Kodak's Discovery of A-Bomb Testing (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Kodak's Discovery of A-Bomb Testing (2016)

popularmechanics.com

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Feynman mentions the physicist Julian Webb in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" [1]. The staff at Oak Ridge were generally kept in the dark about their role in the Manhattan Project, including the fact that the stuff they were producing (purified uranium isotopes) was extremely dangerous if handled improperly. Oppenheimer tasked Feynman with ensuring the integrity of the supply chain and sent Feynman to Oak Ridge for a frank safety discussion with the "big shots," and apparently Oppenheimer knew Webb to be technically capable enough to trust with the technical implications.

Feynman doesn't say what, if anything, he told Webb, but it's an interesting backstory -- it's possible Webb knew more than this article suggests.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=_gA_DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT125&lpg=...

Offtopic, but a couple pages later is the most memorable passage of the whole book to me, a software engineer:

(about setting up the IBM machines to perform calculations for the Manhattan Project)

"Well, Mr Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful. [...] After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly-- while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arctangent X [...] Absolutely useless! We had tables of arc-tangents. But you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease-- the delight in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing. I was asked to stop working on the stuff I was doing in my group and go down and take over the IBM group, and I tried to avoid the disease."

I try to keep this in mind when I'm working. I must admit I'm not very good at avoiding that disease.

Do you know the calculator hacking community? Graphing calculators like TI-84 are commonly used in American math classes, and they are reasonably powerful general purpose computers. So the hacking community started because a bunch of highschoolers are bored enough studying math at school, and discovered programming. First it was BASIC, then Z80 assembly, and later some even started creating their own programming environment on the calculator, rediscovered many high-performance graphics hacks used by early video games. After graduating from highschools, those who still have interests in calculators have developed open source toolchains, programming languages and operating systems in college for calculator development.

However, when Texas Instruments released TI-Nspire CX, it was boycotted by the vast majority members from the hacking community because the system is locked down.

Some teachers and parents commented,

> "one thing that [...] is NOT wrong is TI's refusal to make the NSpire a platform for Doom or Quake or any other distraction that kids enjoy. These things may be fun, but they aren't about learning math"

I think it describes the same phenomenon.

And then people are surprised kids hate school and don't learn a thing.

Tinkering, fun, and being free to follow a stupid idea down a rabbit hole is how people learn and internalize stuff.

I was one of these people.

In middle school, a teacher showed us how to make a pythagorean theorem program, and I immediately saw the potential. When asked if it were possible to make a quadratic equation program, the teacher told me it couldn't be done. I had one written by the following day's math class, and I was hooked.

By high school, I was writing actual graphical games for the TI. I even taught friends so they could help contribute.

If it weren't for that freedom to explore, I would never have even gotten into software. And while pursuing my degree, I came to realize that my friends and I had "invented" some core programming concepts, things like hashing and basic cryptography (so no one would steal our game assets).

This was me. I was actually packing for a move today when I found an old hard drive that has a backup of my homedir on my family's old win98 machine which has all my old BASIC games and programs. At the time I channeled all my boredom into that thing and it led me on a path towards computer programming.

There was a really vibrant community on IRC and ticalc.org, which I was fortunate to find, because it was one of the only programming communities I know of at the time filled with people around my same age; it honestly changed my life. I wouldn't be where I am today without having found it.

"but they aren't about learning math"

Hmmmmmmmmmm

Yeah, exactly.

By 15yo, I was knee-deep in trying to make my own games. Final exams came, after which everyone's chatting about how they solved the math questions. "It was simple, I've used Pythagorean theorem", they'd say, and I rolled my eyes wondering how that applies. I said, "it was simple, I've used the formula for the length of a 2D vector, which is also the same for the distance between two points". They rolled their eyes wondering what I was talking about.

(It did click for me a couple moments later that the cool thing I've learned for my game programming goals was, in fact, derived from the Pythagorean theorem.)

That's a beautiful quote, thank you for sharing! It's also how I acquired most of the skills that today define my career. I studied physics and procrastinated with code, and to a lesser extent with studying computer science, extensively. Today I work on Google's technical infrastructure. I suspect that this is not at all an unusual turn of events amongst readers here.

> I suspect that this is not at all an unusual turn of events amongst readers here.

Definitely not. On large scale, I own most of my career to that disease. On small scale, pretty much every job I got could be attributed to something that I learned through procrastination a year or two earlier.

Absolutely the case for me too.

Switched courses to design because my chemistry tutor kept telling me off for doodling on my notes. Got into web development was because I was bored at work and started learning HTML.

Trouble is, it means that whatever I’m doing is what I should be doing some point in the future, not what I actually need to do right now...

