The ‘toxicity’ of plutonium is based on the chance of causing cancer over the life of the victim when inhaled as a finely pulverized metal dust. The chemical toxicity is much lower (similar to lead) and the absorption rate is low if ingested. Metal or oxide forms of plutonium are not absorbed through the skin, and the alpha particles generated by decay cannot penetrate the skin either. Epidemiological studies have also disproved the ‘hot spot’ theory used to enhance theoretical toxicity in the lungs.
It is not something you want to handle without precautions, but then few things are.
I was going to point some of that stuff out guys but you took the words right out of my mouth. 😀 BTW I’ll bet some people would be surprised that you can buy uranium ore online. Perfectly safe, just wash your hand after handling it. Too bad United Nuclear seems to be sold out.
Plutonium is also one of the few elements that undergoes spontaneous fission, which means it is also a neutron emitter.
Due to it’s high radioactivity, a chunk of plutonium, just sitting there, is warm to the touch. This is why it is used in spacecraft like Galileo and Voyager. It generates electricity from it’s heat, not from any kind of nuclear chain-reaction.
While a metal, it is soft enough to cut with a butter knife.
Crazy stuff, plutonium. It should fit right in the Wapsiverse.
It’s also pyrophoric; ground to a powder or fine shavings (maximising the surface area-to-mass ratio), it will combust spontaneously in air, producing reaction products which are even worse to inhgale than the dust itself.
Uranium is similar, but not to such a degree, which is a second reason (aside from its density) why spent reactor fuel is used in anti-armour penetrator rounds – the heat generated by the friction as it punches through ignites it and it becomes a white-hot fireball bouncing around inside the tank.
Quite right (i kind of knew that but the fingers got ahead of the brain) – at least theoretically, but there have been reports that at least some weapons had been made from reactor waste.
The way they use reactor waste in a weapon is to pack it around a chemical explosive and use that to spread the radioactive substance around creating a nightmare to clean up. The same idea is used in some chemical and biological weapons.
But how concentrated is this particular vial of the stuff? How pure is it? The amount of radioactivity could be enourmous. Of course one assumes the container keeps the handles safe. It would be much to little for our technology, but … nothing says it is from our current technology. Time traveling Shelly might have gone into the future to obtain a really concentrated amount. Also, it may be it’s safe to handle here because nothing can be harmed in this place, like the Library. That could mean she got it from our current time, carrying it in a larger lead container and disgarding the lead container after she got it in place in the tree. Which begs the question, how did she place it in the dead center? Even if it was much smaller at the time.
Strangely enough the amount of plutonium Shelly is holding is perfectly safe if sealed in almost any container.
Almost
Beryllium is a neutron reflector and can amplify plutonium’s self-fissioning. The sword hilt may in fact be lined with beryllium making the stick of plutonium into a power source.
Now if that is the case what other function does the sword hilt have?
…and, beryllium (in powder form in which form it is/was used when working with nuclear power processes) is, in fact, nastier chemically than plutonium…
If it’s an alpha source, then shes got nothing to worry about (unless shes inhaling it). But, if it’s a beta or gamma source, shes in a real pickle. :Ι
“Now you’ll need to call this guy, his name is Doc Brown. He’ll have a DeLorean that you’ll need to hook that up to. Just watch out for the Libyans, though.”
I’m pretty sure Paul was too, considering this is a time keeping forest and and the Sphinx keeps saying she has been here before but Shelly doesn’t know anything. Personally time travel pysicis makes my head hurt, but I love reading about it.
Woo-hoo! nuclear-powered blade, and a buffy girl holding it!
– Well yeah, but she removed the blade…
-Ah? so…Woo-hoo! nuclear-powered jedi sabre, and a buffy girl holding it!
It would depend on what the relic does with it. If it uses the plutonium as a power source, direct mass to energy conversion, then you’d have the power of a continuous nuclear blast in your hand. Hook that up to something capable of using it, and you could accomplish miracles. Or destruction on a Chimera level scale…
As to how it got in the tree…
putting it in a knothole in the trunk at a much younger age would allow the tree to grow and heal around the knot.
One must be careful cutting up trees around an old farm. Casually hanging something in the crook or crotch of a limb and leaving it there will allow the tree to eventually hide the object completely – as my father and us boys found out once, cutting up an old mulberry tree in the yard. It was about 2 1/2 feet around at the main fork, so we were gonna cut it at the fork with a chainsaw – until the sparks flew. We busted it with a sledge and wedges, and found a bicycle crank (the part that holds the pedals) completely concealed by wood – and that shiny chrome steel really did a number on those chain teeth….
I used to work at a wood veneer plant. We were always finding wierd stuff in the logs that we would cut into thin sheets. Bullets and bullet casings from hunters of course, but lenghts of fencing or barbed wire, the occasional horse shoe, hammer, or ice pick was not unknown.
This was a bonus for me, because the way we would find it would be when the 21 foot blade would hit the object and develop a ding and major scratch. The operator would have to stop and hone out the scratch by hand with a large file and then a whetstone, so we would usually get a surprise 30-40 minute break when that happened. Which is why the logs were tested with a metal detector beforehand, but of course that didn’t always work like it should and especially bullet cartridges were almost always missed.
Maybe because she has yet to put it there. A time keeping forest could mean that Shelly can plant something there in the future for her past self to pick up…
No-o-o…
That should be:
If a sacred tree is felled in the forest, by a clueless muscle-bound chick with a sword, as told to by an apotropaic sphinx, does it give up the Holy Hand grenade of Antioch?
Interesting question. It depends on which isotope it is. Assuming it’s from a bomb core, it’s probably Pu-239, which has a half-life of 24,100 years.
The sphinx alluded to the fact that Shelly was last in the forest about 1,450 years ago. Which means 96% of the original Plutonium still exists.
