Oh they still haven't figured this one out at knowyourmeme?
Demon Core meme came from KanColle(2013) communities in Futaba, and permeated to nicovideo.jp as well as to Twitter. That's why it is predominantly image based with few GIFs inbetween, why it is Demon Core and Demon Core only, and why there are few comical non-girl versions created years after inception.
I'd guess overlap between outspoken (ex-)Futaba users AND HN readers(hops_max=3) OR knowyourmeme users is exactly 1.0f, and this won't ever go on record anywhere unless someone say it somewhere, so here you go.
> Demon Core meme came from KanColle(2013) communities in Futaba
Do you have some source for this being the origin? Could you cite some examples from prior to 2018 which is earliest date of other Japanese demon core memes cited by https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/demon-core ?
Oldest mention to Demon Core as local favorite I could find was timestamped 2016/12/05 23:51, but they don't keep formal logs and they really don't like things "brought outside", so I'm not going to link it.
Maybe there could be mht files in someone's basement somewhere, but I have no data to present at this instant, mostly just oral history. Sorry for that.
edit: oldest post tagged Demon Core on Pixiv dates back to 2016/01/17, so kym is verifiably off by years.
edit: there's a KanColle themed image post in Nico nico seiga dated 2017/06/18 featuring a "borrowed" Demon Core-chan 3D model, which meams the design existeed for some time.
Futaba Channel is a Japanese imageboard website originally born as a mirror backup for the textboard website 2ch (now 5ch). You may be aware of 4chan, which was directly based on Futaba and from which it took much of its culture.
Nico Nico Douga is a video hosting website that was created soon after YouTube's boom. It's famous for having user comments scrolling across videos and for being one of Japan's biggest meme factory from 2007 to 2012. Forcing users to login to watch videos, the push for premium accounts, and a rough transition from FLASH to HTML5 are considered some of main reasons of its decline.
The Crossroad trio was ~2015 addition to the game so it doesn't quite date back to 2013, but I doubt others enjoy inevitable wall of text for complete context at this time. I suspect it will take few more years until enough with Anglosphere background gains enough Japanese literacy to document this. For now I'd leave just pointers here.
> Because it’s a meme derived from human suffering. It’s meant to be in bad taste — that’s the source of the humor.
I don’t agree. To me, it’s derived from many things, like juxtaposing something incredibly stressful and dangerous, with something else.
I’d go further and say the suffering that happened is only important in that it made the demon core popular and well-known, but the memes would still work if it somehow became well-known without the death and suffering because no accident happened.
I also disagree with the author. They don't consider the relationship between the meme makers/viewers and the demon core incident. And while it was horrific to those involved, most people have experienced maybe 0.1% of that terror – and that is good. They can and should make light of it.
Expecting everyone to be deeply affected by all traumatic experiences throughout history is unrealistic. We have defence mechanisms to cope with the overwhelming weight of global suffering, and breaking them down is a bad idea. So shaming those who managed to distance themselves from such events (by saying their dark comedy is in bad taste) is condescending. I say it's good to have healthy coping strategies and not be overly affected by awful events we were not exposed to directly – that is called healthy mental resilience. Not everyone should suffer because anyone else has.
People should and will still joke, even when awful things have happened to billions in every conceivable niche of life. Really, I would even argue one should not absorb more suffering and terror than they would have been exposed to in one life-time, even if the internet and news media makes it easy. One should certainly, without any doubt in my mind not internalize every tragedy in history in an effort to stifle humour.
Most comedy is tragic.[1] And laughing is an inherently selfish act, as Mel Brooks observed when he said, "comedy is when you fall in an open sewer and die."[2]
>Simply bringing two pieces of metal together for instant death? It's absolute magic!
There wasn't anything instant about the death, from Wikipedia:[1]
Despite intensive medical care and offers from numerous volunteers to donate blood for transfusions, Slotin's condition was incurable.[2] He called his parents and they were flown at Army expense from Winnipeg to be with him. They arrived on the fourth day after the incident, and by the fifth day his condition started to deteriorate rapidly.
Over the next four days, Slotin suffered an "agonizing sequence of radiation-induced traumas", including severe diarrhea, reduced urine output, swollen hands, erythema, "massive blisters on his hands and forearms", intestinal paralysis and gangrene. He had internal radiation burns throughout his body, which one medical expert described as a "three-dimensional sunburn." By the seventh day, he was experiencing periods of "mental confusion." His lips turned blue and he was put in an oxygen tent. He ultimately experienced "a total disintegration of bodily functions" and slipped into a coma. Slotin died at 11 a.m. on 30 May, in the presence of his parents.
It was instant in that his fate was sealed in an instant. This is unlike basically every other form of death. If you're bleeding out there's a chance you can be patched up and transfused. If a cancer is killing you it could get treated. But Slotin was a dead man walking the moment his hand slipped; there was nothing anyone could do about it.
Exactly. I figured my meaning was assumed in the earlier comment.
But the details also adds to the magical element. It's not just being reckless, but being reckless with a horrible, excruciating, protracted, torture curse.