I have another variant of this: I get code rage (which I can easily self diagnose after the fact as being simply NIH in most cases). So whenever I got stuck debugging a bunch of spaghetti, I'd go look for distractions. But because at this point, that was in a professional setting and no longer just my target for procrastination, I was looking for professionally valid distractions. So I became a team lead/manager that way. One thing leads to another and here I am. Turns out I liked that career, too.

>>I try to keep this in mind when I'm working. I must admit I'm not very good at avoiding that disease.

It is a disease in the same way that a painter or writer has a disease where he cannot stop painting or writing.

Frankly, I think those that have it should count themselves among the lucky ones.

I think he was talking about procrasti-coding. “Should be working on X, but really captivated by a well-defined and elegant Z instead”

Printing arctan tables sounds like a seminal example of a Advent of Code kind of problem, which have been known to nerd snipe countless programmers.

Exactly. It's kind of related to yak-shaving, except the task you're spending time on may not at all be related to the one you should be focusing on.

I've more than once caught myself lovingly perfecting some utility script when, really, I had some more important stuff I should've been focusing on.

The reason, of course, is that I'm getting that rewarding feeling of accomplishment on the script, when I know the feeling will be further out (or unattainable) on the Main Task.

Related context — after Frankel was kicked out of government work for political incorrectness in the 1950s, he designed the LGP-30 (the computer Mel Kaye famously programmed) and the forgotten Smith-Corona Marchant Cogito 240SR, on which project Tom Osborne was inspired to develop what eventually became the HP 9100, the foundation of the line of all of HP's programmable RPN calculators, and in some sense one of the first personal computers, shipping in 1968: http://www.hp9825.com/html/the_9100_project.html

I'm 90% disease, 10% real work.

Edit: But the 10% real work, I work real real hard :)

I wonder if anybody has ever tried to do a study on where "peak efficiency" lies on this spectrum (i.e. how much do you need to allow people to goof around, such that the subset of their time they spend on being productive yield the most value).

Well, the good thing is that generally that 90% of disease can make that real work much more efficient. After a few years of 90% disease, you're probably able to knock out the equivalent of at least 60%-80% of real work in just that 10% of time.

Very familiar with that disease. I admire people who have immunity.

Wasn't that the trip where Feynman discovered they were stacking radioactive materials against the same wall in two storage rooms and were in danger of achieving criticality?

If you review the safety and environmental procedures and precautions for the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, and the US military and federal government in general, they were rather lax through the 70s or 90s depending on your perspective. The scientists at Los Alamos hardly seemed to understand how dangerous are the chemicals they worked with - all of the wastewater was dumped untreated into the pond in the center of town until 1962. Same with all the water from the world’s first plutonium milling facility - dumped untreated into the desert. That created a pollutant plume ~550 feet deep. All of the waste from the Manhattan project (plutonium, uranium, beryllium, lead, PCBs, solvents, radioactive rubble of all sorts) was put into unlined landfills in Los Alamos with little documentation. This happens to be upstream from 90% of the population of New Mexico, on sandy soils 2-5 miles from the largest river in the region.

This throws some light as to why Kodak had weapons grade uranium in one of their labs.

https://www.cnn.com/2012/05/15/us/new-york-kodak-uranium/ind...

At the time, to me (not having had this bit of context), it seemed like overkill, but it sounds like they've had a actually been involved for a long time, with associated business concerns, with dealing with the impacts of nuclear processes.

The US government undertook real and widespread environmental monitoring of radioactivity from at least 1947, and perhaps earlier. Many samples were taken of air, water, soil, vegetation, human bone and other materials to understand the extent of radioactive fallout.

There were international incidents around test fallout in the early 1950s. It was a major political issue in the early 1950s. Presidential candidates RAN on this issue. Consciousness of the problems of test fallout resulted in an above-ground test ban treaty. The US's last above-ground test happened in 1962.

So this was a problem that started in 1945, was well known to the general public within a few years, and was solved by 1962. This is obviously not perfect. But it certainly isn't the case that it was ignored until 1997 and people were only finding out about it then.

In Las Vegas when there wasn't anything interesting for nerdy high school kids to do, you could always drive up the Great Basin highway with your school's Geiger counter and check out the radioactive plants north of Coyote Springs :-)

There used to be a BLM[1] camp ground up there where you could ride your dirt bikes on the trails.

Reading this makes me wonder if it still has hot spots.

[1] Bureau of Land Management - kind of like a national forest but where they care less about the land under their control.

> [1] Bureau of Land Management - kind of like a national forest but where they care less about the land under their control.

CGP Grey made a video on the topic recently:

https://youtu.be/LruaD7XhQ50

Heh... speaking from experience, there was a lot for nerdy high school kids to do in Las Vegas.

Clark HS 1980.

"Even today, X-ray film is highly sensitive [to radiation] (much more so than regular photographic film)"

In fact, that's actually been used as a feature in molecular biology. Traditionally many visualizations in biology were done by labeling molecules of interest with radioisotopes and having these form images on x-ray film. This is still done in some cases, but is being mostly replaced with fluorescent labeling.

