase the search, due to their Artificial Idiocy implementation.
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