It's a shame the judge didn't say
"Up and atom!" to the police...
A judge has warned that a man who jumped bail while facing child pornography charges and fled to Ireland could pose a radiation risk to those he comes into contact with. College principal Thomas Leopold, 42, was slated for an appearance before the beak accused of "five counts of making indecent images of children, and one of …
If those pesky Al-Qaeda blokes get their filthy hooks into him, they just have to strap a bomb on him and send him into parliament, a double dirty bomb, what with the radiation and all the blood, shit and piss flying everywhere.
Shoot him anyway, damn paedos want grinding into dust under a massive boot.
Geiger-Muller tubes work by detecting charged particles directly. Since the average radioactive particle will only travel a few centimetres through air, they would be pretty much useless unless you go around waving one over every part of a person's anatomy. Add that to the fact that the radioactive iodine used to treat a thyroid condition (not an uncommon treatment) will be concentrated in a persons thyroid gland, which is in their neck beneath skin and surface musculature, which would tend to absorb the beta particles pretty effectively.
Anything to do with radiation automatically becomes a scare oout of proportion to the real threat.
He will presumabely be treated with I131 this has a half life from memory of about 8 days and is a gamma and beta emitter. The gamma rays havea fairly high energy (for nuclea rmedicine anyway) of around 360 keV so will easily penetrate his body.
Whatever he has ingested has already decayed by a factor of 8. In addition some material will have been excreted. The beta radiation will not penetrate his body leaving the gamma exposure to police or the public. Studies of the radiation exposure to the family members and pets! of therapy patients show that doses recived over two weeks are an order of magnitude below safety limits.
Given that the material will have decayed by a factor of 8 and the possible exposure time is going to be no more than a few hours the 'threat' already well within safety limits is going to be roughly one thousandth of an already insignificant hazard. Actually this is obvious, people are routinely treated in this way as out patients and it is considered quite normal and safe.
The story does contribute to the general scare mongering and paranoid fantasy about anything radioactive, dirty bombs etc.
"So issues the Garda with geiger counters and we'll find him pretty quick?" .... By Caff Posted Friday 27th February 2009 14:48 GMT
Caff,
You don't know the Garda, very well, do you? [And that's a joke, Paddy, as you know we are masters at laughing at ourselves. And bloody good at rugby too. :-)]
He is *accused* of having dangerously pornographic pictures.
It scares the hell out of me that there are so many people ready to cry hang 'em and flog 'em before any evidence has even been heard, just because someone has been accused. He may be a paedo, but he may not...
Does no one care about justice any more?
Paris because she can be dangerously pornographic
I guess this is the kind of story one should expect from "...a website..." that's sometimes "...a reliable news breaker..." or even "...an ever-excellent technology site..." but is really just "...a bunch of aggro loner twats..." pretending to be "...a respected technology news website..." while in reality engaging in "...unethical..." "...yellow..." pseudo-journalism. This "...internet scandal-sheet..." is less informative about I.T. than a "...comically angry..." "...online lesbian magazine...". I guess they ran short of real news, and had to fall back to being "...an ad-banner trolling site who will publish any rubbish if it'll get clicks...". This story is probably "...best ignored...", it being Friday after all.
Yeah, the one with the extra ellipses in the pocket, ta.
He may only be accused of a child pornography offence, but clearly he has violated his bail conditions. Perhaps by announcing that he is radioactive, it is hoped that he will turn himself in, rather than being Tasered by police who wouln't want to spend too long physically restraining him.
"five counts of making indecent images of children"
Well at least at the moment that probably means the guy in someway took photos of naked kids (although he could just be an artist who makes pictures of cherubs)
But soon "five counts of making indecent images of children" will just mean he drew 5 manga loli on a piece of paper.
As I understand the law, this means that you simply have to download the .jpg and 'make' the pic on your screen with the comp. It goes back to the time when it was legal to possess some kinds of porn, but not to manufacture the stuff, so some clever prosecutor persuaded a judge that the 'download file - create image' was making the picture.
