Oblivious 'influencers' work on 3.6-roentgen tans in Chernobyl after realising TV show based on real nuclear TITSUP The absolute state of 2019 is that millions of vapid young people, followed by millions more vapid young people, make serious bank just by virtue of being really, really, really ridiculously good looking and posting about it online. But for your Instagram "influencer" game to be truly lit, you need that exclusive, glamorous …
Could you warn people when linking to KRM's comic? I mean, I look at the url but not everybody does.
And I really cannot see what's wrong with "influencers" visiting Chernobyl. It's a lot cheaper than building and launching an actual space ark, and these days anyway the job of telephone sanitiser has more or less ceased to exist, so what's the potential downside?
(Icon nearest I could find to view of someone standing in front of a radiation source).
I would guess that a flail mower is a drum with lengths of chain hanging from it, that use brute force to cut things instead of a single spinning blade. Great for never jamming, or stalling if it hits something like a tree. But it tends to leave things looking like they were cut with a machine gun.
I believe a "flail mower" might be a wheeled, upscaled weed-whacker (UK: Strimmer).
The materials used in the flail might vary depending on the expected brush to be demolished.
All guess work.
Later
Completely wrong, except for the "materials used" bit. It's a small cousin to a mine flail. It appears it thrashes the brush into submission.
I approve.
I think you're right. If you travel down country roads, and see the hedgerows and trees looking like they've been in a fight with a tank, all splintered and torn, you're probably looking at the results of one of these. It was probably wielded by a local farmer with a contract with the council.
I've never thought it was a good look for our countryside.
Boring facts: A flail mower consist of a row or rows of fairly heavy steel J shaped picks fixed on a hinge to an axle so that when spun at high speed so the bottom of the J would be travelling left as typed acting like a blunt chisel is can cut through most vegetation and if it cant the hinge allows it to move out of the way and then centripetal force will fling it out again for another go on the next rotation.
Bloody effective at making hedges look shit but rectilinear and not in the way any more. More importantly they are cheap to run so (like pothole repairs that are not done) you save on your council tax and ruin the countryside (and pay more overall for wheel-rims and suspension etc).
I have about a mile of hedge on a shared access lane and its flailed every year and it is not good for the hedges in the long run but its hard work with a hand held hedgecutter!
"If you travel down country roads, and see the hedgerows and trees looking like they've been in a fight with a tank, all splintered and torn, you're probably looking at the results of one of these."
That look is the result of poor equipment and poor maintenance and infrequent cutting. Done properly a flail cutter (the things used for hedges are different to the things used for cutting grass) leaves a perfect finish. But the hedge needs to be cut at least a couple of times a year. Stingy landowners have the hedges cut once every five years and that means having to cut through large branches resulting in the splintered look. The council maintains very few hedges, usually only the ones that confine land owned by the council.
"I would guess that a flail mower is a drum with lengths of chain hanging from it, that use brute force to cut things instead of a single spinning blade."
As the owner of a flail mower (and the tractor to power it) I have to say that you are a bit wide of the mark. Chains don't feature in the design because they tend to break creating a danger of flying shrapnel. There's a rotating shaft fitted with bearings. In the UK flail mowers tend to have flimsy "Y" or "J" shaped blades that are bolted to these bearings. They scalp the vegetation and can be knocked out of the way if they hit a rock or large branch.
Italian and Japanese flail mowers tend to be much more rugged and have hammers that look a little like an old fashioned adze with a sharp leading edge. These devices can be regulated for height and are capable of cutting wood up to about 50mm in diameter. Same bearing arrangement but the mowers are designed to achieve a lawn finish even when cutting grass up to 5ft high.
The underside of the mower looks like this: Flail mower hammers.
Hence the preferred term The Dirty Digger. Though it's a jingoistic term, coined by drunk arts-educated English public school boys believing that all Aussies were either criminals, miners - or worse, their colleague Barry Humphreys - I don't think Rupert 'Stick it up your Junta' Murdoch can complain.
