Background:

Shooting down an ICBM has always been an extremely challenging problem.  There is very little time to react to the missile and they travel at extreme speed.   The distances involved are enormous and because an interceptor must also travel at extreme speed, it can easily shoot right past the target.  This is made even more difficult by the fact that modern missiles have penetration aids and decoys that are hard to distinguish from the actual warhead.  Some also have the ability to maneuver and change course, making it difficult to plot an interception point.  The earliest systems addressed this in a simplistic, though likely effective way:  They would try to destroy the incoming warhead with a massive nuclear explosion.  For example, the Spartan missile carried a five megaton radiation-enhanced warhead that could destroy incoming missiles at a distance of 50 kilometers.   Another missile, the Sprint, used a much smaller explosive and was intended as a last line of defense for warheads that were entering their terminal phase.

Such systems, however, quickly fell from favor for a number of reasons.   For one, the massive blasts associated with them could have some catastrophic effects on the ionosphere and satellites in the area.  While this may have been considered preferable to absorbing an attack with nuclear missiles, it was still a major concern.   The use of high power nuclear explosives was also considered politically impalpable and the prospect of hundreds of nuclear-armed interceptors alarmed the Soviet Union.   The Soviets responded by designing new warheads that were radiation hardened and could withstand blasts up to as close as a few hundred meters.   They also threatened to build up their arsenal of nuclear missiles to include a large enough number to simply overwhelm any defense system

In the end, the US and Soviets both signed treaties to limit such weapons.   The US system, known as Safeguard, was only operational for a few months before being shutdown.   A similar Soviet system was dramatically scaled back and eventually had its nuclear warheads replaced with conventional explosives.

Today there are some interceptor systems that use missiles to intercept ICBM’s, although their effectiveness is somewhat limited.   One of the most notable is the US Aegis anti ballistic missile system. It’s quite effective against single warhead missiles that lack penetration aids and advanced features, but the effectiveness against a barrage of modern ICBM’s is questionable.

A separate approach developed in the 1980’s and focused on the use of directed energy weapons, especially lasers.   These would have a number of advantages over interceptor missiles.  They would be able to engage the target almost instantly and could track a fast moving and maneuvering target in ways that a physical interceptor never could.  The Strategic Defense Initiative was a program initiated by the Regan administration in the early 1980’s.   It studied a number of methods of intercepting missiles and warheads but focused especially on the use of high power lasers.   President Regan would say that one reason for pushing the program was the realization that even a single nuclear missile, perhaps launched by error, could not be stopped and would inevitably trigger a nuclear war.   Therefore, the ability to shoot down a missile quickly and effectively would be an important capability to help preserve world peace.

Whatever the motivation, the Strategic Defense Initiative had decidedly mixed results.  Huge amounts of money were expended and great strides were made in the development of high power lasers and remote sensing systems.   High speed interceptors were developed which eventually were incorporated into THAAD and the Aegis system.   High powered chemical lasers were developed and demonstrated to be capable of blinding satellites and tracking missiles, but showed limited potential against actual missile threats.   A few tests were conducted that showed the lasers could destroy the bodies of missiles, but this was generally limited to fairly thin-walled liquid fueled missiles, which were largely obsolete by the time.

The YAL-1:

After the close of the program in the early 1990’s, some attempts were made to find applications for the technology.   One was the YAL-1.  The YAL-1 is an attempt to make one of the huge chemical lasers developed for SDI into a viable weapon.   The mission of the YAL-1 is to shoot down ballistic missiles during the boost phase. This is a very short period of time during which the missile is just leaving the launch site on course for its target. It would be the ideal time to shoot down a missile, since it would avoid contamination of friendly areas with any materials on the missile and provide the quickest response to the threat.

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An interesting story has recent come out about research at the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory has been making the rounds.   It seems some studies relating to the cellular-level effects of ionizing radiation have found the effect is….. GASP…. not linear and directly proportional to dose level.

Via HealthCanal:

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SSRI’s or Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor’s are used as anti-depressant and anti-anxiety drugs. They’re often regarded as about the safest drugs we have, since it’s almost impossible to overdose on them and the negative long term health effects seem to be negligible. However, there has been some concern expressed about their safety during pregnancy.

