Obligatory xkcd:
Uranium Glass
51–60 of 77 posts
Re: Uranium Glass
#52I don't see anything that indicates that this could be dangerous, so I have to assume that it is safe. I do know that pigments made from uranium oxide (bright white), in cloisonné, can be quite dangerous. Of course, radium pigments were very dangerous (not to mention the medicinal philters).
Most of it is safe to have in a display case. I have an antique uranium glass photo filter that's hot enough that I keep it in a metal box. All of the pieces I have put out enough beta radiation to easily detect. I don't have an alpha counter.
You wouldn't want to grind it up and inhale the dust. I winced when I saw someone on Etsy selling uranium glass shards they'd tried to reclaim from broken pieces by putting them in a rock tumbler to make them look like beach glass.
I wouldn't recommend actually eating off of it either, but most of it is so old and fragile you'd probably want to avoid that anyway.
Re: Uranium Glass
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ads every 2 minutes, host has zero personality and seems to have no real understanding of the safety issues he's dealing with. Not for me...
YouTube premium removes ads. If you watch an hour or more of his videos you’ll realize he’s an extremely cautious creator and knows what he’s doing.
>> Ads every 2 minutes
> YouTube premium removes ads
Ads every 2 minutes won't make me give Google money, at best they'd drive me away from the site. As a matter of fact, last time i tried to watch a long video it did have ads every 2 min. Fortunately it was a speedrun of a game so I just found a similar one on Twitch.
Re: Uranium Glass
#54I don't see anything that indicates that this could be dangerous, so I have to assume that it is safe. I do know that pigments made from uranium oxide (bright white), in cloisonné, can be quite dangerous. Of course, radium pigments were very dangerous (not to mention the medicinal philters).
And I don't see any indication of this being safe :) It's radiation isn't it? Most of the stuff I encounter on a daily basis are much lower on the table. So there must be some differences.
Light is radiation. There is no reason to be scared without understanding
Re: Uranium Glass
#55Re: Uranium Glass
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't you just measure background radiation?
My device, as other implementation, use the particle passing through the Geiger tube as a "virtual coin" , given a sampling frequency, if one or more particles are detected the firmware returns 1, if no particle is detected, zero. In other words, the random numbers are built a bit at time. My configuration with the background radiation returns too many zeros, so I needed something more ... lively. Anyway, what is the…
John Von Neumann’s method of creating a uniform distribution of random numbers from a skewed source (too many zeros) was:
“(From a stream of) bits, (take) two at a time (first and second, then third and fourth, and so on). If the two bits matched, no output was generated. If the bits differed, the value of the first bit was output … (this) can be shown to produce a uniform output even if the distribution of input bits is not uniform so long as each bit has the same probability of being one and there is no correlation between successive bits.” (Edited from Wikipedia)
Re: Uranium Glass
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't you just measure background radiation?
My device, as other implementation, use the particle passing through the Geiger tube as a "virtual coin" , given a sampling frequency, if one or more particles are detected the firmware returns 1, if no particle is detected, zero. In other words, the random numbers are built a bit at time. My configuration with the background radiation returns too many zeros, so I needed something more ... lively. Anyway, what is the…
I have serious concerns about purchasing one and being put on "a list".
But this city is lackadaisical at best when it comes to industry. And we've had incidents where radioactive materials have been found in construction near homes.
So IDK. I feel like I probably should have one.
Re: Uranium Glass
#58I have some marbles and a crucifix ( that kind you hang on a wall) made of this material. I inherited them from my grandmother , the marbles was intended to be toys. The crucifix also is visible in the dark and it's the object with major emissions, but nothing dramatic. The marbles emit mostly alpha rays. Both can excite notably my Geiger counter, but, storing them in a metallic box, (i.e. that sheet metal box for bi…
Couldn't you just measure background radiation?
Would that be cryptographically secure? Couldn't someone perturb an RNG based on background radiation by beaming radiation at it?
Re: Uranium Glass
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
So the crucifix is visible in the dark? This article makes it sound like a black light needed to observe the phenomenon, which strikes me as odd because I wouldn't have thought black lights were commonly available at the time when these first gained popularity.
The crucifix is different, besides the Uranium glass it has engravings painted with something I think is tritium.
How old is it? Tritium has a half life of only 12.3 years, so if it's more than 60 years or so old, there's basically none left (around 3%), certainly not enough to make it glow.
Radium is much more likely if it's still glowing.
Re: Uranium Glass
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't you just measure background radiation?
Would that be cryptographically secure? Couldn't someone perturb an RNG based on background radiation by beaming radiation at it?
That shouldn't change anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_coin#Fair_results_from_a_...