A story of using a screwdriver to fiddle with a loaded gun while the muzzle is pointed at you wouldn't have the same appeal, because the consequence is so much more direct and mundane.
It was a form of death that was extremely novel, considering the entire history of humanity. He wrecked his entire body at the molecular level in a way that takes days to fully take effect. Before nuclear research the only ways to kill you comparably were either very violent and immediate, dosing with some chemical aggressor (e.g. venom, fungal toxin), or rabies. Radiation poisoning works at the physical level, like getting punched really hard in every covalent bond in your body. Death by a trillion cuts.
I mean, if this should happen to me, I want to undergo euthanasia as soon as possible. If I am already dead, I don't want to unnecessarily suffer. So my question is, did he not want the euthanasia or was it not "accepted" or why he had to suffer so much?
The first person the demon core killed, Harry Daghlian, notably allowed the doctors to study and record information about his deterioration due to radiation. I believe Slotin had a similar motivation - that at least, even this slow, painful death could provide valuable information to doctors and scientists.
You have to admit that the setup of this experiment makes riding a motorcycle, without a helmet, with a .1% BAC, look like more responsible behavior.
The other people in the room got a couple years’ worth of rads from his mistake didn’t they?
I’m sure they rationalized not using an apparatus for this due to embrittlement, thermal expansion, response time, or all three. But from the perspective of someone looking back on this era 50 years later (now 80), Jesus fucking Christ.
Carpenter’s pencils as spacers would have saved his life.
In fact Wikipedia says he was a dumbass:
> The standard protocol was to use shims between the halves, as allowing them to close completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion.
> By Slotin's own unapproved protocol, the shims were not used. The top half of the reflector was resting directly on the bottom half at one point, while 180 degrees from this point a gap was maintained by the blade of a flat-tipped screwdriver in Slotin's hand. The size of the gap between the reflectors was changed by twisting the screwdriver. Slotin, who was given to bravado,[11] became the local expert, performing the test on almost a dozen occasions,
The real demon here isn't the core it's the flathead screwdriver--lowest among tools. The number of times I've slipped dealing with flathead screws, or stripped them, or nearly had an aneurysm from them is uncountable. No wonder one of these cursed devices played a central role here as well. But yeah he totally could have chucked a couple sticks in there to keep the halves separate and then he wouldn't have died. Oops.
Transposed to a very different time and place, the "bravado" here really reminded me of the "repeated dives in a carbon-fiber sub to crushing depths" -- with such setups, it's just a matter of when, not if.
Those people died before they knew they were fucked. At some point acute radiation exposure makes it so they can’t even dose you with morphine properly. Same thing happened at Chernobyl if I recall.
Yep. It's like someone chain-smoking cigarettes while working with gasoline. There's a "yo, WTF?" humor to how reckless it is.
Off-primary use of a mundane hand tool being the only thing preventing a minor nuclear disaster is simply funny. Like God forming man from mud not with the fine tools of a master clay-worker, but a child's play-doh plastic carving tools and a couple toothpicks.
My mom once worked as a gas station attendant and general gopher, back when gas stations had car repair shops attached (late 70s). She used to chain smoke as well. Whenever a customer would complain, she would intentionally spill a tiny bit of gasoline on the ground[1], then put her cigarette out in the puddle. She told me she would never light one while filling, because the spark and flame from the lighter could be enough to start a fire, but that the cigarette itself was not hot enough. I've never repeated this experiment.
1: Yeah I know this is a bad idea itself, but what can you do? She was ~20 and her pre-frontal cortex was still not fully developed.
Nit-pick: the meme about people's prefrontal-cortex not being fully developed until age 25 is not true. What is true is that there was a longitudinal study that found that people's brains continued to change under MRI as far as they tracked the participants, which was below the age of 25.
Yeah I’ve always thought the juxtaposition of 1) these high level experts with 2) one of the most dangerous objects we’ve ever created against the ways 2 was treated by 1 is part of the entertainment. Like its own unique and wildly unexpected category of the Darwin awards.
Yeah it’s sad but it is almost difficult to believe, so it ends up being kind of funny
American propaganda likes to paint the nuclear scientists as heroes, but I think the younger generation likely views them much more as "evil scientists who worked to create apocalyptic weapons" and feel comfortable with a lack of empathy for them harming themselves in the process.
I think it's about something else: In German there's the word "betriebsblind", an adjective that describes a state of knowing better but out of convenience/lazyness/routine foregoing precautions or ignoring warning signs, often resulting in preventable calamity.
It's relatable: It's so human to experience fatigue and just let it go and do it the quick way that one time. From jaywalking to not checking whether the power is turned off.
The Demon Core is an exciting parable about how closely we're flirting with death when we do that. Just one little slip, and life completely changes from one moment to the next.
It's that wretching discomfort of how easy it is to imagine being Slotin.
The nihilistic humor/sarcasm is a way to cope/confront it all.