Now if they got the stuff from a thermo-electric generator, that means it’s Pu-238 (half-life of 88.75 years.) In that case, pretty much all of the Plutonium has decayed (0.001% remains) into Uranium 234.
okay, so after a few time cycles I am sure that its life has expired.
[ quoth the Wiki]
The longest-lived are plutonium-244, with a half-life of 80.8 million years, plutonium-242, with a half-life of 373,300 years, and plutonium-239, with a half-life of 24,110 years. All of the remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives that are less than 7,000 years.
[end quote]
A half-life is just that… the amount of time for half of the base amount to decay. So after 24100 years, a 1oz capsule of Pl 239 (the most common/stable) will be half Pl 239 and half U 235 (which has a half-life of 700 MILLION years). The good news is that after that it further breaks down into Thorium and further decays, but in very unstable isotopes with half lives of less then a day. So once you got it past that big Uranium hump, it’ll become stable and inert in a few weeks.
(This message brought to you by the ‘why radioactive materials are bad for you’ board.)
Need to also keep in mind this is a magic place. Like the Library, and like the Library, time may have no meaning here. That would mean not only that anyone living there would not age, it could also mean things like plutonium do not decay. So it would be as fresh as a radioactive daisy.
But how could you keep many different times in the same place unless the place they are kept is timeless? Sort of like keeping antimatter. It can only be kept in a place with no matter, i.e. suspended in a magnetic field. Many different time streams could only be kept by suspending them outside of any time stream. I suspect the trees are only a visual metaphore for something else anyway.
Of course I’m looking at the phrase “time keeping forest” as being a place where various times are kept (stored). This as opposed to a time keeping device which tracks the passage of time like a watch (or the growth of a tree). Perhaps each tree tracks the passage of some sort of time or time-line, yet they are all housed in this forest which is, itself, suspended in time.
Yes, what SoWhyMe said. Assuming the sphinx isn’t just yanking Shelly’s chain and that really is plutonium, the amount of elapsed time in the pocket realm is not necessarily linked to time in the outside world, so radiological decay might not be very advanced.
There is an interesting real world example of time dialation vs radioactive decay. A certain particle which streams from the sun should not be detectable on earth because it’s half-life is so brief, it would normally all decay into something else before getting here. But, it is traveling at such an appreciable fraction of the speed of light that time slows down for it to such an extent that it does make it to earth before it decays.
Plutonium – well given the long halflife of the material it would be the perfect fuel to power something. I mean if the Time-Forest has its own continuity and the Calender Machine activates a couple of times you wouldnt loose much of it.
The question is what should be powered with that stuff? The sword mayhaps or is it just another container?
Also i see that with the poiting and the GGs power they could obtained the stuff every time the calender machine started so why hiding it in the Time-forest?
Well if the act of obtaining the plutonium killed one (or more) of the cast for real and everyone is needed for the things that have yet to come it would be a wise decision to use one of the Calender-loops to set things up in a way that in a later Loop the stuff can be savely obtained.
I hate to say this but pure plutonium is one of the most toxic substances on this planet. Plutonium oxide is only slightly less so, but more stable than pure plutonium.
I think that, along with Shelly’s super strength, that she maybe immune to the effects of Plutonium. And all radiation as well.
Which brings me the question: the heat we feel from the sun, is basically radiation. So if Shelly is immune to radiation, can she get a sun tan? Or even sun burnt?
You are talking about two completely types of “radiation”. The “radiation” from the sun – electromagnetic radiation – is not a true particle (though it has particle-like properties in addition to wave-like properties, so it is often described using “photons”). Light, UV, infra-red, radio waves, gamma rays, x rays, these are all basically the same thing, just at different frequencies.
Now, nuclear radiation is another beast. What nuclear radiation is, is actual subatomic particles that get shot out from the material at a very high speed. These are real particles that have mass.
So being “immune” to nuclear radiation would not imply being immune to electro-magnetic radiation. That said, I doubt she’s immune to any kind of radiation in the first place. A little bit isn’t going to kill you. It’s absorbing a little bit over a long period of time, or a lot over a short period, that will give you problems. As long as the plutonium is contained, rather than being exposed to the air, she should be fine.
the thing in the tree looks like a screw top glass vial with beads of something in it… I doubt she touched the plutonium directly…. either way I hope this is more of an astral projection of shelly and not really her physical body….
Also, if it is in a glass phial, the glass itself would block the alpha rays. The neutrons are another matter, however, and wouldn’t even notice the glass on their way out, although a small enough chunk wouldn’t generate very many.
Actually, plutonium isn’t all that chemically toxic – mass for mass, caffeine (or was that nicotine?) is worse chemically – what’s bad about it if it gets inside you is that it goes straight to the bone marrow and you die of galloping leukemia.
On the Manhattan District, the only treatment for an injury that contaminated a wound (however small) with plutonium was immediate high amputation.
Don’t know the science personally, so I have to accept the words of those who do–or at least act like they do, but I recall a scene from the end of Blish’s They Shall Have Stars where the convicted traitor Senator Bliss Wagoner is confined in a waste dump from the reactors–his comment is that “it’s so chemically toxic that you don’t also note that it’s hot,” or words to that effect.
O.K. Shelly hid parts of an atomic sword in a mystical forest. And set things up for her to find it in the next CM cycle? And Shelly hides the hilt in a graveyard which sets things up because Monica would eventually get onto the trial of the sword when Jin’s problems manifest themselves. But Jin’s problems would never manifest until the CM was fixed and the time cycles stopped.
So that means that Shelly the Sword was hidden well in advance in terms of CM cycles because they couldn’t be sure in what cycle the CM would be fixed. And that begs the question was the Sword hidden from almost the very beginning?
We might get some of this straightened out if they track down Jin’s mom and asked her some pointed questions. She seems to be the wild card in this. What was her part in the whole CM mess and did she build more than one.
