Stan, Day 7

28.1 µS/hr @ 7:43 am

(35.1 µS/hr @ 4:45 pm)

He was furiously eating.  I’m planning on making another attempt later today and correcting this reading.

Amusingly, he has come to accept the presence of the detector and accepts that I will press it against his throat.  He just won’t let it get in his way anymore.

Stanford, Day 4

89.8 µS/hr @ 8:09 am

The number should be going down day-by-day, not up.

I attribute the crazy readings one or more of these factors:

  • Experimental error.  Stan doesn’t much care for the detector being shoved in his face.  The readings change drastically depending on which part of his neck you reach.
  • Calibration, or lack thereof.
  • Secondary decay byproducts that are more radioactive.  I will research that in a bit. (EDIT: Iodine 131 decays into Xenon 131, which is stable (not radioactive).)

I think I saw an even higher reading, but Stan is a long-haired cat and obscured the screen.  The detector doesn’t keep a high-water mark in it’s history, just averages.

Stan, Day 2

35.6 µS/hr @ 8:10 am.

Correction: 86.4 µS/hr @ 2:23 pm. [1]

There’s definitely some variability to the readings due to experimental error.  The highest readings come when I press the device directly against his throat, which he does not like.

I get better cooperation if he’s eating while I take the readings.

He also does not like the sound the detector makes, so I’ve disabled it, but that removes some of the fun (for me) during the data collection.

If I had a bunch of these detectors and placed them in each room then we could track his movements around the house based on sound alone.  There are noticeable rises in detector activity when he merely enters the room.

[1] this is a lesson in experimental error.  Stan jumped up on my lap at an opportune moment and was willing to rub his face against the detector, leading to the highest score to-date.  Figuring out how to get consistent results is going to be a problem.

Stan’s Return, Day 1

We just got Stan home from the MSPCA hospital.  He’s been there for three weeks while his radioactivity levels fell from highly dangerous levels to merely regular dangerous.

Today’s highest reading: 41.7 µS/hr from the area around his throat.  That’s more than four thousand times higher than the typical background levels in my house.

Background

Stan was treated for an overactive thyroid.  The modern procedure is to inject the patient with a single dose of Iodine 131 to kill off the hyperactive cells.  The normal thyroid cells are generally unaffected because they’ve gone dormant and don’t take up any of the iodine.

For the first three weeks post-treatment Stan was kept at the facility for monitoring but, more importantly, because his pee and poop were strongly radioactive and cannot be disposed of with normal trash.  We would have had to hold onto it for 90+ days.

I’m planning on taking daily readings using my Better Geiger S1 scintillator until his levels drop to near-background levels, which are under 0.01 µS/hr in my house.

Harder Than It Needed To Be

I think I’m not alone in disliking Google’s AI-generated results.

As tedium.co explains, it’s technically possible to remove the AI cruft just by adding a URL parameter to your search.  It’s not perfect.  As that page points out you’re getting a 2001 presentation of today’s SEO-addled search results, so the results aren’t the breath of fresh air you might be hoping for.  But they don’t have the AI summaries, and that’s a plus.

Sites like  udm14.com make a big show of adding the parameter and removing the AI stuff for you, but I don’t typically start at the front door of search engines.  I use address-bar searching like a civilized person.

Oddly, since they’re the FLOSS favorite, but maybe not-so-oddly since they’re still beholden to corporate interests, Firefox makes it easy to add commercial providers but doesn’t make it easy to add or edit custom providers.  Finding out how took me much longer than I’m happy about. I’m sharing here in hopes that it helps someone else.

The support forum leads the way, but here’s a summary:

  1. Go to about:config
  2. Create, or modify, the browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh setting as a boolean and set it to “true”.  It’s undocumented.Firefox about:config showing new parameter
  3. Click on the “hamburger” menu, click Settings, then go to Search
    firefox hamburger menu
  4. Under the “Search Shortcuts” section, you should have an “Add” button that wasn’t there before.  Click it.
  5. Fill in your “new” search provider, using the same term for Engine URL and Search Suggestion URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 then save your changes.edit search engine example dialog
  6. Slide back up to the top of the page and set your “Default Search Engine” to your “new” provider.

That’s it!