The Radioactive Boy Scout (1998)
harpers.org
harpers.org
My favorite part of the story is that he was arrested for stealing smoke detectors from his apartment building trying to collect radioactive material. One of my first jobs was shipping / receiving for an electronics manufacturer, and smoke / gas detectors were the lion's share of our business. I was told I always had to classify the products as "components for a nuclear reactor" on international shipping manifests, which I thought was silly. Until I read this story...
(If you haven’t watched the show Nathan For You, I can’t recommend it enough).
I actually met the guy many years ago a few times before he was ever famous. First time he was SO OBNOXIOUS, like we had to be mean as possible and kick him out because he just wouldn't listen to us trying to tell him to shut the hell up with name-dropping Seth Rogen and some early hiphop comedy act he used to do on this website loadingreadyrun when we were trying to watch a movie... Second time he was a security guard at a parking lot next to a rave and we smoked a blunt with him
Sometimes I wonder if he remembers any of that
Yeah the smoke detector episode is from the most recent (and final) season. If you liked the first couple, the last season is the best imo.
Now they're all oversensitive steam sensing BS models. I'd rather have freaking IR cameras looking for too much heat (outside of kitchens).
The other type is the photoelectric type, which is generally more expensive, but rather radically more likely to alert for the sort of fires that kill people.
Ionization types are really good at detecting the emissions from flames. They're disturbingly bad at detecting actual smoke - so the name "smoke detector" for them is a bit misleading, IMO. If you've got a grease fire or something going with basically no smoke, an ionization type will detect this in a hurry, and they're also rather prone to false positives as noticed by anyone with one of them near a kitchen.
The photoelectric types aren't so good at detecting flames, but are quite good at detecting smoke in the air. In some tests, they alert 30-40 minutes before an ionization type notices a problem.
But the problem comes when you start looking at the type of fires that actually kill people. The bulk of fire deaths are from overnight fires, in which something is smoldering (and smoking...) for half an hour or longer before the heat gets to the point that the piece of (usually furniture) ignites. The photoelectric type will alert to this smoke. The ionization type waits until the [whatever] has actually caught fire to bother doing anything - which is far less useful, because by the time the couch has caught fire, the room and the rest of the house aren't far behind. Some realistic tests have shown that there's literally half an hour or more of alert from the photoelectric type, down to "A minute or two" for the ionization type.
Skip Walker has done a number of presentations, and some of his work can be found here:
http://www.propertyevaluation.net/Photoelectric%20vs%20Ioniz...
> In tests, ionization alarms will typically respond about 30 to 90 seconds faster to “fast-flame” fires than photoelectric smoke alarms. However, in smoldering fires ionization alarms respond an average of 15 to 50 minutes slower than photoelectric alarms. Several studies indicate that they will outright fail to activate up to 20-25% of the time. The vast majority of residential fire fatalities are due to smoke inhalation, not from the actual flames and almost two-thirds of fire fatalities occur at night while we sleep.
> In 2007, UL published the “Smoke Characterization Study”. This study tested both types of smoke alarms using current UL testing standards and materials; they also tested the alarms using UL test criteria integrating a variety of synthetic materials and current tests such as smoldering toast. The results are frightening. Ionization alarms failed the UL 217 test 20% of the time using the current standard test materials. This is the test that the alarms must pass 100% of the time to be offered for sale and installed in US homes. When tested using synthetic materials, ionization alarms DID NOT TRIGGER (DNT) in 7 out of 8 synthetic test scenarios. In the one test where the ionization alarm did trigger, it activated at a level exceeding maximum allowed under the UL standard and nearly 43 minutes after the photoelectric alarm in the same test.
He also has a presentation up that just drills down, over and over, into data, studies, etc. The results are quite clear: in the sort of fires that actually kill people, photoelectric smoke detectors radically outperform ionization types - and this is found in study after study that looks at "fires vs fire deaths vs smoke detector types" as well.
https://structuretech1.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Ion-vs...
You can spider off those if you want, but you really should put at least a few photoelectric smoke detectors in your house.
Don't bother with the combo detectors. They're either an "or" gate, which gives you the worst of both worlds, or an "and" gate, at which point the photoelectric sensor can be screaming its head off about the smoke, but the alarm won't sound until the ionization type detects flame products.
> I'd rather have freaking IR cameras looking for too much heat (outside of kitchens).
They've been tested against smoke detectors and are worse than even ionization types for detecting early fires.
I'm pretty well annoyed that ionization types are still allowed and the default, if it doesn't show. "YOU LIT THE KITCHEN ON FIRE!" alarms are nice, but radically less useful than "Hey, something's smoking and has been doing so for a while and you're all asleep," based on empirical evidence from the studies on fire deaths. Fires while someone's awake and (often enough) involved in the process are important to warn about, but if one has to pick between that and the stuff that kills people at night, I'd bias towards the ones that (a) meet the requirements they're supposed to meet and (b) provably save lives.