A number of studies have been conducted on the use of various SSRI drugs during various stages of pregnancy and breast feeding. The majority of the studies done have not found any harmful effects of the use of SSRI’s on developing fetuses or infants who breastfeed. While these drugs do pass through the placenta, the concentration of exposure is at least two thirds less for the developing fetus than for the mother.

However, one study, done in 2007, did find a slight increase in a few birth defects in mothers who received relatively high doses of certain SSRI medications during the first trimester of their pregnancy. The study did not find any significant increase in overall odds of most birth defects, but did find an increase in a few birth defects, such as certain cardiac defects. Still, the total risk remains tiny with or without SSRI’s, and while the increase was greater than the statistical error of the study, confounding factors cannot be ruled out, such as the possibility that depressed mothers might have less healthy babies for a variety of reasons.

You can read the entire study here.

The reception of the study in the medical community was generally more one of reassurance than concern. While it indicated that there was at least a possibility that a few narrow birth defects might possibly be associated with SSRI’s, the overall risk is very low. Interestingly, the study did not find that these risks increased for all types of SSRI drugs. Zoloft and Paxil did appear to produce slight increases in some birth defects, but Prozac, Lexapro and other antidepressants did not produce any detectable increase in any birth defects.

Given that the risks are not completely proven and appear to be extremely low, the Mayo Clinic says the following about the use of antidepressants during pregnancy:

Overall, the risk of birth defects and other problems for babies of mothers who take antidepressants during pregnancy is low. Still, few medications have been proved safe without question during pregnancy and some types of antidepressants have been associated with health problems in babies.

It should also be noted that these slight increases in risk have been speculated about since before the 2007 study, and most women who received the drugs during pregnancy would have been told (or should have been told) by their doctor that the possibility existed that there could be a small increase in some birth defects.

Now enter the lawyers. Lets say, you happen to have had a child with a common and minor birth defect, like a cleft lip or a club foot, both of which are fairly common and correctable. You might have just put your child’s foot in a brace or taken them for minor plastic surgery and then thought nothing of it. Well, if you happen to have been taking an anti-depressent, there are lawyers out there who want to be sure you don’t just go on with your life without giving them a crack at the drug companies. And they’re paying for advertising to make sure you know.

I’m not entirely sure what the “occupy” protesters generally want.  They talk a lot about corruption in business and government.  Certainly, we can all agree that’s a bad thing and needs to be eliminated.   Other than that, most have little idea what the “corruption” is or where it needs to be routed out and how to do it.   Some are socialists, a few are anarchists and others just seem to not be sure what they are.

Now there has been a turn toward trying to blockade ports.   I’m not sure what the reasoning is.  Perhaps it’s a hatred of imports or a belief that blocking trade will somehow undermine the big businesses.  Regardless of their goals, it seems that some of the tactics have gone far beyond just getting in the way to the point of absolutely astounding danger.

Here is an amazing example of how bad it has gotten.

Faith in humanity? Okay, that’s fine. I really don’t think that any train driver wants to blow through a crowd or run over a toddler. I’ll even go so far as to say that the majority of the evil corporate executives at a railroad or transportation company would be horrified by the idea of a young child being torn apart under the wheels of a massive locomotive. I’m sure that the train driver, upon realizing that there is a child in the track will do everything possible to avoid running them over, which, unfortunately, is not much.

Perhaps this is just evidence that the educational system is failing, because in addition to humanity, there are some things you should always count on because they always work.

Inertia – It’s the property of an object to resist any change in its motion. It’s directly proportional to mass. In other words, heavy objects are more difficult to get moving that light objects. Makes sense, right? Well, conversely, once you get them moving, they’re also hard to stop.

Ever try pushing a car because it wouldn’t start? It’s hard to get it going but once you do it’s also hard to stop, which is why you need someone inside it to push the brake when it needs to. A two ton car has too much inertia for a human to easily stop it, even when it’s moving quite slow.

Trains have a lot more. A locomotive can weigh over one hundred tons. Fully loaded, each of the additional cars weighs anywhere from fifty to one hundred or more tons. So even a small freight train weighs thousands of tons. The ones that are used for transporting containers to and from ports are not small, however, and weigh a real real lot. They have a lot of inertia. When they get going, even at slow speed, it’s not easy to stop them.