And another question come to mind. Why in the world do they need an Atomic Powered Sword for? To cut through…(light builb lights up)…something which is nigh invulnerable to harm? Something like a Golem Girl by the name of Jin?
Hmmm… Interesting thought.
All the power of a nuclear bomb, concentrated into a single blade COULD be powerful enough to hurt one of the GGs, but I always believed they were absolutely indestructible. At least from any thing in this world.
Shelly removed the blade, like the sphinx directed. It’s just a hilt now – a hilt with a vial of plutonium stashed in the hollow interior.
And this is all happening in a “vision”. The vision is going to end, Shelly is still going to have the hilt in her hand, and she’s going to open it to find the plutonium came with her.
And the entire reason for all of this is probably that it’s VERY hard to get your hands on plutonium in any sizeable amount. It’s one of the most highly controlled substances in the world. So short of mining uranium and enriching it into plutonium yourself (instead of buying or stealing it), there really isn’t a way to get a hold of it. Although… I suppose the golem girls could potentially dig up and fuse some uranium with their powers…
Anywho, it’s a dead-drop. The point is to have the item available on a moment’s notice, and in a secure place.
Good thought. that means the relic is also a power supply for something. The blade is there to allow it to be retrieved by Shelly next cycle. I wonder if she leaves the blade now or does it later when returning the vial to the tree. But wait the CM is toast so why should she ever need to put it back? Questions and more questions.
you should only ever need one of her but if you do need more go directly to two for the sake of decency and effectiveness, .21 would just be swiftly dieing tissue. see grrrl power webcomic.
Doc Brown is The Doctor. An incarnation of him anyways. Memory and TARDIS lost. But, a TARDIS does not a Timelord make. Hitting his head starts the process of eventually regaining his memory and finding the TARDIS. But you need a time-machine to catch a time-machine, thus the DMC. 😉
some subs are nuclear powered arnt they
what about the that german sub from the island?
is THAT where shelly got the plutonium from?
so its possible that they didnt go mad, shelly timetravelled stole the plutonium, avoided all the bullets (possibly through monica poiting it?), got the captain to stand still (or maybe he helped her) boobytrapped the sub and kicked a hole out the sub, came back and hid the plutonium.
Obviously the time-traveller shelly is alot more clued up than this pre-shelly. Possibly with hanging with Bud/Brandi
(i kinda want to go to the sub page to see if it was nuclear powered now but i dun wanna cuz i like this idea i dont want it replaced with anything other than the correct story line)
first nuclear powered sub was in 1954 and the sub sank in 1945.
The idea for nuclear subs WAS in 1939 so its possible they were experimented with but not fully told about? 😀
checking out nuclear subs and plutonium i saw the chemical element U-234 was used.
Wondering if U296 was actually a chemical element i checked out THAT
it doesnt but it DOES give you a page of this guy
Karl Eugen Julius Wirtz (1910 – 1994) was a German nuclear physicist. He was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces and incarcerated at Farm Hall for six months in 1945 under Operation Epsilon.
Who seemed to write this – REGULATORY GUIDE
G–296
DEVELOPING ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION POLICIES,
PROGRAMS AND PROCEDURES AT CLASS I NUCLEAR
FACILITIES AND URANIUM MINES AND MILLS
which is quite interesting and possibly far fetched 😀
It strikes me that Plutonium could be used for time travel, but that would be a paradox. Also, couldn’t the blade be re-attached? Seems more useful that way.
The one “you” I didn’t think of yesterday – Shelly herself.
Plutonium, eh? I am absolutely at sea, here. Not a clue as to what she would be doing with that, and since it would be seriously difficult to acquire it, and she went to a deal of trouble to set this up, it must be important.
Did anyone think of that? I certainly didn’t. So Shelly time traveled? She must have done that in a previous loop then. IIRC, Brandi was left alone with the time machine in a previous loop, but I didn’t think that Shelly was.
I thought of it…Shelly was actually my first thought for the “you” from yesterday. It wasn’t until I started reading the comments that I began thinking of other options.
Hmmm….So it’s Plutonium, huh?! Well, that explains the prongs on the relic. It plugs into something and is a power source!!! Kinda like a super-duper battery for one honking powerful flashlight! Ruh-roh, what DOES it power??
Oh BOY! Hang onto all the breakables kids, this is gonna be a wild ride!! Tomorrows cliffhanger is bound to be a corker.
Plutonium is a transuranic element. According to its Other Wiki article it’s only found in trace quantities in nature. So assuming this sample wasn’t assembled from those traces, somebody must have made it. Which raises the obvious question…
Someone ask about a Blue PoliceBox?…..Ah, Back To The Future, funny movie. You know I was asked to be their Technical Advisor,which means I told them how and they did what they wanted to do anyway. Although they did use my Mr. Fusion Idea. Oooh a Time Forest, Nice for storage,but I prefer Ziploc, and you have to be carefull you don’t run into yourself in there or you could end up altering your past or future. At least In Theory.
Plutonium. Yeah, I used to think it was “touch it and die,” I appreciated the comments above by My2Cents which clarify that it’s much less toxic in its metallic form than usually supposed. Still, I’m hoping that “artifact” functions like somewhat of a shield. With those little poky-outy things on the bottom, I’m assuming that it plugs in somewhere else and, with the Plutonium inside, acts as a power source. Most interesting. Not to mention that Shelly has been here before in another cycle. This story sure has me hooked…
You have forgotten the Bill and Ted paradox. This may make a lot more sense when Shelly sets this up later. Time travel makes a lot more sense the second time around…
And that’s why the plutonium is there…because the good guys win, so only what they set up actually happens. 😛 I’m not ashamed to admit I own both Bill & Ted movies.