Ignorance is the opportunity for teaching and learning. I'm ignorant of many things, not because I'm unwilling, but there are only 20 or so usable hours in a day, 9 are spent twiddling bits, 3-4 caring for\enjoying family and by that time I doubt my brain is ready for input
I had no freakin' idea what an 'influencer' was until now. Wish I didn't, the damage is done.
Ignorance is an unwillingness to learn
*Willing* Ignorance is an unwillingness to learn. Ignorance per-se can be cured but only if the ignorant one is willing to amend that state.
In the dim and distant past (when I used to assist with the technical part of the interview process) I was always more happy with the candidates that said "I don't know but I can find out" rather than the ones that tried to bluff and pretend that they knew when they obviously didn't..
"Standing in front of a radiation source" - I think you want something like "Dr. Bruce Banner is bathed in the full force of the mysterious gamma rays".
i.e. https://www.blogs.unicamp.br/ciencianerd/hulk/ (a little way down the page)
Watch him boogie (still picture). http://jwong.freeshell.org/origin.html catches it well, too.
As does "that" scene inside #441, "Hulk Fiction" (in which Mrs. Hulk plans her memoirs...but Bruce's cousin the "She-Hulk" poses for the cover).
While it has been shown that limited areas of the brain do spawn new neurons in adult life they in no way 'grow a brain', they more patch it. Superhero fiction apart mutations affect your offspring. In you they either kill cells or spawn cancers or make cancers more nasty and invasive and drug resistant.
Whether you think getting cancer might benefit the influencers, the type has been known to fake cancer for the extra clicks so perhaps not.
And just to explain the effects of an extreme-dosage of ionising radiation on the nervous system... the thing that's going to kill you is all the messenger & transfer RNA being machine-gunned to pieces. There won't be time for your cells to recreate enough of it, especially from the now damaged DNA, to keep your little grey cells supplied with neurotransmitter molecules before they all get used up. Once your stock is depleted, which they say takes about 5 minutes, your neurones will stop talking to each other and you'll basically suffocate when your diaphragm stops moving or goes into spasm; but you won't feel anything as your consciousness will have dissipated by then due to generalised disruption of cortex wide synchronisation.
Nice thought to go to bed on.
I have to say that if I knew I was going to die of something starting in five minutes, that doesn't sound too bad at all.
Perhaps we should suggest it to the Americans who enjoy executing people who are only guilty of being black in the wrong place.
Knowing you are going to die and not feel it while all the people gathered to watch are going to die more or less slowly of radiation sickness would be small, not non-zero consolation.
And I was only talking from a neurological point of view. The effect on the rest of the body is somewhat akin to being microwaved whilst stood under a sun lamp. There's probably a sweet spot in the dosage that will cause the neurological death before heat death, but I'm not volunteering to find out where that is. Suffice it to say that I don't know if you'd be writhing in pain akin to sunburn or not before you passed out, then stopped breathing. As you don't tend to feel your skin burning from intense sun until 6 hours or more later, then I suspect you'd just be feeling a bit hot and blistery and thinking you're definitely going to be peeling tomorrow before you zonked.
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"Perhaps we should suggest it to the Americans who enjoy executing people who are only guilty of being black in the wrong place."
Someone got their before you. James Blish the author of "They Shall Have Stars" which features the Dillon-Wagoner Graviton Polarity Generator, known as the spindizzy, mentions the use of exposure to high-level atomic waste as a method of execution. Alaska's Senator Bliss Wagoner is executed in this manner for diverting public funds to the research programme to develop the spindizzy, starting with the construction of a bridge on Jupiter as a testbench for gravity research. It also features an early discussion of drones and telepresence. The Senator himself explains that the method of execution was chosen to instil fear into the public, but that in actual fact it's relatively fast and relatively painless.
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