This is also how I think about AI training data. You have generational loss if you train AI on data that came from AI, so pre-AI data will be inherently more valuable, even as it becomes outdated.
Wow, this is the setup for some excellent dystopian scifi. Or, like, real fucking life.
FFS, couldn't this have just been a text post?
So much harder to read in a shitty jpg
as an image I can easily save it and repost it to my own shitposting channel. Sure I could do that with a text post, but it would be infinitesimally more work.
Also, framing the text as an image enshrines it as a shitpost worth preserving. I don't make the rules.
Also totally sucks for accessibility. Some communities strictly enforce having alt text for posts.
Transcript:
souldagger
im sorry i just found out that all steel made post-ww2 has like subtly higher levels of radioactivity..... bc the nuclear bombs increased the background radiation in the air slightly all across the world and so atmospheric air used in the production of steel contaminates it.... and it's completely negligible in everyday life and not at all dangerous (really, truly do not worry about it) but apparently it also means that whenever we need Special No Radiation Steel (like for scientific/medical equipment, ex. geiger counters or xray machines) we have to use scavenged steel made before ww2. and apparently shipwrecks are a great source of such steel. so a lot of such equipment is made from recycled shipwreck metal. what the fuck. what the fuck
for anyone who like me was worried we will one day run out of shipwreck steel: thankfully the background radiation levels in the atmosphere have been dropping ever since nuclear testing was moved underground, so this will become less and less of an issue with time, and now for another radioactive metal from shipwrecks fan fact:
apparently lead is really good for radiation shielding, which is why it's important to many physics experiments, especially those concerned with studying dark matter and rare particles. unfortunately, lead is also inherently A Little Bit Radioactive (unrelated to nuclear bombs, it's just a feature of the metal), but the radioactive element decays over time, so the older the lead, the less radioactive, and hence better for Physics Stuff. which is why ancient Roman lead is Ideal for this, so a lot of ancient bars of lead from Roman shipwrecks - tons of cargo that would've ended up as weapons or coins and stuff, if it didn't sink to the bottom of the sea - are sold to physicists. it's like a whole "preservation of cultural heritage vs revolutionary scientific research" thing. like a whole fucking feud btwn the archaeologists and physicists
Maybe game mechanics aren't so unrealistic after all because now "you need this rare metal that is only found in ancient relics and we don't know how to make it" sounds really fucking plausible. Wtf.
There are examples of lost metals in real life. Damascus/wootz steel (the actual historical metal, not the pattern welding technique often marketed as Damascus steel) was produced for multiple millennia and was prized for its ability to hold a sharp edge and resist shattering, before the technique to make it was lost in the early 1900s.
Modern material analysis has identified some of how and why it was so resilient and metallurgists have come up with reproductions that achieve most of its qualities, but the exact technique and circumstances behind it remain lost to time even though it only stopped being produced a mere century ago.
A guy called Frank Richtig made knives from the 30s to the 70s using a heat treatment that’s never been replicated. He would do demonstrations where he’d use a hammer and a knife to cut through steel, and then use that same knife to slice through paper as if nothing had happened.
even heavily worn knives fetch a high price these days.
Oh no, another rabbit hole.
Well, down I go!
IIRC, it's also one of the best ways to test for forged paintings, because paint after WW2 is affected by the same minute traces of background radiation that the real deal painted a few hundred years ago wouldn't have.
So this is probably a dumb question, but why would "new" lead be any more radioactive than ancient ingots? Wouldn't it be the same age (whenever the deposit was formed) and have decayed the same amount while still in the ground?
I'll go down this rabbit hole for you because I was also curious.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-roman-lead-physics-archaeology-controversy/
All lead mined on Earth naturally contains some amount of the radioactive element uranium 235, which decays, over time, into another radioactive element, a version of lead called lead 210. When lead ore is first processed, it is purified and most of the uranium is removed. Whatever lead 210 is already present begins to break down, with half of it decaying on average every 22 years. In Roman lead almost all of the lead 210 has already decayed, whereas in lead mined today, it is just beginning to decay. (Of course, many lead 210 atoms have already decayed in this ore, too, but the supply is constantly replenished by uranium in unprocessed lead). "The longer since it was originally processed, the lower its intrinsic radioactivity," Gonzalez-Zalba says.
they did a whoopsie, lead 210 comes from uranium 238. every 220 years radioactivity drops 1000x which means that 200-300 year old lead is mostly fine. copper notably doesn't have this problem, is dense and is refined to high degree, at scale. it's good enough to shield most of relatively low energy radiation from that isotope (less than 50kev gammas). couple mm of copper should be plenty for many applications
You can still get Job in metal shop
not all from me, but I recommend snacks
You won't get the same purity. Not because of worse industrial processes, but because with ancient lead any radioactive impurity normally introduced by the ore had enough time to decay.
We simply can't filter out trace amounts of radioactive material naturally existing in or around the ore as reliable as time can.
Not all of it is stable isotopes. Some of it has traces if radioactive stuff in it, since that stuff usuially decays Into lead, the highest atomic number element with stable isotopes and you might have a really decayed batch that's mostly just lead now but not lead enough for certain uses. Or it has unstable lead isotopes
Yeah all the lead atoms are the same age, whether refined or not. Does refining lead somehow make it radioactive?
Not all lead is formed at the same time, a lot of it is made by decay of other stuff and the decay chains are of different lengths, if I understand this correctly.
Reincarnate me as a melanin obsessed Ukrainian mold spider fungus possum growing from Chernobyl
...what?
I just watched a youtube video that they found a Roman shipwreck absolutely packed with lead ingots. They brought them up for use.
I second the request for a link if you can remember it. Raising stacks of lead from the seafloor sounds like an interesting (and expensive!) engineering challenge, especially if they aren't bound together.
Share the link? That sounds fascinating!
It was confounding. Please beware!
Maybe that infamous copper salesman had selflessly excised all of his radioactive copper from his stocks so as not to rip off or harm the customer. Maybe he deserves an apology. Inferior copper that isn't full of syphilis or whatever is better than great copper that melts your face off.
We should talk about copper and what's the deal
Does this mean archeologists and physicists get into gang fights?
I'm an archaeologist and I'm totally cool with them having a few bars. As long as everything removed from collections is weighed, recorded, and ideally photographed it's okay. Of course we should keep a representative sample of lead bars, but there's a lot of material and we can't curate every ingot or every brick. So it's a balance for sure.
It turns out to be more of a gang coperation. A decent number of archeological research projects around the Mediterranean are funded by much larger physics grants. They fund the exploration and the anthropologists and other researchers can keep everything, publish the findings etc, as long as the physics project gets all the lead that they find at the bottom of the ocean.
Gangs of New York 2: Battle of Lead Alley
Sharks and Jets?
Indiana Jones vs. The Physicists
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