I wonder if the Germans knew it was plutonium? They were working to create an atomic bomb also. They figured two ways to do it. 1) put together a lot of unprocessed fissionable material and a lot of explosives. This makes for a rather large bomb (assuming it works at all). 2) Use refined radioactive material for a much smaller bomb. Fortunately the final decisions rested with Hitler and he chose option number 1, so they were way behind the US trying to make one that worked. This is why I consider enemy totalitarian leaders our greatest allies when we fight them. They always think they know best and will make stupid decisions. Also, they kill or imprison all but the most fawning yes-men so they never get the straight facts about what is going on until it’s too late. Saddam was one of the best examples of this in recent times.
The IAU currently recognizes five dwarf planets—Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris. However, only two of these bodies, Ceres and Pluto, have been observed in enough detail to demonstrate that they fit the definition.
The following list contains candidates that the Spitzer Space Telescope has estimated to have diameters greater than 600 km:
Sedna, Orcus, Quaoar, (55565) 2002, (84922) 2003, 2002 MS4, (208996) 2003 AZ84, (55637) 2002 UX25, (90568) 2004 GV9, and Ixion.
There are other lists that include more possible candidates.
Good luck on finding a mnemonic to remember those…
Obvious statement that everyone’s missing: Shelley may have done this when she was on her vision quest. See, that little vial of plutonium may have been the fifth stone doll… the one that allows them to retrieve Jin’s “sanity.”
Be sure and wash your hands afterwards…
Plutonium? Eeek!
…Atomic? How fitting.
Looking forward to her reaction.
oh gawd da punz!
“Is it … atomic?”
“Yes, sir – very atomic!”
(Let’s see how many people pick up on that one. No fair googling.)
Without no googles…”The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T” I think ‘T’…a Dr. Suess movie…pretty cool too…
The Googles! They do nothing!!!
below critical mass it’s an alpha source, you could rub it all over yourself without even getting a tan.
It is, however highly and incredibly toxic. Rubbing it all over yourself is a very bad idea.
From the Wikipedia “…a few milligrams of plutonium per kilogram of tissue is a lethal dose.”
Nasty stuff.
The ‘toxicity’ of plutonium is based on the chance of causing cancer over the life of the victim when inhaled as a finely pulverized metal dust. The chemical toxicity is much lower (similar to lead) and the absorption rate is low if ingested. Metal or oxide forms of plutonium are not absorbed through the skin, and the alpha particles generated by decay cannot penetrate the skin either. Epidemiological studies have also disproved the ‘hot spot’ theory used to enhance theoretical toxicity in the lungs.
It is not something you want to handle without precautions, but then few things are.
I was going to point some of that stuff out guys but you took the words right out of my mouth. 😀 BTW I’ll bet some people would be surprised that you can buy uranium ore online. Perfectly safe, just wash your hand after handling it. Too bad United Nuclear seems to be sold out.
Plutonium is also one of the few elements that undergoes spontaneous fission, which means it is also a neutron emitter.
Due to it’s high radioactivity, a chunk of plutonium, just sitting there, is warm to the touch. This is why it is used in spacecraft like Galileo and Voyager. It generates electricity from it’s heat, not from any kind of nuclear chain-reaction.
While a metal, it is soft enough to cut with a butter knife.
Crazy stuff, plutonium. It should fit right in the Wapsiverse.
It’s also pyrophoric; ground to a powder or fine shavings (maximising the surface area-to-mass ratio), it will combust spontaneously in air, producing reaction products which are even worse to inhgale than the dust itself.
Uranium is similar, but not to such a degree, which is a second reason (aside from its density) why spent reactor fuel is used in anti-armour penetrator rounds – the heat generated by the friction as it punches through ignites it and it becomes a white-hot fireball bouncing around inside the tank.
Depleted Uranium (U238) has never seen a reactor. It has simply been refined of its lighter isotopes.
Quite right (i kind of knew that but the fingers got ahead of the brain) – at least theoretically, but there have been reports that at least some weapons had been made from reactor waste.
The way they use reactor waste in a weapon is to pack it around a chemical explosive and use that to spread the radioactive substance around creating a nightmare to clean up. The same idea is used in some chemical and biological weapons.
But how concentrated is this particular vial of the stuff? How pure is it? The amount of radioactivity could be enourmous. Of course one assumes the container keeps the handles safe. It would be much to little for our technology, but … nothing says it is from our current technology. Time traveling Shelly might have gone into the future to obtain a really concentrated amount. Also, it may be it’s safe to handle here because nothing can be harmed in this place, like the Library. That could mean she got it from our current time, carrying it in a larger lead container and disgarding the lead container after she got it in place in the tree. Which begs the question, how did she place it in the dead center? Even if it was much smaller at the time.
Handles=Handler
can we just skip to the plutonium dragon already? ;P
Strangely enough the amount of plutonium Shelly is holding is perfectly safe if sealed in almost any container.
Almost
Beryllium is a neutron reflector and can amplify plutonium’s self-fissioning. The sword hilt may in fact be lined with beryllium making the stick of plutonium into a power source.
Now if that is the case what other function does the sword hilt have?
…and, beryllium (in powder form in which form it is/was used when working with nuclear power processes) is, in fact, nastier chemically than plutonium…
There’s a beryllium manufacturing plant about 30 miles away…i wonder if they do piece work?
It turns into a lightsaber?
Yeah, I imagine shelly’s going to be a shrieking streak running at maximum speed away from the artifact tomorrow…
That’ll teach Shelly to go fission around without asbestos protection as she can get. Isotope she’s learned her lesson.
If it’s an alpha source, then shes got nothing to worry about (unless shes inhaling it). But, if it’s a beta or gamma source, shes in a real pickle. :Ι
Isa sometink gonna goes BOOM! 0_0
“Now you’ll need to call this guy, his name is Doc Brown. He’ll have a DeLorean that you’ll need to hook that up to. Just watch out for the Libyans, though.”
