I believed it. Sadly it's not real: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/plutonium-jazz
It seems believable given the story of the “Radium Girls”, workers who painted radioactive paint on watch dials to make them glow. They’d lick the tips of the brushes when they got too frayed… which eventually led to cancer.
Whoa. Eating radioactive material isn't great at all.
From a different time, too: An X-Ray shoe fitter
A department store still had one of these when I was a kid, but it wasn't used. It was, however, in occasional use when my brother was very little in the early 80s. My mom has pictures of him with his foot in it.
Thanks, Woke.
They want to cancel bananas now.
To be fair, the factory management knew that it was dangerous but didn't tell the workers and encouraged them to lick the brush.
Phew.
I came to the comments for this hope.
Sadly??
This sounds like something that was made up for a fallout game.
Of course, so does "bombarding myself with xrays and moving around to entertain the audience looking at my bones" and "including uranium in paint to make watch dials glow"
They did it with uranium too? I knew about radium, but not that.
Uranium wasn't used for watch dials, but Uranium Orange is a colour of cermic glaze. It was pretty popular in America from the 1930's to around 1942, when the government needed all the uranium for some big secret project. After the 60's it was made with depleted uranium, instead of natural ore, until someone realized this still wasn't a great idea.
Fun fact: fiestaware plates (this was the company that made the uraranium glazed ceramics) are commonly used by radiation safety folks as check sources and for teaching how to use survey meters. This is because they usually aren’t considered a radioisotope source, so there’s less paperwork to keep them around.
I believed this was real until I searched for it 😂 To be fair to my own credulity, Plutonium Jazz would not be the most insane thing people did with radioactive materials back then. The "medicines" alone make Plutonium Jazz sound pretty tame.
But Geiger counters aren't rhythmic at all, radioactive decay is, pretty famously, random.
True, much like memes are pretty famously fabricated.
... Jazz.
/S
Rhythmic? No, not really. More exciting if the musician could somehow anticipate this fundamentally unpredictable event? Absolutely.
Follows a Poisson distribution. I guess one could call that random.
Well, its random, like... by definition.
The third sentence makes it clear it's fake
Disappointed in the people who believed this.
Well... This is jazz... I'm skeptic as well, but what if it was some sort of experimental modern jazz where the musicians would try to predict the next click?
You can't predict the next click, that's what random means. This would never have gotten far enough to appear in front of an audience. They would have tried it at rehearsal and realised it was impossible.
It does have a rate though. Each click is random, but overall they're at a predictable rate. Still, it wouldn't be useful for music really. I could see someone trying to make it happen though. I've heard of dumber things.
Well in that case all you've done is reinvent tempo but worse. Unless you vary the rate on the fly, which requires moving the counter and/or radioactive material on the fly. And then all you've done is create a very bad musical instrument.
It would be Musical Roulette essentially
The Geiger counter can be pre recorded, creating the illusion it was life, yet allowing the composition to be crafted around it
And even if it worked, you wouldn't need a radiation source more dangerous than a banana to make a geiger counter go click enough to play along.
If there were hazardous levels of radiation, the clicks would be a squeal, you wouldn't be able to match a rhythm to it
Right. If you were to attempt something like this, you'd be better off with something like a chunk of granite than plutonium.
Since "Geiger" is German for "violinist", you can replicate it with a guy who counts how many violinists are present
"3.6 violinists. Not great, not terrible."
147282793856...
[jazz plays]
Sounds like a Cowboy Bebop episode involving smuggled fissile material.
Live performances at Chernobl when?!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
