Random Interests

Marie Curie’s century-old notebooks are still radioactive, so they’re kept in lead-lined boxes for protection against radiation exposure.  

Photo via: Wellcome Library, London

Anyone wishing to handle her notebooks, personal effects, or other items have to wear protective gear and sign a liability waiver, just in case. She basically walked around carrying radium and polonium in her pockets, so… yeah.

Photo via: Amanda Macias/Business Insider

Marie and her husband Pierre are buried in Paris’s Panthéon, a mausoleum in that contains the remains of distinguished French citizens — including philosophers Rousseau and Voltaire.

Paper is basically impossible to decontaminate. That’s just it’s nature. Paper is a fragile material that absorbs everything, and when it absorbs moisture, it degrades. If it absorbs anything else, it’s not going to come out.

Marie Curie did her work in an era when there was no real knowledge of the hazards of radiation and radioactive contamination. She exposed herself to toxic materials with no protection. The isotopes that are radioactive also tend to be toxic heavy metals.

So she’d do her work while handling these materials and her hands, and her work tables, transferred those isotopes to the paper, where it’s now there permanently. These books can never be cleaned. And since she worked with some rather long-lived isotopes, that contamination is now fixed permanently.

It’s not just her book, either. Her entire workspace is radioactive. It still stands but it’s under lock and key. If you do get permission to enter with a dose rate meter, and survey the room, it’s actually very obvious what she touched. Her doorknobs, and the back of her chair, are more radioactive.

She suffered from still births and health problems not understood then, but understood now. We’ll likely never know just how much dose she saw, and how much toxic material she ingested. Her work was exemplary, and it is regrettable she did this in a time with no true safety equipment.

Like any major industry, the first researchers suffer, especially those that are far beyond their time. Only lion tamers get eaten by lions.

There was one on tv. I wasn’t even paying attention to it, I had my headphones on and was actively trying to tune the show out. My ears picked up on the sound of the garage door, and a jolt of adrenaline shot through my body as I grabbed my laptop and moved to get out of my seat and run to my room.

I realized what happened after about two seconds.

The sound is gone from my ears, but my heart is still racing and I’m waiting for the door to the house to open, to hear the jingling of my mother’s keys and her footsteps moving through the house. My muscles are still tense and I’m fighting the urge to run to my room and stick a board in front of the door.

For years, the sound of a garage door was my warning to pack up what I was doing quickly and retreat to my room if I was out of it.

these were products i had chosen myself because i liked the smell. and they got connected to the medical phobia because i was using them to wash off the hospital reek and the fear sweat and so forth. i don’t know why they became a trigger. maybe because washing off the hospital smell didn’t make me not in pain. maybe because their ‘fresh pine ocean breeze bluegreen spicy stuff’ smell didn’t really replace the hospital stench, just mingled with it.

but for whatever reason, smelling these objectively nice soaps made me do flashbacks and get all hopeless and wobbly. so they had to go.

triggers are random. they’re often something that was simply present during a trauma, and you can’t guess what they’ll be. no one who hasn’t heard me explain this would ever associate suave naturals ocean breeze body wash with unbearable abdominal pain. so i guess the takeaways here are twofold:

- if you have triggers, remember other people can’t predict them, and don’t expect to be protected from them all the time. that’s up to you.

The religion of Jesus’s people has no concept of a permanent hell and instructed its priests on how to induce miscarriages.  Jesus explicitly rejected the concept of disability as a divine punishment.  He spoke out against religious hypocrites.  He had enough respect for women to let his mother choose the time of his first miracle.  He blessed a same sex couple.  He told a rich man that he must give up his wealth to get to heaven, and also told a parable about a rich man suffering in agony in presumably Gehinnom (basically Purgatory) just to hammer the point home.  He told people to pay their taxes.  He declared “love your neighbor” to be one of the two commandments on which all laws hang.  He commanded his followers to help the poor.  He commanded them to help the sick and the needy.  He spent time with social outcasts.  He healed the servant of a high priest during his arrest rather than fighting back.  He was put to death by the occupying government because he was a political radical.

“Canon Jesus is better than Fandom Jesus.”

This is the best idea for a restaurant. - Imgur

Support your local beekeepers

Set up bee hotels for solitary bees

If you see a lethargic bee feed it sugar water

the fact that we find honey yummy and nutritious is part of why we keep bees, true, but the truth is we mostly keep them to pollinate our crops. the vegetable crops you seem to imagine would still magically sustain us if we stopped cultivating bees.

and when you get right down to it… domestic bees aren’t confined in any way. if they wanted to fly away, they could, and would. they come back to the wood frame hives humans build because those are nice places to nest.

Time is the substance from which I am made.