I was just thinking along those same “Back to the Future” lines!
I’m pretty sure Paul was too, considering this is a time keeping forest and and the Sphinx keeps saying she has been here before but Shelly doesn’t know anything. Personally time travel pysicis makes my head hurt, but I love reading about it.
I’m so glad someone went there before I had to look up a quote. 🙂
Why not just use Mr. Fusion?
The car itself runs on ordinary gasoline…always has. 😉
Plutonium 0_o Gck….crk…. gack!
Woo-hoo! nuclear-powered blade, and a buffy girl holding it!
– Well yeah, but she removed the blade…
-Ah? so…Woo-hoo! nuclear-powered jedi sabre, and a buffy girl holding it!
That would be cool 🙂 We’ll see…
More likely the hilt also plugs into other things.
You can’t see it in the last panel because it’s under her hand, but that hilt has a “Snap-on Tools” label . . .
;^)
That would be the Litsabbur?
JUST what we need- a plutonium powered sword… This cannot end well.
Plutonium power would do what to a sword?
If you put it at the tip, then you could swing harder. But in the hilt??
It would depend on what the relic does with it. If it uses the plutonium as a power source, direct mass to energy conversion, then you’d have the power of a continuous nuclear blast in your hand. Hook that up to something capable of using it, and you could accomplish miracles. Or destruction on a Chimera level scale…
Perhaps it also plugs into the chimera? Not that they need even more power, but something else in them may get powered to fix Jin.
CLICK! “Dohhhh!”
CLICK! “Reyyyyy!”
CLICK! “E-gonnnnn!”
I’ll bet you get an “Ominous Hum”, Sergeant. (c8
Isn’t that a HUUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM? Schlocktroops Unite!
Well, that answers a few questions… and raises about 15 more.
And I am a wandering winged Lybian…
Waspi Square is now a NUCLEAR POWER !!!
And if Shelly isn’t careful she can become a night light!
What’s the half-life of Plutonium? Even if it’s hidden in the core of a sacred tree, by a girl that has no memory of putting it there?
How does a tree grow with a deadly substance inside it???
Remember… SACRED tree. XD
I’d like to know how she got it in there the first time.
Q: Why should you never walk in the jungle between 4 and 5 PM?
A: That’s when the elephants are jumping out of trees
Q: How do elephants get in trees?
A: They sit on acorns.
Ha! I’ve heard it:
Q: How does a elephant hide in a cherry tree?
A: By painting their toenails red.
Q: How does an elephant get into a cherry tree?
A: Sits on a cherry and waits.
Q: How does an elephant get out of a cherry tree?
A: Sit on a leaf and wait for fall.
The toenail painting thing seems to work. I’ve certainly never seen an elephant in a cherry tree.
you forgot an older, worse one…. 😀
how do you get 4 elephants into a mini??
.
.
.
.
2 in front, 2 in back….. :E
Those elephant jokes are so old, the first time I heard them I fell off my dinosaur… (waiting for collective groan… ah, there it is!)
As to how it got in the tree…
putting it in a knothole in the trunk at a much younger age would allow the tree to grow and heal around the knot.
One must be careful cutting up trees around an old farm. Casually hanging something in the crook or crotch of a limb and leaving it there will allow the tree to eventually hide the object completely – as my father and us boys found out once, cutting up an old mulberry tree in the yard. It was about 2 1/2 feet around at the main fork, so we were gonna cut it at the fork with a chainsaw – until the sparks flew. We busted it with a sledge and wedges, and found a bicycle crank (the part that holds the pedals) completely concealed by wood – and that shiny chrome steel really did a number on those chain teeth….
But this thing is in the center.
I used to work at a wood veneer plant. We were always finding wierd stuff in the logs that we would cut into thin sheets. Bullets and bullet casings from hunters of course, but lenghts of fencing or barbed wire, the occasional horse shoe, hammer, or ice pick was not unknown.
This was a bonus for me, because the way we would find it would be when the 21 foot blade would hit the object and develop a ding and major scratch. The operator would have to stop and hone out the scratch by hand with a large file and then a whetstone, so we would usually get a surprise 30-40 minute break when that happened. Which is why the logs were tested with a metal detector beforehand, but of course that didn’t always work like it should and especially bullet cartridges were almost always missed.
Maybe because she has yet to put it there. A time keeping forest could mean that Shelly can plant something there in the future for her past self to pick up…
…wibbly woobly timey wimey
I’m guessing she put it in there a few hundred time loops ago.
If it’s safe enough to carry around in your pocket…
Here’s a new take on an old “thought-provoking” question:
If a sacred tree grows with plutonium at its core in an other-planar wood, do the Wapsi fans have any clue what’s going on?
No-o-o…
That should be:
If a sacred tree is felled in the forest, by a clueless muscle-bound chick with a sword, as told to by an apotropaic sphinx, does it give up the Holy Hand grenade of Antioch?
Interesting question. It depends on which isotope it is. Assuming it’s from a bomb core, it’s probably Pu-239, which has a half-life of 24,100 years.
The sphinx alluded to the fact that Shelly was last in the forest about 1,450 years ago. Which means 96% of the original Plutonium still exists.
Now if they got the stuff from a thermo-electric generator, that means it’s Pu-238 (half-life of 88.75 years.) In that case, pretty much all of the Plutonium has decayed (0.001% remains) into Uranium 234.
Just as long as it’s not Illudium Pu-36.
okay, so after a few time cycles I am sure that its life has expired.
[ quoth the Wiki]
The longest-lived are plutonium-244, with a half-life of 80.8 million years, plutonium-242, with a half-life of 373,300 years, and plutonium-239, with a half-life of 24,110 years. All of the remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives that are less than 7,000 years.