Friction – It’s the property of two solid surfaces to resist motion against each other.  With wheels, it’s often considered to be synonymous with traction, the ability of the wheels to “grip” a surface and provide control and acceleration or stopping ability.   When you hit the brakes in a car, it’s the friction of a surface that keeps the car from just sliding away forever.

Not all surfaces have the same friction.  You will notice this if you are driving in different conditions.   Dry asphalt against rubber has quite a lot of friction, so if you hit the brakes on an asphalt road, you’ll stop pretty fast.   You may skid a bit, but it won’t be that much because the road provides plenty of friction against your wheels.   Now if you do the same on a wet road, which has less friction, you’re going to skid a lot farther.  Do it on an icy road and you’ll skid further still.  If you hit your brakes on a patch of smooth ice you will keep going almost like you didn’t hit them at all, although your car may also spin out.   One thing that will not happen on ice is a nice sudden stop, because there’s not enough friction.

You know what else doesn’t have a lot of friction?   Smooth steel rails against steel wheels.

And this is why, regardless of the humanity of a train driver, the train is not going to stop unless it has a good mile or so of warning that you’ve put your kid on the track.  It will keep going and kill you and your child.

For those interested in what actually happened: The original story can be read here. While it’s pretty clear from the video that the idiots were in the track right in front of a train, there are no reports of any deaths. Either the train was already coming to a stop and was light enough to not kill them all, or they realized it was not going to stop before it ran them over. Note that they are on the tracks but not chained to the tracks.

Just the same, this is one of the worst parents I have ever seen. It makes not vaccinating your children seem rather mild.

When astronauts first walked on the moon, NASA was recording the raw video on data tapes.  These tapes could have been used to provide better images of the event after the fact, even using technology of the day, and at the very least, fill in a few dead spots in the final recordings, caused by video source changes and problems in the converter settings.   Nasa took great pains to make sure the tapes were properly cataloged and stored and then, some time in the early 1980’s, like a complete idiot, lost them and presumably ended up erasing the tapes for reuse.

If that sounds stupid, you have not heard anything yet.

The multi-billion dollar Apollo Program brought back about 382 kilograms of lunar material (rock and soil samples).   Soviet unamanned sample-return missions brought back less than a third of a kilogram of material. There are also lunar meteorites, which are composed of material blasted off the moons surface by impact events, which eventually made their way to earth.  Although these meteorite samples do have scientific value, they events that brought them to earth combined with contamination and weathering means they do not have the same value as rocks collected on the actual surface of the moon.

The scientific value of moon rocks is enormous.  Analysis can help determine the composition of the moon, the age of the moon, the formation of the earth-moon system, the composition of the solar system and the levels and types of particles emitted by the sun.   The study of moon rocks is also critical to determining how future lunar missions might be carried out and to what extent the moon might be able to provide some of the resources necessary for such missions.  Analysis of moon rocks resulted in the giant impact hypothesis becoming the most accepted scenario for the formation of the moon.

While the material brought back from the moon has been subject to analysis and experimentation for more than forty years, there’s still much to learn.   Since the samples and the areas they were gathered from is relatively limited, many of the rocks are very unique in composition.   For example, the “Genesis Rock,” which was recovered during Apollo-15 appears to be the oldest rock of its type ever recovered.  At more than 4.5 billion years old, the rock dates to the very early days of the solar system.  It is possible that other samples may contain tiny fragments of the moon’s primordial crust, which would be even older.

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CRAP THIS WAS ACTUALLY AN APRIL FOOLS JOKE  OOPS!

Some news stories you really can’t make up.   Perhaps it’s a little bit off color to chuckle at a story about someone who is very likely mentally ill, but in some cases it’s hard not to.

For that matter, I suppose we could also at least consider that this might be true.

Apparently, a man from the future has come back to the present day (or so he says) to stop the LHC from discovering the Higgs boson, which would lead to some as yet unknown source of limitless energy for humanity.  While this sounds like a good thing, he explained that this ultimately was the undoing of society and therefore he was there to stop it.   Tragically, he made the mistake of forgetting to fill the tanks on his time machine with whatever fuel it uses, and it now seems he might be trapped in the present, which to him, is the past.