Weirdly enough that conclusion reminds me of a scene I once saw in a nature documentary. It involved a species of birds where the males showed off their "fitness" to the females by doing dangerous things. One remarkable thing was that in one particular area near a highway, a group had adapted to show off by diving in front of a car without being hit (I guess that that species already used to do that with snakes and other predators before).
Anyway, in a general sense that's a particular type of sexual selection[0] that's been observed more often: showing that you are a healthy individual with good genes by taking risks. It probably has name. I suspect that with humans it's also an instinctual way of showing off who is the strongest in your peer group, without the sexual selection connotations.
EDIT: turns out the wikipedia article was one click removed from what I had in mind: signaling theory! (the evolutionary biology version)
I think it does, that’s the normalisation of deviance, slotin had stopped respecting the danger because he’d worked with it so much it had become mundane, innocuous. Doing party tricks with barely sub-critical masses absolutely qualifies for me.
There is Slotin and his motivations and then there is the visual vocabulary of musume art and how it represents emotions. The quickest way to get schooled on the latter is to watch the anime for
I just want to highlight the amazing irony of the parent post trying to virtue signal something about "virtue signalling" and then getting down voted to oblivion, thus possibly proving his point?
I feel like some conclusions of the intent here are born from being very well versed in the actual outcomes, including what I can only assume was a very painful end to someone's life.
But on the surface level of it, it's a scientist doing something knowingly incredibly dangerous and dumb for no particularly justifiable reason.
We've all felt a bit like that at some point. We just probably didn't have a core and a screwdriver.
It's a master-tier Darwin Award win. That's why it's funny. Same reason should-have-known-better accidents often get a laugh even when the consequences were pretty grave.
"I'm a highly-trained scientist who helped develop the bombs that leveled two cities and usher in the nuclear era... yeah, lemme just fuck around with this bomb core and a screwdriver such that I'm one muscle-twitch from killing everyone around me, that seems fine."
After a software project failure that overturned my life I got interested in the quality movement, Deming, Toyota Production System and all that. I was also interested in nuclear energy, actually opposed to it at that time, an opinion I have changed.
Before the Fukushima accident I became aware that Japan was leading the world in nuclear accidents, especially this criticality incident
which I could summarize as "makes Superphenix look like a huge success"
Causes floated for that were that (1) Japan was more aggressive at developing nuclear technology post-1990 more than any country other than Russia (who is making the FBR look easy today) and (2) the attitudes and methods that served Japan well in cars and semiconductors served them terribly in the nuclear business. Workgroups in a Japanese factory, for instance, are expected to modify their techniques and tools to improve production but takes detailed modelling and strict following of rules to avoid criticality accidents.
> Workgroups in a Japanese factory, for instance, are expected to modify their techniques and tools to improve production
If you go through the Fukushima disaster handling, that doesn't seem to have happened at all. In fact, people seemed to be super inflexible and actions seemed to have a long authorization chain.
The Toyota Production System wasn't actually that free, it expected people to report the changes before they happen and had plenty of opportunities for a manager to step in and stop it. Anyway, I'm not sure how widely it was adopted in Japan, the system famously came from there, but the country isn't famous for applying it.
Despite it being so famous, and the memes, I still don't understand what Slotin was doing.
So I get it, it was a demonstration of how to perform an experiment. But I can't understand how the screwdriver makes any sense at all. What's being measured? What does success and failure look like? What does the experiment produce, what data in what format?
Because in my head, a proper experiment has data collection and precise measurements. Somebody's working on a data table that says "At position X, we measured value Y". But randomly wiggling stuff around with a screwdriver, I can't see how one can do anything of the sort. And I figure at this level, "more coverage = more radiation" is kind of a trivial point that doesn't really need to be demonstrated.
> It required the operator to place two half-spheres of beryllium (a neutron reflector) around the core to be tested and manually lower the top reflector over the core using a thumb hole at the polar point. As the reflectors were manually moved closer and farther away from each other, neutron detectors indicated the core's neutron multiplication rate. The experimenter needed to maintain a slight separation between the reflector halves to allow enough neutrons to escape from the core in order to stay below criticality. The standard protocol was to use shims between the halves, as allowing them to close completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion.
> Because in my head, a proper experiment has data collection and precise measurements.
In your head yes, in early nuclear science it seems protocols weren't that important as long as it went boom in the end. As with many industries, regulations are written in blood
I've read about this in a few different mediums before and no it's not just that protocols weren't that important.
The guy doing this experiment was *notorious* for it and multiple other manhattan project people had already told him he was going to die if he kept doing it. But he had the kind of bravado and personality that he kept doing it.
So to be clear: all of the other people whose risk tolerance levels already had them handling weapons-grade plutonium as a career ALSO thought this guy was insane for doing this.
He took a dip in a pool with a functioning nuclear pile some time before that just to avoid having to shut the thing down before doing some maintenance, taking a pretty big dose. He was a daredevil and had the kind of bravado of someone on a work site who scoffs at PPE and rolls their eyes when you tell them they need to wear a damn helmet. Those types usually end up having a bad time eventually.
> Those types usually end up having a bad time eventually.