I suppose I ask too much... :/
People love to rush to the defense of anything slightly but not that significantly dangerous, and seem to feel that there has been a loss for all mankind if it goes.
I lived in that apartment for over 10 years... Never once had a "real" fire, but easily had hundreds of alarms. Very, very low signal to noise ratio...
Anecdotal: a friend had these in apartment and they ended up covering them with sacs everytime they wanted to bake meat. Cause otherwise the whole building risked evacuation just because they wanted damm baked chicken or something.
If you read through the history of his life, it looks much less like a smart, resourceful person trying to do science being kept down by The Man. It's more like untreated mental illness putting others in danger, and resulting in his premature death.
"smart, resourceful person" + "untreated mental illness"
He didn't build a reactor. He didn't build an x-ray machine. No experiments took place. There was no scientific method employed. He took apart a bunch of smoke detectors. He irradiated his mother's back yard, and then he tried to do it again in an apartment building.
He wasn't a misunderstood savant.
The guy did nothing that should be emulated, lauded, or praised. He's a cautionary tale of untreated mental illness.
He didn't seem to have ambition to aquire the kind of knowledge that makes a difference. Math. Safety protocols. The politics of working with others and creating a sense of absolute trust.
He may have had a lot of domain knowledge, but was any of it at all relevant to a supercomputer simulation of a reactor?
This isn't something you learn as you go. If you try something, and aren't already 99% sure what is going to happen before you try it, then you may be learning lots of random nuclear facts, but you aren't learning what the professionals do.
99.99% of nuclear engineers have probably never done even one DIY experiment past the very safe "Let's measure bananas" stuff.
The best way to steer him towards a real career would be to make him understand why you do not build backyard reactors, and why you learn your math, go to college, and do things professionally or not at all.
How do you know they didn’t?
It doesn't take domain knowledge to stockpile smoke detectors. He learned what he did from high school chemistry textbooks.
> had the ambition to learn more
Apparently not, as evidenced by him not having successfully built anything nor pursued any higher education.
David Charles Hahn (October 30, 1976 - September 27, 2016),
sometimes called the "Radioactive Boy Scout" or the "Nuclear Boy Scout" : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn
The Nuclear Boy Scout - A Short Documentary : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WyFktKBGfIA
The Nuclear Boy Scout (TV Short 2003) - IMDb : https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0378468/
Can someone explain the logical connection between "naive social awareness" and "choosing to go way above and beyond for this merit badge"?
As someone with Asperger syndrome (very mild) and the parent of a kid with it (more so), I may be overly sensitive to stereotyping on the topic. So in that excerpt above, what I hear is a neuro-typical adult dismissing the kid's amazing accomplishment here, just because he's socially awkward.
I'm sure she's actually a lovely person, so I'm hoping someone can give me a better explanation.
Perhaps she was implying he was not neurotypical(Many think he wasn't), perhaps she was referring to something else.
She's probably not a psychologist, she probably knows she isn't supposed to diagnose, so she's probably not thinking in those terms. She's just thinking something is wrong, and it was, and she probably felt a need to say it politely, and might have, without really thinking, used phrasing typically used when trying to be understanding about neurodiversity issues.
If it were me I can't say I would be proud of what I might have said about it. I almost feel bad writing this post at all. But I probably would have thought they needed some kind of immediate state or even police intervention.
I'm not a psychologist either, but I do suspect I have Dyspraxia myself, and many friends with Aspbergers, and some of the stories do fit, but it doesn't fully explain everything.
The problem is... this is not that much of an amazing accomplishment. He didn't discover something new. He actually made himself LESS likely to have a nuclear career.
To me it looks more like pyromania with nuclear materials.
It's definitely true that most people might not be able to do all that. I probably couldn't. In fact, I absolutely know he was more capable than me. Already driving by 16, while I'm 28 and still occasionally make mistakes crossing streets on foot.
But still, I doubt any nuclear professional would be happy to see what he did. It was difficult, special, and impressive, but maybe more importantly, it was horrifying.
He had some raw potential, but the experiment was a tragedy, and possibly the result of untreated mental health traumas.
He needed help. But not the help a lot of people now think he needed. His superfund creating experiments shouldn't have been encouraged. Someone should have made him understand why he needed to do better in school.
I think the aura of impressiveness the whole thing had may have led to some enabling happening.
Theoretically, the hidden assumption is that the only reason why you would not do certain things is because you guessed from social clues other people might be mad.
Sociopaths (friends with everyone)
Management (clueless)
Losers (actually do the homework)
I'm trying to be the biggest loser and outsmart the system, but thank God, I failed. The sociopaths want to copy the homework. Whatever good ideas you and your kid have, please type them and share! There's no intellectual property here. We're not afraid to ask "What if?"