Via Cnet:

Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he’s from the future

A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.

The LHC successfully collided particles at record force earlier this week, a milestone Mr Cole was attempting to disrupt by stopping supplies of Mountain Dew to the experiment’s vending machines. He also claimed responsibility for the infamous baguette sabotage in November last year.

Mr Cole was seized by Swiss police after CERN security guards spotted him rooting around in bins. He explained that he was looking for fuel for his ‘time machine power unit’, a device that resembled a kitchen blender.

Police said Mr Cole, who was wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age, would not reveal his country of origin. “Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I’m here to stop it ever happening.”

This isn’t the first time time-travel has been blamed for mishaps at the LHC. Last year, the Japanese physicist Masao Ninomiya and Danish string-theory pioneer Holger Bech Nielsen put forward the hypothesis that the Higgs boson was so “abhorrent” that it somehow caused a ripple in time that prevented its own discovery.

Professor Brian Cox, a CERN physicist and full-time rock’n'roll TV scientist, was sympathetic to Mr Cole. “Bless him, he sounds harmless enough. At least he didn’t mention bloody black holes.”

Mr Cole was taken to a secure mental health facility in Geneva but later disappeared from his cell. Police are baffled, but not that bothered.

Unfortunately Mr. Cole apparently did not take into consideration some important factors that really all time travelers should consider.

1. Always bring enough fuel. (Although I thought he was from a future of limitless energy.. oh well). In fact, you should bring more fuel than you think you’ll need, because you never know when you’ll make a wrong turn or you’ll have to go back to the past yet again, because for all you know, Biff Tannen might have stolen the sports almanac and stopped your parents from falling in love at the dance, and then what are you to do? You can’t just rely on an opportune bolt of lightning, because lightning doesn’t even provide a huge amount of energy, contrary to popular belief.

Remember to bring both kinds of fuel that you will need. Sure, the time circuits may be electric, but what about the internal combustion engine? That runs on regular unleaded and always has. You can’t always find that.

Also keep in mind that 1.21 gigawatts is not actually an amount of energy at all.  It’s an amount of power, which means a reasonably large capacitor bank can provide it, but only for a brief period of time.   If you need it for longer, it’s still not impossibly high.  Any large power plant should be able to output it.    I never really figured out the whole “1.21 gigawatt” thing, but the best I can think of is it might be the amount of power continuously needed to travel a given amount of time.   For example, time traveling a year means you need 1.21 gigawatts times one year for the total energy.   That would seem to work, but then again, a lightning bolt would still never be enough.

So in any case, choose your fuel well and bring plenty of it.   You don’t want to rely on lightning or hijacked locomotives.

2. To be perfectly honest, don’t expect to return to the future you left and have it look anything like you expected or have a place for you. If you change anything, even slightly, those changes will propagate. If that happens your great great grandparents may not meet or may not marry and procreate. And just having your parents meet is not good enough. You can’t just set them back up if you mess up their meeting. Everything has to be identical, which it never will be. If they mate at a slightly different time or if the temperature is different by a fraction of a degree or anything like that, a different sperm will fertilize the egg and the resulting offspring won’t be you. This goes for all generations all the way back to where you have traveled.

So in all likelihood, just stepping into the past will result in a different time stream that you will return to in which you never existed.   You could go back to 1890, for example, and just by swatting a fly, you end up stopping World War I and World War II from happening.  That might seem like a good idea, until you realize that it prevents a guy from dying who then goes on to marry your grandmother, thus avoiding the marriage of her and your grandfather and now you don’t exist.

Or even if you did exist, you will find that you had not traveled back in time because you had no reason to, thus when you return, you will find yourself and have a real identity crisis.

You might be better off not going back but sending some kind of terminator unit.   The terminator could be made of living tissue around a metallic framework or out of some kind of shape-shifting metal.  It’s up to you.   The only problem is it probably won’t change your present because it gets inserted into an alternate reality.   Really, you just can’t win at this.

3.   You have all the time in the world.   Plan well.   Don’t just show up at the LHC with no idea how to stop it.  Bring weapons or something.  Flesh out a response plan and run it by a couple of your friends for input.  Consider what could go wrong.  Take the tools you might need.  Brush up on your period lingo and customs in case you had to blend in.   Just be sure not to mess up.