I had radiation therapy a while ago and they were able to take X-rays just by holding a piece of film behind my back. Freaky!

That was done? That ray is vastly more powerful than diagnostic doses and is generally targeting at a small area. Diagnostic doses had their strength magnified by using fluorescent plates which produce multiple visible light photons from a single X-ray photon, which in turn exposes the film. ‘Had’ because it’s usually a digital process now.

Was there some kind of shutter? Because otherwise wouldn't it be very blurry?

This was done during treatment so the "shutter" was the LINAC itself.

Do you know why? Were they just confirming that you hadn't wriggled & they got the right spot?

A collimator [1] was probably in front of the film.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collimator

relatedly, nytimes posted this interview yesterday with american soldiers who were exposed to a nuclear blast in the 50s, some of whom experienced health issues later in life. their description of what it was like (from close enough to be knocked over while sitting down and facing away by the blast wave) is awesome, in the old, bad sense:

https://youtu.be/FokopVKMgdU

Soviet scientist Georgii Flerov figured out nuclear weapons program was about to start indirectly from the fact that nothing was being published on nuclear fission and physicists in the field didn't publish at all. That was during MAUD era before Manhattan project was started.

Flerov informed Stalin April 1942, serval months before Cambridge Five leaked the MAUD papers to Staling.

Modern day scifi version:

OpenAI stops publishing their models. There are rumors that Geoffrey Hinton wrote a letter to the president. Deep Mind,Google Brain, FAIR go all silent. AI researchers stop updating their twitter and don't respond to email. Zero publications to NeurIPS 2020 from the best groups. Then someone spots few of those guys buying coffee near NSA's Utah Data Center. That center seems to grow and grow.

In the China Baidu Research goes silent as well.

Strange lights are seen on the desert sky....

Asimov used this idea in his excellent short story "Spell My Name with an S" from 1958.

Dr. Kristow said stolidly, "Executed!" "He might have been. Ordinarily, I would even assume so, though the Russians are not more foolish than we are and don't kill any nuclear physicist they can avoid killing. The thing is there's another reason why a nuclear physicist, of all people, might suddenly disappear. I don't have to tell you." "Crash research; top secret. I take it that's what you mean. Do you believe that's it?"

[...]

"Has it been decided that we're to go on shield research, too?" "Yes." Kristow's hand went back over his short, bristly hair, making a dry, whispery sound. "We're going to give it everything we've got. Knowing the papers written by the men who disappeared, we can get right on their heels. We may even beat them to it. —Of course, they'll find out we're working on it." "Let them," said Brand. "Let them. It will keep them from attacking. I don't see any percentage in selling ten of our cities just to get ten of theirs— if we're both protected and they're too dumb to know that." "But not too soon. We don't want them finding out too soon.

It's worth remembering that Kodak was one of the premier high technology companies of its day. George Eastman endowed MIT and other technical schools, because his fortune was built on the work of scientists and engineers. Even well into the 80s and even early 90s they had top notch scientists, engineers, and inventors working for them. The late era management is a different story entirely and serves as a cautionary tale.

related reading .. The Firecracker Boys, by Alaskan author Dan O'Neil .. recommended https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_O%27Neill_(writer)

"What he uncovered was shocking." ... Ugh

There must be a wizard in some word processor I haven't yet come across for making “clickbait articles”. It must feature a template with “shocked at what he found out” and “reached out to” as mandatory fill-ins.

Would be interesting to correlate Kodak's... business opportunities, following the briefing. How profitable was their silence?

That’s not (really) how time-series work...

I'm sure there are other tools than time-series available to us...?

Perhaps if we look at some of the potential questions we would like to answer we can find more suitable data science methods?

  Did Kodak have competitors in the X-ray film business? What happened to them?
  Did this packing material plant supply products to other companies than just Kodak? 
  Did the company culture start to resemble that of another company after the briefing? (Hard but interesting.)
  Did their hiring practices change?
  Did they get cheap loans?
  Did they buy other companies?
  Was their HQ moved or renovated?
  Was someone pressured to leave due to political leanings?

etc.

Yeah because all of those can't be due to a booming postwar economy.

Cheap loans, you say? So to keep Kodak quiet, the US government put pressure on some banks to give cheap money to Kodak so that to keep a few folks in one company quiet they'd have to deal with keeping a load of analysts, bank managers, and supervisors quiet in a plethora of banks?

Pressured to leave for political leanings? You mean in an an organisation with a considerable number of possibly left-leaning academics on the eve of McCarthyism?

Did they buy other companies? Gosh, I'm sure Kodak wasn't into the whole M&A thing.

Et cetera, do you see my point?

Is your point that no investigation should be made because coincidences exist? If so, no.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com