[end quote]
So… We’re good!
Nope.
A half-life is just that… the amount of time for half of the base amount to decay. So after 24100 years, a 1oz capsule of Pl 239 (the most common/stable) will be half Pl 239 and half U 235 (which has a half-life of 700 MILLION years). The good news is that after that it further breaks down into Thorium and further decays, but in very unstable isotopes with half lives of less then a day. So once you got it past that big Uranium hump, it’ll become stable and inert in a few weeks.
(This message brought to you by the ‘why radioactive materials are bad for you’ board.)
Need to also keep in mind this is a magic place. Like the Library, and like the Library, time may have no meaning here. That would mean not only that anyone living there would not age, it could also mean things like plutonium do not decay. So it would be as fresh as a radioactive daisy.
Radioactive Daisy … I like it.
Well of course time has meaning there. It’s a TIME KEEPING FOREST. Read the comic!
But how could you keep many different times in the same place unless the place they are kept is timeless? Sort of like keeping antimatter. It can only be kept in a place with no matter, i.e. suspended in a magnetic field. Many different time streams could only be kept by suspending them outside of any time stream. I suspect the trees are only a visual metaphore for something else anyway.
Of course I’m looking at the phrase “time keeping forest” as being a place where various times are kept (stored). This as opposed to a time keeping device which tracks the passage of time like a watch (or the growth of a tree). Perhaps each tree tracks the passage of some sort of time or time-line, yet they are all housed in this forest which is, itself, suspended in time.
Yes, what SoWhyMe said. Assuming the sphinx isn’t just yanking Shelly’s chain and that really is plutonium, the amount of elapsed time in the pocket realm is not necessarily linked to time in the outside world, so radiological decay might not be very advanced.
There is an interesting real world example of time dialation vs radioactive decay. A certain particle which streams from the sun should not be detectable on earth because it’s half-life is so brief, it would normally all decay into something else before getting here. But, it is traveling at such an appreciable fraction of the speed of light that time slows down for it to such an extent that it does make it to earth before it decays.
Plutonium – well given the long halflife of the material it would be the perfect fuel to power something. I mean if the Time-Forest has its own continuity and the Calender Machine activates a couple of times you wouldnt loose much of it.
The question is what should be powered with that stuff? The sword mayhaps or is it just another container?
Also i see that with the poiting and the GGs power they could obtained the stuff every time the calender machine started so why hiding it in the Time-forest?
Well if the act of obtaining the plutonium killed one (or more) of the cast for real and everyone is needed for the things that have yet to come it would be a wise decision to use one of the Calender-loops to set things up in a way that in a later Loop the stuff can be savely obtained.
I hate to say this but pure plutonium is one of the most toxic substances on this planet. Plutonium oxide is only slightly less so, but more stable than pure plutonium.
I think that, along with Shelly’s super strength, that she maybe immune to the effects of Plutonium. And all radiation as well.
Which brings me the question: the heat we feel from the sun, is basically radiation. So if Shelly is immune to radiation, can she get a sun tan? Or even sun burnt?
You are talking about two completely types of “radiation”. The “radiation” from the sun – electromagnetic radiation – is not a true particle (though it has particle-like properties in addition to wave-like properties, so it is often described using “photons”). Light, UV, infra-red, radio waves, gamma rays, x rays, these are all basically the same thing, just at different frequencies.
Now, nuclear radiation is another beast. What nuclear radiation is, is actual subatomic particles that get shot out from the material at a very high speed. These are real particles that have mass.
So being “immune” to nuclear radiation would not imply being immune to electro-magnetic radiation. That said, I doubt she’s immune to any kind of radiation in the first place. A little bit isn’t going to kill you. It’s absorbing a little bit over a long period of time, or a lot over a short period, that will give you problems. As long as the plutonium is contained, rather than being exposed to the air, she should be fine.
Actually, the worst kind of radiation – gamma – is, in fact, electromagnetic radiation, of higher energy than light, which is why it does the damage.
Alpha is helium nuclei (two protons, two neutrons), beta is electrons.
Neutrons are the particle that propagates fission chain-reactions.
Neutrons are the next-most-bad thing to gamma.
the thing in the tree looks like a screw top glass vial with beads of something in it… I doubt she touched the plutonium directly…. either way I hope this is more of an astral projection of shelly and not really her physical body….
Also, if it is in a glass phial, the glass itself would block the alpha rays. The neutrons are another matter, however, and wouldn’t even notice the glass on their way out, although a small enough chunk wouldn’t generate very many.
Actually, plutonium isn’t all that chemically toxic – mass for mass, caffeine (or was that nicotine?) is worse chemically – what’s bad about it if it gets inside you is that it goes straight to the bone marrow and you die of galloping leukemia.
On the Manhattan District, the only treatment for an injury that contaminated a wound (however small) with plutonium was immediate high amputation.
Don’t know the science personally, so I have to accept the words of those who do–or at least act like they do, but I recall a scene from the end of Blish’s They Shall Have Stars where the convicted traitor Senator Bliss Wagoner is confined in a waste dump from the reactors–his comment is that “it’s so chemically toxic that you don’t also note that it’s hot,” or words to that effect.
All together now… D’oh !!
Don’t let Bud squeeze it
“Oh… Pluton—?! Wait. I hid WHAT in the WHERE, now? Then? ”
Yeah, her reaction (Hee!) should be delightfully nuclear!
Ah, Wapsi, how we love thee… the more nutso it’s going the more we can’t stay away.
Yeah, ok, I’ll go to bed now. 😀
O.K. Shelly hid parts of an atomic sword in a mystical forest. And set things up for her to find it in the next CM cycle? And Shelly hides the hilt in a graveyard which sets things up because Monica would eventually get onto the trial of the sword when Jin’s problems manifest themselves. But Jin’s problems would never manifest until the CM was fixed and the time cycles stopped.
