Note: This story is over four years old, but I just came upon it and thought other Soylentils might find it interesting.
5 Things That Sound, Move, or Smell Like a Nuclear Explosion:
After most of the world's nations signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, in 1996, they set up a new commission to watch out for clandestine explosions. Since then the commission (CTBTO[*]) has wired the world with hundreds of seismometers, infrasound detectors, radionuclide sniffers, and underwater microphones. The stations send their data to the CTBTO's headquarters in Vienna, Austria, where it is analyzed for signs of a secret bomb. But the system keeps picking up other things, too—which is sometimes a problem for the system and sometimes a boon to science. Here are some of the things that can at first seem like nuclear tests:
In the course of the efforts to detect clandestine nuclear tests, these devices have also detected:
- Space rocks
- Aurora (Northern and Southern Lights)
- Whales
- Tsunamis
- Nuclear-power-plant disasters
- Medical-isotope manufacturing
[*] CTBTO: Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 28 2018, @02:33PM (5 children)
Author lists SIX THINGS, I guess he can't count? He's just so used to making clickbait titles that he couldn't resist the "5 things"??
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday December 28 2018, @03:01PM
Technically the aurora doesn't have a taste movement or smell, purely visual. But overall in spirit I agree, clickbait is lame.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday December 28 2018, @05:04PM (1 child)
The original article said 5 things. Reading the text, it's plain that they conflated auroras with space rocks. Apparently both aurora and the exploding meteorite they mentioned were atmospheric phenomena.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday December 28 2018, @05:12PM
But the article, too, listed six things. In addition to the five/six things in the summary, they listed actual nuclear explosions. But those aren't the things that the system was designed to detect. The article's intent was to list the things that might confuse the monitoring system.
But technically...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @01:49AM
It seems to be some type of female thing:
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=29217&page=1&cid=776962#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Saturday December 29 2018, @03:48AM
Don't worry...
Between Japan starting up commercial whaling again (and a few countries sure to follow them as well) and the environmental policies of the current US president, I am positive that any detection of whales will not be on the list for very long.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday December 28 2018, @03:09PM
Admittedly amazon turk is older than the story, and the idea is older yet, but a modern spin is surveillance is the kind of work that could be done really well using mturk-alike technology for grunt labor.
Give 9 people one cent to look at a funky nuclear detonation seismograph, then click Y or N on an actual sample seismograph, then if two or more untrained people click Y then pass up to second tier higher trained people. Slip in a real testing seismograph once in a while to verify compliance.
Human labor is in many cases cheaper than electronic labor plus highly paid programmers plus highly paid sysadmins plus security droids plus enough HR to babysit them plus mgmt overhead plus executive bonuses ... F it just put seismographs on turk and pay a simple bill.
Also a side effect is my coworkers who thought it was funny to "drunken turk" as a hobby might end up being the first westerners to discover the next North Korean nuke test, which is weird to think about.
Wonder if they'll be PTSD issues with turk-based cloud surveillance "They told me to click on weird squiggles, so I did, I had no idea it meant Seoul was just glassed and now I need treatment for nightmares about hentai tentacle pr0n"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 28 2018, @03:44PM
Put "5 things like nuclear explosion" in the headline, even bothered to list buncha stuff tested, but not a pip on what those 5 things are.
(Score: 3, Funny) by SomeGuy on Friday December 28 2018, @04:02PM (1 child)
That was me. My bad. Atomic Taco Tuesday FTW!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @02:21AM
Today is Saturday. You need more fibre in your diet.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Sulla on Friday December 28 2018, @06:52PM (1 child)
I read RT because it is interesting seeing things from the Russian government's side. No doubt it is propaganda, but it is nice to get the full picture by reading their sources and reading other sources as well. RT often covers events that are not covered by western media or carried to a much lesser extent, after reading the RT article you can try and toss out the propaganda to get to the raw news.
I also like the https://chinadigitaltimes.net/ [chinadigitaltimes.net] for covering events the Chinese government restricts.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 1, Informative) by Sulla on Friday December 28 2018, @06:56PM
Wrong tab, please mark offtopic and move on. Sorry.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @12:06AM
I betcha someone could have a ball with a jar of that "radium paint" you could get about 80 years ago. Stuff was radioactive as hell and I would think it would really clear out an area until they figured out they were chasing a painted wad of paper.
Suspension of Radium Chloride. It was used for glow-in-the-dark stuff like clock dials and aviation instruments.
Its use was promptly discontinued when it was noted that about everyone who used the stuff died of radiation poisoning.
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Saturday December 29 2018, @01:33AM
US GBU-43/B MOAB or Russian ATBIP (FOAB) which are comparable to small tactical nuclear weapons.
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