Anyway, I seem to recall that here in Canada Manga lolis are illegal. (Well, some anyway)
Pet owner gets stopped and searched for dirty bombs because routine nuclear surveillance detected the radiation treatment in his cat. Inside a car. Going by at 70 miles per hour. - http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/dannywestneat/2004300343_danny23.html
‘Hot’ patients setting off dirty-bomb alarms - Surprise side effect of radioactive medical therapies: being strip-searched - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16869630/
Medical Tests Can Trigger Airport Radiation Alarms - http://sexualhealth.e-healthsource.com/index.php?p=news1&id=526971
Bruce Schneier on radiation detectors in ports - http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/03/radiation_detec_1.html
Hell I've been saying that for at least 3 months now. Hell what has me more worried is it took this long for people to say anything. Starting to wonder if we were so conditioned by his normal posts that we just randomly added in nonsensical phrases into a post of his liberally sprinkled with XXXXXX and stuff in there from time to time. Maybe that alien mind control of his is starting to get to us...
/mines the one with the foil hat next to it. Thanks
"Geiger-Muller tubes work by detecting charged particles directly. Since the average radioactive particle will only travel a few centimetres through air, they would be pretty much useless unless you go around waving one over every part of a person's anatomy"
GM tubes will also detect gamma rays. If a gamma ray photo strikes a particle of air within the tube (and is absorbed), the molecule of gas become ionised.
So GM tubes will also detect gamma radiation.
However, the point about gamma radiation is that it is not as strongly isonising as alpha radiation. Alpha radiation are charged particles. Gamma radiation is not charged.
If as someone else has suggested the primary emitters of radiation with the radioisotope are gamma rays and beta radiation, the beta particles ( high energy electrons) will not penetrate the skin, however the gamma will, but that's probably very low level.
The biggest risk is...if you catch the criminal and he decides to take a leak over you.
Some of the radioactive material may find its way into the uninary system.
"Geiger-Muller tubes work by detecting charged particles directly. Since the average radioactive particle will only travel a few centimetres through air, they would be pretty much useless unless you go around waving one over every part of a person's anatomy. Add that to the fact that the radioactive iodine used to treat a thyroid condition (not an uncommon treatment) will be concentrated in a persons thyroid gland, which is in their neck beneath skin and surface musculature, which would tend to absorb the beta particles pretty effectively."
Indeed. Surely if he was radioactive enough to be a danger to others he would be....well...dead, dead dead and more dead to the power dead. So that raises the question, if he IS radioactive enough to be dangerous he should be easily detectable.
Both my late son & extant wife had radiotherapy (i.e. radioactive treatment,) to their cancers. I was never given a health warning that they were radioactive. Simply because the amount of radiation they emitted would have been too tiny to worry about. The Beak saw the words "radioactive treatment" & threw a wobbly!
I was working on a client site with a colleague a couple of years ago. She was pregnant at the time. She has always been on the, erm, larger side, and now with the baby was... well, you get the picture. One of the client's techies had just had this iodine therapy, and he was told that he was radioactive enough that he had to stay away from people who might be sensitive to radiation. So he comes into our room, looks at the two of us and says, "There aren't any children or pregnant women in here, are there?"... My colleague was not amused.
I tend to work with 'dangerous' levels of radiation most days. It takes a fair amount of radiation to get a Geiger counter to start ticking above background levels - say like 10 feet from a 1.6 Curie CS 137 source in a ~33kg depleted uranium shield. And you really have to be paying attention to see that low level.
For someone treated with such extremely low levels of radiation, with such a short halflife, you'd probably be able to stick the Geiger-Muller tube probe down their throat and not see anything out of the orginary. You would likely need a Scintillation Detector, which is not quite as cheap or easy to make as a geiger counter. And you'd have to be pretty close too. The nice thing is that if you did it right, it could do a spectroscopic breakdown and tell you just what radioisotopes it found. And that would probably come out on the indecent side of $100k.