So that means that Shelly the Sword was hidden well in advance in terms of CM cycles because they couldn’t be sure in what cycle the CM would be fixed. And that begs the question was the Sword hidden from almost the very beginning?
We might get some of this straightened out if they track down Jin’s mom and asked her some pointed questions. She seems to be the wild card in this. What was her part in the whole CM mess and did she build more than one.
…and Shelly is the currently most-qualified to ask pointed questions…
I’d like to make an edgy reply to this. But Shelly probably would cut me dead.
Or cut you to the quick…
Or down to size…
Atomic sword? Err — Light saber?
Nope. Everyone knows lightsabers are powered by using a focusing crystal to channel the energizer bunny. 😛
Well I don’t know about you guys, but I’m looking forward to Shelly’s feakout tomorrow. XD
If today’s comic isn’t a cliff hanger, can you image what Friday’s comic will be like?
Argh. Bad smelling strikes again. “..can you imagine*…”.
Knowing Paul? Probably something jaw dropping.
Well maybe shelly is so shocked that she reacts rather calm.
And another question come to mind. Why in the world do they need an Atomic Powered Sword for? To cut through…(light builb lights up)…something which is nigh invulnerable to harm? Something like a Golem Girl by the name of Jin?
Hmmm… Interesting thought.
All the power of a nuclear bomb, concentrated into a single blade COULD be powerful enough to hurt one of the GGs, but I always believed they were absolutely indestructible. At least from any thing in this world.
But I could be wrong.
A nuclear detonation would probably be like someone hiccuping to Bud.
The sword is no longer a sword.
Shelly removed the blade, like the sphinx directed. It’s just a hilt now – a hilt with a vial of plutonium stashed in the hollow interior.
And this is all happening in a “vision”. The vision is going to end, Shelly is still going to have the hilt in her hand, and she’s going to open it to find the plutonium came with her.
And the entire reason for all of this is probably that it’s VERY hard to get your hands on plutonium in any sizeable amount. It’s one of the most highly controlled substances in the world. So short of mining uranium and enriching it into plutonium yourself (instead of buying or stealing it), there really isn’t a way to get a hold of it. Although… I suppose the golem girls could potentially dig up and fuse some uranium with their powers…
Anywho, it’s a dead-drop. The point is to have the item available on a moment’s notice, and in a secure place.
~D.
You obviously haven’t spent any time in the Russian black market…
Good thought. that means the relic is also a power supply for something. The blade is there to allow it to be retrieved by Shelly next cycle. I wonder if she leaves the blade now or does it later when returning the vial to the tree. But wait the CM is toast so why should she ever need to put it back? Questions and more questions.
“No, no, no, no, no. This sucker’s electrical. But I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity I need!”
1.21 JIGGAWATTS!!!
you should only ever need one of her but if you do need more go directly to two for the sake of decency and effectiveness, .21 would just be swiftly dieing tissue. see grrrl power webcomic.
And bring on the Panic! LOL 😀
Doc Brown, Delorians, all we need now is a blue police box appearing out of nowhere! LOL
(Back to the Future is a childhood favorite of mine, but Doctor Who and his Tardis trump doc brown and his delorian anyday! LOL)
What of Spock in the original Enterprise?
Doc Brown is The Doctor. An incarnation of him anyways. Memory and TARDIS lost. But, a TARDIS does not a Timelord make. Hitting his head starts the process of eventually regaining his memory and finding the TARDIS. But you need a time-machine to catch a time-machine, thus the DMC. 😉
Now that is a crossover fanfic that could be a lot of fun. I’m almost afraid to look for it, since Sturgeon’s Law would apply.
some subs are nuclear powered arnt they
what about the that german sub from the island?
is THAT where shelly got the plutonium from?
so its possible that they didnt go mad, shelly timetravelled stole the plutonium, avoided all the bullets (possibly through monica poiting it?), got the captain to stand still (or maybe he helped her) boobytrapped the sub and kicked a hole out the sub, came back and hid the plutonium.
Obviously the time-traveller shelly is alot more clued up than this pre-shelly. Possibly with hanging with Bud/Brandi
(i kinda want to go to the sub page to see if it was nuclear powered now but i dun wanna cuz i like this idea i dont want it replaced with anything other than the correct story line)
boo
had to check and destroy my own theory
first nuclear powered sub was in 1954 and the sub sank in 1945.
The idea for nuclear subs WAS in 1939 so its possible they were experimented with but not fully told about? 😀
man this theory could go on forever
checking out nuclear subs and plutonium i saw the chemical element U-234 was used.
Wondering if U296 was actually a chemical element i checked out THAT
it doesnt but it DOES give you a page of this guy
Karl Eugen Julius Wirtz (1910 – 1994) was a German nuclear physicist. He was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces and incarcerated at Farm Hall for six months in 1945 under Operation Epsilon.
Who seemed to write this – REGULATORY GUIDE
G–296
DEVELOPING ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION POLICIES,
PROGRAMS AND PROCEDURES AT CLASS I NUCLEAR
FACILITIES AND URANIUM MINES AND MILLS
which is quite interesting and possibly far fetched 😀
[Testing Gravatar]
Sorry, guys. It’s being a total pain in the sphinx at the moment and won’t show up
it’s there…
Yay! Another fan of the Monica-bug! 😀
BBZZZZZTTT!!! >deedledeedledeedle<heeheehee!!!
@Julie: I was wondering why no one did that one yet.
@Fairportfan: Sorry if I’m disrupting the flux capacitor here
I admit that I would never have predicted that in a million years. The sheer WTF of it makes me giddily pleased to be a reader.
It strikes me that Plutonium could be used for time travel, but that would be a paradox. Also, couldn’t the blade be re-attached? Seems more useful that way.
oh. is that all?
probably shouldn’t drop that, shelly.