You only get one shot at this… well, actually, I suppose you can do it as many times as you want, but then you really start to make things messy and complicated.  You can encounter yourself on one of your aborted missions, for example.   It’s just best to avoid such problems.

4.  Consider *when* you want to go back to.   Is this really the best time?  Why wait until the LHC is constructed and operational?   You can go back a little further and it might be easier to stop it during construction.  Perhaps you could somehow disrupt the funding for it or sabotage the construction.  OR, you could try to stop an earlier accelerator from being built, which would stop the discoveries that would lead to the creation of the LHC.

5.  Remember there are alternate possibilities.  Don’t focus too much on one issue when it will likely spawn others.  Sure, you could shut down the LHC, but what will that do?  Some other accelerator will eventually be built and make the horrible discovery.  You need to think big and stop all particle physics.

6.  If you are going to resort to telling people not to do it, make sure you are believable.   It’s not a terribly bad plan to just be honest and tell the world that you are from the future and stopping a horrible mistake.   If you can get the governments of the world to listen, that might be the best way of actually stopping the project, but you really need to make it clear you are from the future, so bring some future stuff to show everyone.   Since you will be coming from the future, you’ll be able to choose the most opportune time to make a big splash.  You might want to pick a time when the news cycle is slow and when you can grab some media attention to warn the world before the government tries to stop you.

Of course, as long as you’re well prepared, the government shouldn’t be a problem.   They’ll have no way of stopping you with the crazy ray guns and telliportation devices you’ll have on you, so be sure to be well equipped to prove you’re from the future and that you are serious.

7.   Why not mix business with personal time travel?   We don’t get many visitors from the future, so it’s obviously fairly expensive or difficult to do, so use the trip wisely.   Once you’ve stopped the LHC, why not invest some money in a stock that you know is going through the roof or at least put it in an interest-bearing account.   Stop by some of the scenes of the past before they’re gone and enjoy the quaintness of 21st century culture.   Maybe grab a few interesting photos, like giving the future president of the world a wedgie while he’s still eight years old.   Now that’d be something cool to show your friends!

8.  Consider doing something nice.   After all, you’re messing up the time stream as is, so you may as well stop 9/11 or warn the Japanese about the 2011 earthquake or the Indian Ocean region about the 2004 tsunami.   At the very least look up some people who died of cancer and tell them they have it while it’s still treatable.

You don’t have to do this, but since you’re messing up the time stream, it just seems like you’d be a dick not to.

It could also help with your image, which might be hurt pretty badly if you happen to do something like destroy the LHC.   If you destroy the LHC, you’ll go down in history as the guy who destroyed the LHC, and when you return to your day and age they might not think you’re a hero, because they won’t be aware of the problems the LHC caused.

On the other hand, if you evacuate the Indian coast before the Tsunami and then destroy the LHC, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be remembered well just the same.

The following article ran on the front page of the New York Times just a few days ago. I’m hoping very much that this might actually start to get people questioning the wisdom of spending huge amounts of money on energy sources that can’t and won’t deliver. This is especially true in the current economic climate. The US government can’t afford to waste money and as many suffer without jobs, the issue of “corporate welfare” and handouts that benefit the rich while doing little for society as a whole has become a major issue.

Yet these subsidies and mandates are exactly the kind that create the worst social inequalities. Those rich enough to invest in the government-backed and subsidized businesses are given a golden opportunity to make more money with less risk than could ever be had in a fair market. At the same time, the general public pays for it through higher electric rates and taxes. Despite the claims that these programs exist to create jobs, the higher cost of energy that results hurts industry and ultimately can cost jobs. The enterprises that take advantage of these subsidies are incapable of ever being self-sustaining and could not survive without these direct and very expensive incentives by the government.

Via the New York Times:

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This is a rarity. I’ve seen something so horrible and I’m so goddamned angry about it that I can’t even think of what to say. It’s astoundingly disheartening to see such a professional, compelling and effective set of lies being purported to further infectious disease.

Hopefully by posting this garbage I can get some sound-minded people to vote it down a bit and make some rational comments to educated those who might believe this dangerous message.