Welcome to the community of the Internet, we love you.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Handl [2] https://richardsreactor.blogspot.com/
.!!.
I'm currently reading through the 1950s "Tom Swift Jr." stories... so maybe that's why I expected this HN post to be a great work of fiction. Like Charles Stross' "De-chlorinating the Moderator" http://www.antipope.org/charlie/fiction/moderator.html
The real world can be more delightful. And terrifying.
Ah, ok, Wikipedia to the rescue:
> In his mug shot, his face was covered with sores, which investigators believed could have been from exposure to radioactive materials, psoriasis, or possible drug use.
Related:
The Radioactive Boy Scout (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23538908 - June 2020 (1 comment)
The Radioactive Boy Scout - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18396332 - Nov 2018 (1 comment)
The Radioactive Boy Scout (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15466860 - Oct 2017 (34 comments)
“Radioactive Boy Scout” who tried to build a homemade nuclear reactor dead at 39 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12957768 - Nov 2016 (67 comments)
The Radioactive Boy Scout: When a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9867739 - July 2015 (5 comments)
The Radioactive Boy Scout (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6310748 - Sept 2013 (1 comment)
The radioactive boy scout: the teenager who attempted to build a breeder reactor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=611583 - May 2009 (18 comments)
Also related, a little less directly:
Middle school student achieved nuclear fusion in his family playroom - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24705563 - Oct 2020 (82 comments)
Boy, 12, said to have created nuclear reaction in playroom lab - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19472076 - March 2019 (14 comments)
12-Year-Old Claims to Have Achieved Nuclear Fusion at Home (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19229433 - Feb 2019 (92 comments)
“I built a fusion reactor in my bedroom – AMA” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12118525 - July 2016 (127 comments)
The Fusioneers, who build nuclear reactors in their back yards - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11777553 - May 2016 (54 comments)
Nobody builds nuclear reactors for fun anymore - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6867072 - Dec 2013 (102 comments)
The Nuclear Scientist Who Skipped College - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4762449 - Nov 2012 (50 comments)
I suspect it lifted more than the title. There's a significant overlap between the articles.
Harper's:
> by age twelve was digesting his father’s college chemistry textbooks without difficulty. When he spent the night at Golf Manor, his mother would often wake to find him asleep on the living room floor surrounded by open volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. [...] By fourteen, an age at which most boys with a penchant for chemistry are conducting rudimentary gunpowder experiments, David had fabricated nitroglycerine.
> David’s parents admired his interest in science but were alarmed by the chemical spills and blasts that became a regular event at the Hahn household. After David destroyed his bedroom—the walls were badly pocked, and the carpet was so stained that it had to be ripped out—Ken and Kathy banished his experiments to the basement.[...]
> Not even his scout troop was spared David’s scientific enthusiasm. He once appeared at a scout meeting with a bright orange face caused by an overdose of canthaxanthin, which he was taking to test methods of artificial tanning. One summer at scout camp, David’s fellow campers blew a hole in the communal tent when they accidentally ignited the stockpile of powdered magnesium he had brought to make fireworks.[...]
> David was not deterred. One night as Ken and Kathy were sitting in the living room watching TV, the house was rocked by an explosion in the basement. There they found David lying semiconscious on the floor, his eyebrows smoking. Unaware that red phosphorus is pyrophoric, David had been pounding it with a screwdriver and ignited it.
Tales from the Nuclear Age:
> By age 12, he was easily reading college level chemistry text books. At Patty’s house in Golf Manor, she often found him in the morning asleep on the floor surrounded by encyclopedias and chemistry books. At age 14, he did the typical teenage synthesis of gunpowder, but quite atypically, moved on to synthesize nitroglycerine.
> Explosions and chemical messes became rather routine at the Hahn’s house. When one explosion pock-marked the walls of his room and destroyed the rug, Ken and Kathy insisted he remove his experiments to the basement.[...]
> David’s adventures with the Boy scouts included his penchant for experimentation. He appeared at one scout meeting with a distinctly orange face. He had ingested a “tanning” chemical, to investigate artificial methods of sun tanning. At one summer camp, a group of scouts blew a hole in the main tent when David’s powdered Magnesium exploded. He had brought it along to make some fireworks.[...]
> There were other problems. One evening Ken and Kathy were in the living room watching TV, when a large explosion shook the walls and floor of the house. Rushing down to the basement, they found David lying on the floor unconscious with his eyebrows smoking, and the basement strewn with broken equipment. David had been pounding a pyrophoric chemical with a screwdriver when it ignited spontaneously…
(Submitted url was https://talesfromthenuclearage.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/the-...)
https://www.amazon.com/Radioactive-Boy-Scout-Backyard-Nuclea...