That is the greatest geek punchline in the history of webcomics.
The one “you” I didn’t think of yesterday – Shelly herself.
Plutonium, eh? I am absolutely at sea, here. Not a clue as to what she would be doing with that, and since it would be seriously difficult to acquire it, and she went to a deal of trouble to set this up, it must be important.
Did anyone think of that? I certainly didn’t. So Shelly time traveled? She must have done that in a previous loop then. IIRC, Brandi was left alone with the time machine in a previous loop, but I didn’t think that Shelly was.
I thought of it…Shelly was actually my first thought for the “you” from yesterday. It wasn’t until I started reading the comments that I began thinking of other options.
Am I the only one who thinks that Shelly might have been quite brilliant at some other timeline?
Actually I was thinking ‘We’re in the middle of a plot where SHELLY is the mastermind?’
Hmmm….So it’s Plutonium, huh?! Well, that explains the prongs on the relic. It plugs into something and is a power source!!! Kinda like a super-duper battery for one honking powerful flashlight! Ruh-roh, what DOES it power??
Oh BOY! Hang onto all the breakables kids, this is gonna be a wild ride!! Tomorrows cliffhanger is bound to be a corker.
Um, people, I think we’re missing something here.
Plutonium is a transuranic element. According to its Other Wiki article it’s only found in trace quantities in nature. So assuming this sample wasn’t assembled from those traces, somebody must have made it. Which raises the obvious question…
Where’s the cream filling?
Seriously though, I’m thinking Soviets. Seeing as we’ve already got Nazis somewhat involved.
Shelly: “Awwww, *@%!”
the sword! it is burning….
Someone ask about a Blue PoliceBox?…..Ah, Back To The Future, funny movie. You know I was asked to be their Technical Advisor,which means I told them how and they did what they wanted to do anyway. Although they did use my Mr. Fusion Idea. Oooh a Time Forest, Nice for storage,but I prefer Ziploc, and you have to be carefull you don’t run into yourself in there or you could end up altering your past or future. At least In Theory.
“All London brothels display a blue lamp…” (For the Gerard Hoffnung fans out there.)
Its a good thing she didnt slice a little bit lower. That could have been messy…
What on earth is the plutonium for? Is a thermonuclear explosion necessary to produce whatever temporal shift Jin needs to be fixed?
Plutonium. Yeah, I used to think it was “touch it and die,” I appreciated the comments above by My2Cents which clarify that it’s much less toxic in its metallic form than usually supposed. Still, I’m hoping that “artifact” functions like somewhat of a shield. With those little poky-outy things on the bottom, I’m assuming that it plugs in somewhere else and, with the Plutonium inside, acts as a power source. Most interesting. Not to mention that Shelly has been here before in another cycle. This story sure has me hooked…
Didn’t we have a discussion about a nuclear powered toaster?
You have forgotten the Bill and Ted paradox. This may make a lot more sense when Shelly sets this up later. Time travel makes a lot more sense the second time around…
And that’s why the plutonium is there…because the good guys win, so only what they set up actually happens. 😛 I’m not ashamed to admit I own both Bill & Ted movies.
I wonder if the Germans knew it was plutonium? They were working to create an atomic bomb also. They figured two ways to do it. 1) put together a lot of unprocessed fissionable material and a lot of explosives. This makes for a rather large bomb (assuming it works at all). 2) Use refined radioactive material for a much smaller bomb. Fortunately the final decisions rested with Hitler and he chose option number 1, so they were way behind the US trying to make one that worked. This is why I consider enemy totalitarian leaders our greatest allies when we fight them. They always think they know best and will make stupid decisions. Also, they kill or imprison all but the most fawning yes-men so they never get the straight facts about what is going on until it’s too late. Saddam was one of the best examples of this in recent times.
I wonder if one of the other trees has a creamy nougat center?
What I want to know is, are we actually going to see the panicked-fumbling ZOMFG HOLY CRAP DO NOT WANT panel, or is it implied? 🙂
Meh.
Pluto isn’t even a planet anymore.
Don’t care what some Cardassian scientist says.
There! Are! NINE! Planets!
*pats*
glad im not the only one who misses pluto ^^
Not by a long shot. Heck…how am I supposed to remember the order of planets now?
My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine….where’s the Pizza?????
My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Noodles!
My favorite has always been “Many Volcanoes Erupt Mulberry Jam Sandwiches Under Normal Pressure.”
ive never heard of any of these sayings.
Technically it’s been reclassified as a dwarf planet.
The IAU currently recognizes five dwarf planets—Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris. However, only two of these bodies, Ceres and Pluto, have been observed in enough detail to demonstrate that they fit the definition.
The following list contains candidates that the Spitzer Space Telescope has estimated to have diameters greater than 600 km:
Sedna, Orcus, Quaoar, (55565) 2002, (84922) 2003, 2002 MS4, (208996) 2003 AZ84, (55637) 2002 UX25, (90568) 2004 GV9, and Ixion.
There are other lists that include more possible candidates.
Good luck on finding a mnemonic to remember those…
I say we blast those little suckers to pieces and avoid that problem.
I thought we were going to start giving these places names.
[Prays she’s not the only SG-1 fan in the Wapsiverse]
Atomic Powered sword? interesting…bets that she has to use it to do brain surgery on Jin? any takers?
Perhaps it has enough power to give Bud the haircut she always wanted or even make cruls…
Obvious statement that everyone’s missing: Shelley may have done this when she was on her vision quest. See, that little vial of plutonium may have been the fifth stone doll… the one that allows them to retrieve Jin’s “sanity.”
Ooooh, I like this idea!
damn! that’s one potentially volatile revelation!
It’s a nuclear powered Swiss Army Knife!