Here it is. The Greater Good: Supposedly a fair look at vaccines, but actually one of the worst pieces of lying propaganda I have ever seen.

This is beyond shameful. It’s a very skilfully made, compelling set of bold faced lies that tug on heartstrings and can easily cost lives. Defeating this kind of propaganda is going to be very difficult. It’s a potent weapon against the war on infectious disease that humanity has fought for its entire history. We’re really going to have to work hard to fight this filth. It may require writing letters to the film festivals and venues that show it.

For a complete and well researched refutation of the film, please visit Science Based Medicine.

Oh, and by the way, there’s no evidence that the health problems of the young lady shown in the beginning are at all related to vaccines. She began to experience health problems which were diagnosed as central nervous system vasculitis and central nervous system lupus “within weeks” of her third dose of the HPV vaccine, but there’s absolutely no evidence the two are related and in all likelihood, the condition had been developing for some time before that. Of course, it’s very sad that she has this condition, but it was not caused by the vaccine. You can read more about it on the Science Based Medicine page.

It is going to be very very hard to counter this kind of media. We’re facing an uphill battle. The major pro-vaccine groups have nowhere near the money necessary to produce a film of this kind of quality and if they did, it would just be portrayed as proof of all the dirty money that big pharma is spending. The only way of combating this is to redouble grass roots efforts, but with this well funded and cunning opposition, it won’t be easy.

In the war on infectious disease, it now seems we have two enemies working in close alliance. One is the pathogenic microbes who seek to invade our bodies and the other is the humans who have defected to their side. I’m not sure anymore which is the tougher one to defeat.

There are two primary types of smoke detectors: ionization and photoelectric.  Ionization smoke detectors are the most common type and have been around the longest.   Photoelectric detectors have not been commonplace until more recently and are still generally less common than ionization detectors.

Ionization detectors use a tiny amount of radioactive material, usually amercium-241, to ionize air in a small chamber in the detector.  When smoke particles from a fire enter the detector, they interrupt the ion potential of the air in the chamber, thus tripping the detector.

Photoelectric detectors work by using a tiny light emitting diode, usually infrared and a light detector.  A small gap between the light and the detector allows air to pass between the two.  When smoke particles enter the detector, they obscure the light beam and this triggers the detector.

Recent Opposition to Ionization Detectors:

In recent years there have been some groups that have sprung up claiming that ionization detectors are entirely unreliable and that the use of ionization detectors puts lives in danger due to their failure to adequately detect and warn of fire.   This is often accompanied with claims of some kind of conspiracy between authorities and smoke detector manufacturers to keep this information from the public.   The issue of radioactivity and claims of corruption by the nuclear industry as also been a fixture in the argument.

It may not be that surprising, in the end.  Given the rampant radiophobia that has gripped the world, even the humble smoke detector had to eventually become the subject of fear.

These arguments were used as the basis for an Australian documentary and advocacy project with the absurdly dramatic name “Stop the Children Burning.”

Here is a clip from the film:

In reality, there’s no danger posed by the tiny amount of Am-241 in smoke detectors.  Am-241 produces some low energy gamma rays, but is primarily an alpha emitter.  The material is present in microscopic quantities and is in a form that is non-soluble, chemically stable and not easily absorbed.  It can resist all but the most extreme temperatures, and if the temperature was that high, you’d have worse things to worry about than inhaling a tiny amount of Americium liberated from the detector.  In most cases, the Am-241 is in the form of an oxide or ceramic and is embedded in gold foil that is affixed to a steel disk, usually recessed.   It is specifically designed to make release of the material unlikely.

There is no requirement for special disposal of smoke detectors nor do they require a license to own or sell.  The total radiation exposure during normal operations is negligible and even in the most extreme cases of a release of the embedded material would still be too small for much concern. It has not been “declared fifteen times more dangerous than plutonium.” It is technically about fifteen times more radioactive per unit of mass because the half-life is shorter, but that also means a much smaller amount is needed to produce the same ionization effect than would be needed if plutonium were used.

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Today I almost plunked down money for a useless product that was being sold to treat a condition it won’t actually help. No, it wasn’t on purpose and in the end, I caught myself but I came a lot closer than I’d have liked to falling for the scam and if I didn’t make it a point to be careful of this I would have.