It's entirely possible to build up skills allowing you to avoid using PPE, but every kid who sees you is being put at risk just so you can swing your dick around.
What skill do you develop to avoid the need for a helmet? Is it like a spidey sense, or do you hit yourself in the head so frequently your skull thickens enough to protect your brain from falling objects?
Humans don't have perfectly consistent attention, and by the time you think you have any skill like that your attention is even less consistent than before you started "practicing".
No it isn’t. Over an 80,000 hour career in construction/other dangerous field, you will eventually have an incident that will make you thankful for PPE.
I've read that and it doesn't really answer those questions. How can you measure the core's neutron multiplication rate if you're not exactly controlling the distance? Isn't the measurement going to be all over the place?
In a demonstration, not an experiment, it’s sufficient to have the Geiger counter go clicky at different rates while the demonstrator plays the sphere like a theremin.
The point was to show it to people, not to collect data.
It was a boy's club with unlimited funding working on things that were never attempted before, a lot of things weren't exactly done by the books, even their original "safe" protocol would seem completely insane by modern standards. As long as it went boom in the end and they kept it secret I doubt they had many rules
Imagine if you'd invented the world's first modern sink, in a world that had never seen a faucet or a plughole before. And you're training some new guys on the details of what you're working on.
Sure, some of that training is going to involve blackboard calculations and careful measurements.
But you're also probably going to demonstrate a sink to them and say "As you can see, when we turn this knob more hot water is added to the mix. Note how, after I put the plug in the plughole, the water level starts rising."
The purpose of the demo isn't to precisely measure the depth of the water or the temperature at the faucet or the angle the tap is turned to. It's just to let them see the thing in practice, so as they study it in theory they know what to imagine and how the model maps onto the real world.
Regardless of the outcome, this still looks like a poor demonstration: what's the point of showing how it is done, if you're not following the protocol anyway? My understanding is that those in the room where nuclear experts, so they didn't need a demonstration to know that, the closer the two cores where, the higher the radiation.
Same reason that chemistry professors demonstrate dramatic reactions in front of the class from time to time. It's fun, and keeps things interesting, even if you already know the chemical processes that are happening.
My understanding is that he was demonstrating a technique for how to bring the system to near supercriticality, without causing it. I.e. the objective was to look at the measurement devices they had and monitor them, and build an understanding of what the data was showing. This would then (in principle) be repeated by others with more specific objectives later.
Obviously they should've built a rig for that (at least), but I guess there was a "ain't nobody got time for that" attitude.
Right, but shouldn't distance be a critical part of such a measurement?
Like if we measure the amount of noise a device makes, we do it in a quiet room and at a standard distance. Without precision there's no useful data being generated.
So that's the part that I don't get. Shouldn't there be a screw being turned precise amounts, precisely made shims, or at least calipers be involved?
The honest truth is there's just a certain acceptable level of jank in a scientific lab.
Not everything needs to be measured to a high precision to be useful, and it's always a balance of how much effort you want to expend versus how useful that extra accuracy/precision is.
If all you care about is "when you're getting close to a critical mass, your instruments will look like this," you don't care that you have a wide swing in your data. You just want to show a difference from baseline.
Sometimes science doesn’t have to be precise to demonstrate a result.
Consider trying to measure feedback from a microphone and speaker. You don’t have to be an expert to know that there’s a quick change in system behavior when the microphone gets too close to the speaker.
If the goal is to collect precise data and use it after the experiment to draw conclusions, update a model, etc. then sure.
If the goal is to demonstrate to observers how the neutron output (reaction rate) increases as the reflectors are moved closer together over the source, then that isn't really necessary.
This seems more like an incredibly dangerous version of a demonstration you might see at an interactive science museum or a classroom. You don't need precise measurements to demonstrate the relationship between two phenomenon.
I think it was more about being able to understand/read what the measurement devices were showing. The exact distance probably wasn't as important as the criticality could also vary with other variables (e.g. geometry).
As in, you're trying to understand the situation as "shouldn't they have precisely nailed down all the parameters, if the goal is to measure when X starts happening". But it seems Slotin was more demonstrating "this is what you're going to see on the monitors when stuff is close to going boom". It wasn't about "this specific distance is a safe gap" and more "here's how you can tell whether the gap is safe".
He was about to be reassigned out of the lab, and was demonstrating equipment to his designated successors.
IMO the demon core incident resonates with people as kind of the ultimate case of "playing with fire". Humans have always played with fire, so we see the attraction, but also the dangers of it. It's a primitive behavior that's put us at risk, but also been the origin of most of our technology. The juxtaposition of a top nuclear weapons scientist taking such a "caveman" approach, playing with a new kind of "fire" that's millions of times more powerful, is poignant in the way it's absurd, but also relatable, sad & darkly funny.
Just about all humor derives from some degree of suffering. Compared what the core could have done, the three deaths from the accident are nothing. Even things that are joked about often have much higher death tolls like wars and natural disasters.