Today has not been a good day for me. I woke up this morning with an itchy, watering, irritated eye. I wiped it, I splashed water in it and that did not seem to help. By the time I was driving to work my other eye was bothering me. In fact, my eyes were so irritated I could hardly keep them open for long and they were watering enough to make it a bit hard to see, especially with the glare of the early morning sun, low on the horizon. I had to keep stopping the car and wiping the tears from my watering eyes, closing them to regain my vision and returning to the road until they started bothering me enough to stop again.

By the time I was at work, it had become obvious that I was suffering from conjunctivitis, commonly known as pinkeye. The outer layer of my eye, the conjunctiva, had become inflamed and was bloodshot, itchy and irritated. It’s a fairly common condition which can be caused by a bacterial or viral infection. In my case, I’d later find out I probably have a minor viral infection, based on the symptoms. It’s generally not terribly serious and tends to clear up on its own within a couple of days, but it’s annoying and uncomfortable. It’s also fairly contagious, so it’s important to wash one’s hands, avoid touching common surfaces when possible and clean those that are touched.

My condition, however, was bad enough that I figured I should probably see a doctor. I made a call to my doctor’s office and was told that unless it was an emergency they wouldn’t be able to have anyone to see me until later in the afternoon. Of course, it’s not an emergency, so I was agreeable to waiting a few hours to have my eyes looked at.

Given that I had to wait a few hours, I went to my local drug store to see if there were any products that might be able to offer some kind of relief in the meantime. I wasn’t looking for a cure, but as my eyes were pretty sore, I thought that there might be some kind of anti-itch, anti-irritation eye drops that would, if nothing else, at least be soothing to my sore eyeballs.

And this is where I almost got swindled, because as I scanned across the shelf of eyedrop products, something caught my watery, itchy, squinting eyes:

I saw the pink eye and the words “Pinkeye relief,” and immediately thought to myself “Well that’s exactly what I’m looking for!”  I then read the indications, stating that it provided relief from redness, irritation and watery discharge.   Again, I thought it was perfect.

You may notice that there word “homeopathic” is written in thin white font against the red background of a tiny band that runs around the box just bellow the picture of the eye.   I literally couldn’t see this at all in my state.    I was really and truly about to buy this product.  Luckily, I have a habit of looking at the back fine print whenever I buy a health product, and this was no exception.  Despite my irritation, I wiped my eyes and forced them all the way open to examine the directions and active ingredients of the product.  Only then did I actually see the words “homeopathic.”

I’m also lucky in that I know what “homeopathy” means, which many people do not.   The fact that it’s homeopathic means that everything else on the front of the box can be discounted as a lie.  It says “relieves the redness, watery discharge & burning associated with conjunctivitis.”  Well, it doesn’t.  That’s just a bold faced lie.   You might think that it would do so, because it says it does right on the box and most products you find on the shelves of your local pharmacy are required by law to only make truthful statements about what symptoms they can provide relief to, but this is homeopathic, so they can lie.

The active ingredients are belladonna, euphrasia and hepar sulphuris, not because these ingredients actually have been shown to help the symptoms of pinkeye, but because if you put them in a healthy eye, they’ll make it get red, irritated and watery.   However, they’re diluted to the point where there are only a few molecules or less actually present in the final product, so there’s really no effect.   The only thing this product might do to help pinkeye is just provide a little bit of lubrication and moisturizing, which any eyedrop could do.

I was lucky to catch this.  In the end I bought some general purpose anti-itch eyedrops that cost half as much as the homeopathic version and actually have some active ingredients that help provide some itch relief.   They didn’t help all that much, but they seem to reduce the itch a bit.   (Note, this is not a placebo controlled study thus my opinion that they seem to help should not be considered to be an objective fact.)

But still, I was very nearly swindled by an extremely dishonest product making a false claim and sitting next to perfectly legitimate products in similar packaging on the same shelf.

And yes, I’m pissed!

I wonder if they actually picked the font and colors to make it intentionally difficult for a person with watery, irritated eyes to see it.  It wouldn’t surprise me if that was the case.

I wrote about this kind of thing a while ago, but this is the first time I was almost swindled, because I’m usually very careful about these sort of things.