The author mentions 2019. That was the year that the "Demon Core Kun" videos were put on YouTube[0]. There's no mention of them in the article, which is a bit odd. I don't know if that was the first to "memeify" the demon core, but it certainly is one of the most popular memeifications, with each of the eight videos having somewhere between three to six million views.
This also would explain the relatively large presence of anime memes in particular, since the "main" meme is a series of Japanese animations.
EDIT: knowyourmeme.com actually has an article about the Demon Core and its popularity in Japan as a meme[1]. Apparently the latter predates the Demon Core Kun series by about a year at least. Still, the latter being on YT made it a lot more accessible to non-Japanese people which might explain the spike in meme popularity in 2019.
Twice bitten, three times shy.
After the Slotin incident, prompt critical assemblies by hand were prohibited.
Los Alamos then built a series of remotely operated critical assembly machines.
There is a fair amount of open source literature on them, especially the "Godiva" series. Some of these machines have experienced criticality excursions that damaged the machine, but spared the biological organisms operating them by remote control.
Which reminds me, I can unfortunately not turn this up, but iirc at one of the national labs they've been working on dismantling a particular set of hot cells and iirc the whole thing has been stalled for a couple years trying to figure out how to do it. Sort of like a "demon hot cell".
Which is the equivalent of ~4,000,000 gallons of gas, or 10,700,000,000 Tesla powerwalls.
Bear in mind, however, that some napkin math suggests that this is gross overkill, 2,250365100 = 82,135,000, suggesting that even a fairly long lived person only needs a mere 2,650 gallons of gas, or ~7,070 Tesla powerwalls, and that the demon-core can easily supply enough lifetime calories for a solid large city of ~1,500,000.
I still can’t believe that there exists rocks on this world that will make a room glow blue and kill everyone in the room if the rocks are brought close together.
I likewise “can’t believe” we have CPUs. The two things are equally wild to me.
Sometimes i imagine how I would explain our current tech to someone clever and curious from the past. Like what would Jules Verne, Edison or John von Neumann do if you took your iphone out of your pocket and show them as you unlock it with your face, click youtube and search their name. (Just as an example of something super pedestrian and mundane which might just blow their minds.) We are trully living in an age of wonders.
> Heavily processed rocks that very few nations can produce.
“Are allowed to” is probably more accurate than “can”, given that the main constraint is other nations looking for signs that you are doing it and... reacting negatively if they see them.
It’s because “rocks” aren’t the fundamental nature of our reality. There are also ugly giant bags of mostly water posting comments in this very thread.
My spouse works in a nuclear research facility. Everytime they talk about radiation or something i make jokes from the HBO "Chernobyl" series like "3.6 Röntgen, not good, not terrible".
Some years ago i gifted them a snow globe for birthday, but not one with a snowman and white particles, but one with a little chernobyl plant and black particles. Their coworkers found it funny. It is still at their desk these days.
Although, my AI-generation was a response to an interesting comment. You do not think readers are interested to see how the Chernobyl snow-globes look like?! (Looking at AI generated images or store links.)
But we wouldn't know what it looks like, we would only know what your AI thinks it looks like. So no, we're not interested in filling up our heads with vaguely related AI slop. If you had actually posted the store link that would be an entirely different question, which you've somehow tried to conflate with generated images.
I clicked on it at least twice and found it disgusting. If more people were like you, thinking this is a good idea, i would stop posting my IRL stories to the internet.
> Although, my AI-generation was a response to an interesting comment.
Yes, that's why the comment it was in response to was not downvoted. But being interesting and HN-appropriate isn't something responses automatically inherent from their parent comment.
> You do not think readers are interested to see how the Chernobyl snow-globes look like?!
Actual Chernobyl snow globes... maybe a link to that would be appropriate.
AI hallucinations of what they might look like? Maybe if the context was a discussion of the capacities of different AI models and it was offered as a demonstration of the one that generated it, but not in the context it was presented, no.
I think this _is_ indeed interesting and also indicative of where AI art is going, unironically. People has much higher tolerance for human made low-effort memes.
For comedy one needs to subvert expectations, and this is why making light of grave events (Black Comedy) is a big phenomenon.
There are many examples from WW2 comedy to 9/11 memes. Sometimes the examples are more indirect, like in film: American Psycho, American Beauty, Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short, Fargo, Don't Look Up, Fight Club, Quentin Tarantino's stuff, etc. All of them deal with dark themes in a light way.
Given the prevalence of this in our culture, the author seems a bit surprised. Maybe they didn't connect it to dark comedy.
>this somewhat kawaii rendering of the Slotin experiment, along with the “I love science” phrasing, was a form of dark humor.
And later
>Dark humor, in its own strange and inverted way, is arguably a sort of coping mechanism — a defense against the darkness, a way to tame and de-fang the horrors of the world.
Strangelove is funny because it was true. Serious people really were doing studies on how to survive a nuclear war.
But just as in the movie it was politicians who weren't down with it. On both sides. Khrushchev was removed when his colleagues figured out just how close he got them to WW3.
Yeah, in spite of the author's claims to not want to be the humor police, this really just reads as someone who takes their work as a historian of nuclear weapons 'very seriously' and doesn't want it to be joked about. The SNL joke he identified as being particularly offensive ("Having received the Novel Peace Prize, the survivors of the nuclear bombings called the award the second biggest surprise of their lives") is ... pretty anodyne? It's not making fun of the survivors or glorifying cruelty, it's just contrasting the banal things people say when receiving awards with the extreme reality of having endured one of the most awful events in human history.
That kind of juxtaposition is pretty par for the course in comedy, let alone dark comedy. And when it comes to engaging with the reality of awful events, not everyone wants to or has the capacity to treat them with the grave solemnity the author seems to expect.
IIRC John Cleese has a talk from years ago where he makes a very interesting point that seriousness and solemnity are two very different things.
In his opinion, killing humor is the same as killing creativity and killing creativity is the same as inviting disaster and/or failure for the sake of your ego.
Not being solemn is not the same as not being serious.
I think your last sentence there really is the right take away here. But even more than that, I think the right way to prevent future tragedies is with humor not solemnity.
If you scroll far enough in the comments of most of からめる's videos, there will almost always be a English-translated transcript somewhere. Of course, in many cases you barely need them, since most of their videos don't really need much explanation, or maybe more accurately, utterly defy attempts at being explained.
> So perhaps if anybody has a “right” to make jokes in poor taste about the “Demon Core”… it might be the Japanese?
> I’m not here to be the humor police, or to say things should be “off limits” for comedy, or that it’s “too soon,” or make any other scolding noises. Dark humor, in its own strange and inverted way, is arguably a sort of coping mechanism — a defense against the darkness, a way to tame and de-fang the horrors of the world.
I am always of the opinion that as long as the joke lands with the audience or does what the teller intended, it's a good joke. Comedy is about a give and take between the comedian/artist/whatever and their audience.
The problem arises when people think they are an intended audience when they are not (the pope going to a Bill Hicks show), or when a comedian thinks that they're in front of their intended audience when they are not (a conservative comic at the Appolo). A lot of people need to learn this on both sides, and more importantly need to stop complaining when they come to this realization.
I had never heard of this story. What an absolutely horrible way to die. Not only do you have ample time to suffer with the knowledge of your impending death, but you get to do so in agony the whole time. I wouldn't wish that upon anyone.
No mention of the earlier XKCD mentioning the demon core? It's what set in motion my particular interest in nuclear accidents.
I don't agree with the author's analysis here. I think the demon core is simply memorable. It has a scary name and the beryllium sphere is iconic in a way the Kelley and SL-1 accidents simply aren't.
A bit from Look Around You, a (fantastic) British comedy show made to look like retro science classroom educational videos, from the minds of Peter Serafinowicz and Robert Popper
My favourite one is the flail with the demon core attached to it. Memes aside, I find it fascinating how absurd was thinking that experiment was a good idea
Im on the internet a ton. Very familiar with the two horrible nuclear research accidents that occurred around this time. Never once seen these meme.
Also, I love how the author tries to argue for who should be allowed to make the joke, like there is some arbiter who can tell you “oh you don’t fall into that group so you are not allowed to make that joke.”
What is going on here? I am not exceptionally well-versed in anime or manga tropes, but I think the “obvious” reading of this is a classic case of “unexpected juxtaposition creates humor.” That is, moving something from one context (“Demon Core,” radiation experiment, horrible death) into another (cute, anime, girls) creates something that feels novel and unusual
Ah, sir, I guess you’re completely unfamiliar with anime tropes. From absurd brutality to dark drama (much worse than your Titanic Ending and Futurama Dog), everything can be found in anime. Thinking that these are cute animations for teens and children is a big mistake. I, a grown up adult, usually dread when an anime plot is too nice to its actors and think if I want to watch it further. This juxtaposition is well-expected.
There's a lot of light and fluffy fare in anime. Even back in the 90s when I was used to sex, violence, drama, and strong character lore in my anime, I discovered You're Under Arrest and was a bit surprised to discover that it pretty much went nowhere, just an episodic series full of funny things for the characters to do. Especially surprising for a show about police officers, which in American media usually means it's a "procedural" with particularly dangerous criminals and high stakes. But in YUA the officers mainly deal with petty criminals and get up to wacky hijinks. More recent series, like Azumanga Daioh and Lucky Star, are pretty much just schoolgirls doing cute things. And maybe that's just the energy you need sometimes rather than, say, the horror and drama of Attack On Titan.
To paraphrase Brad Bird, anime is not a genre. It's a broad art form that encompasses all genres. This is a common mistake for Western viewers of anime; even in the 90s it was marketed to us as being all dark, twisted Liquid Television stuff. But yeah, actually, most anime is created for and marketed to kids and teens. In Japan, if you're an adult consumer of anime, your peers may wonder what the hell is wrong with you and why won't you grow up. (Manga is different; plenty of manga are produced for adult consumption, and these are fairly serious in tone, and may lack the fantastic settings or big-eyed character designs Westerners associate with the medium.) Adult anime otaku in Japan are viewed with the same bemusement and contempt we might have for, say, the grown-ass men who are fans of My Little Pony. This may have changed more recently, as the Japanese government has leaned into the idea of anime and manga being important cultural exports through its "Cool Japan" publicity program.
Would science have progressed more slowly if they had spent a few hours building a decent rig for that that can't slip like a screwdriver instead of losing a scientist?
Yes, but not in the way you're implying. Safety measures don't exist in a vacuum, they exist in a whole system of other similar safety measures. In aggregate, this system of safety measures does slow science down (or anything else). One might argue that it's worth it to slow down output for the sake of safety, but I don't think one can reasonably argue that output doesn't slow down.
It is possible to construct a system of safety measures so absolute that almost no work can get done, and it is possible (in a sufficiently dangerous field) to be so reckless that injuries to and deaths of would-be contributors stymie progress. Even ignoring the value of avoiding death and injury for its own sake, it is likely that optimal productivity lies somewhere in between.
What? We're making incredible progress. mRNA vaccines, CRISPR, access to space research, materials sciences, the upcoming AI-driven research boom. It's crazy out there, and as a bonus, we're not irradiating anyone due to clumsy screwdriver techniques.
Stop paying attention to whatever source is leading you to believe scientific progress has slowed down. They're lying to you.
I am professional scientist. I am not allowed to use certain substances, because exposure is damaging to the unborn child. I am a man.
I am not allowed to perform certain procedures, unless I rebuild half the lab.
I am not allowed to use lasers you can buy as costumer products in the US and china unless I write a safety manual .
Innovation needs creativity and fast iterations, in our current setup that is incredible hard.
MRNA tech is a good example: It was stuck in limbo for ages due to safety concerns, COVID allowed people to ignore these and push forward.
Oh they still haven't figured this one out at knowyourmeme?
Demon Core meme came from KanColle(2013) communities in Futaba, and permeated to nicovideo.jp as well as to Twitter. That's why it is predominantly image based with few GIFs inbetween, why it is Demon Core and Demon Core only, and why there are few comical non-girl versions created years after inception.
I'd guess overlap between outspoken (ex-)Futaba users AND HN readers(hops_max=3) OR knowyourmeme users is exactly 1.0f, and this won't ever go on record anywhere unless someone say it somewhere, so here you go.
> Demon Core meme came from KanColle(2013) communities in Futaba
Do you have some source for this being the origin? Could you cite some examples from prior to 2018 which is earliest date of other Japanese demon core memes cited by https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/demon-core ?
Oldest mention to Demon Core as local favorite I could find was timestamped 2016/12/05 23:51, but they don't keep formal logs and they really don't like things "brought outside", so I'm not going to link it.
Maybe there could be mht files in someone's basement somewhere, but I have no data to present at this instant, mostly just oral history. Sorry for that.
edit: oldest post tagged Demon Core on Pixiv dates back to 2016/01/17, so kym is verifiably off by years.
edit: there's a KanColle themed image post in Nico nico seiga dated 2017/06/18 featuring a "borrowed" Demon Core-chan 3D model, which meams the design existeed for some time.
edit: this blog post dated 2014/09/30 links to a deleted Touhou video with Demon Core in title: https://1ni.co/2014/09/30/project20140930_6/
>Oh they still haven't figured this one out at knowyourmeme?
Why not contribute your knowledge there, instead of (or in addition to) here, where it will surely be forgotten about?
Can you elaborate? What's the context? I have no idea what those communities are.
Futaba Channel is a Japanese imageboard website originally born as a mirror backup for the textboard website 2ch (now 5ch). You may be aware of 4chan, which was directly based on Futaba and from which it took much of its culture.
Nico Nico Douga is a video hosting website that was created soon after YouTube's boom. It's famous for having user comments scrolling across videos and for being one of Japan's biggest meme factory from 2007 to 2012. Forcing users to login to watch videos, the push for premium accounts, and a rough transition from FLASH to HTML5 are considered some of main reasons of its decline.
The Crossroad trio was ~2015 addition to the game so it doesn't quite date back to 2013, but I doubt others enjoy inevitable wall of text for complete context at this time. I suspect it will take few more years until enough with Anglosphere background gains enough Japanese literacy to document this. For now I'd leave just pointers here.
> Because it’s a meme derived from human suffering. It’s meant to be in bad taste — that’s the source of the humor.
I don’t agree. To me, it’s derived from many things, like juxtaposing something incredibly stressful and dangerous, with something else.
I’d go further and say the suffering that happened is only important in that it made the demon core popular and well-known, but the memes would still work if it somehow became well-known without the death and suffering because no accident happened.
I also disagree with the author. They don't consider the relationship between the meme makers/viewers and the demon core incident. And while it was horrific to those involved, most people have experienced maybe 0.1% of that terror – and that is good. They can and should make light of it.
Expecting everyone to be deeply affected by all traumatic experiences throughout history is unrealistic. We have defence mechanisms to cope with the overwhelming weight of global suffering, and breaking them down is a bad idea. So shaming those who managed to distance themselves from such events (by saying their dark comedy is in bad taste) is condescending. I say it's good to have healthy coping strategies and not be overly affected by awful events we were not exposed to directly – that is called healthy mental resilience. Not everyone should suffer because anyone else has.
People should and will still joke, even when awful things have happened to billions in every conceivable niche of life. Really, I would even argue one should not absorb more suffering and terror than they would have been exposed to in one life-time, even if the internet and news media makes it easy. One should certainly, without any doubt in my mind not internalize every tragedy in history in an effort to stifle humour.
Most comedy is tragic.[1] And laughing is an inherently selfish act, as Mel Brooks observed when he said, "comedy is when you fall in an open sewer and die."[2]
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/06/25/comedy-plus/
[2] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/mel-brooks-film-exc...
"Comedy is tragedy plus time".
That quote seems to have multiple origins, though I remember it from Portal, an unlikely source.
>juxtaposing something incredibly stressful and dangerous, with something else.
That "something else" to me is the absolute ease of the act. I think we normally expect the scale of the consequences to match the setup difficulty.
Simply bringing two pieces of metal together for instant death? It's absolute magic!
So there's also the wizardry component of it. It tickles our love of fantasy stories and arcane power, and the irresponsible handling thereof.
Elsewhere someone mentions lighting cigarettes at a gas station. That situation has similar aspects, but lacks the magical flair.
>Simply bringing two pieces of metal together for instant death? It's absolute magic!
There wasn't anything instant about the death, from Wikipedia:[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#Slotin's_deathIt was instant in that his fate was sealed in an instant. This is unlike basically every other form of death. If you're bleeding out there's a chance you can be patched up and transfused. If a cancer is killing you it could get treated. But Slotin was a dead man walking the moment his hand slipped; there was nothing anyone could do about it.
Exactly. I figured my meaning was assumed in the earlier comment.
But the details also adds to the magical element. It's not just being reckless, but being reckless with a horrible, excruciating, protracted, torture curse.
A story of using a screwdriver to fiddle with a loaded gun while the muzzle is pointed at you wouldn't have the same appeal, because the consequence is so much more direct and mundane.
It was a form of death that was extremely novel, considering the entire history of humanity. He wrecked his entire body at the molecular level in a way that takes days to fully take effect. Before nuclear research the only ways to kill you comparably were either very violent and immediate, dosing with some chemical aggressor (e.g. venom, fungal toxin), or rabies. Radiation poisoning works at the physical level, like getting punched really hard in every covalent bond in your body. Death by a trillion cuts.
Of course there was, that’s not even pedantically correct. Death came instantly, only dying took awhile.
Replace "instant death" with "certain doom" then! Even more fantastical!
I mean, if this should happen to me, I want to undergo euthanasia as soon as possible. If I am already dead, I don't want to unnecessarily suffer. So my question is, did he not want the euthanasia or was it not "accepted" or why he had to suffer so much?
The first person the demon core killed, Harry Daghlian, notably allowed the doctors to study and record information about his deterioration due to radiation. I believe Slotin had a similar motivation - that at least, even this slow, painful death could provide valuable information to doctors and scientists.
You have to admit that the setup of this experiment makes riding a motorcycle, without a helmet, with a .1% BAC, look like more responsible behavior.
The other people in the room got a couple years’ worth of rads from his mistake didn’t they?
I’m sure they rationalized not using an apparatus for this due to embrittlement, thermal expansion, response time, or all three. But from the perspective of someone looking back on this era 50 years later (now 80), Jesus fucking Christ.
Carpenter’s pencils as spacers would have saved his life.
In fact Wikipedia says he was a dumbass:
> The standard protocol was to use shims between the halves, as allowing them to close completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion.
> By Slotin's own unapproved protocol, the shims were not used. The top half of the reflector was resting directly on the bottom half at one point, while 180 degrees from this point a gap was maintained by the blade of a flat-tipped screwdriver in Slotin's hand. The size of the gap between the reflectors was changed by twisting the screwdriver. Slotin, who was given to bravado,[11] became the local expert, performing the test on almost a dozen occasions,
The real demon here isn't the core it's the flathead screwdriver--lowest among tools. The number of times I've slipped dealing with flathead screws, or stripped them, or nearly had an aneurysm from them is uncountable. No wonder one of these cursed devices played a central role here as well. But yeah he totally could have chucked a couple sticks in there to keep the halves separate and then he wouldn't have died. Oops.
You can add it to your list of its crimes against humanity: killed at least two nuclear physicists.
I'm just surprised it wasn't a Phillips camming out.
Transposed to a very different time and place, the "bravado" here really reminded me of the "repeated dives in a carbon-fiber sub to crushing depths" -- with such setups, it's just a matter of when, not if.
Those people died before they knew they were fucked. At some point acute radiation exposure makes it so they can’t even dose you with morphine properly. Same thing happened at Chernobyl if I recall.
At some point potassium chloride is a mercy.
The source of the humor is that what Slotin did is extremely funny. So obscenely reckless.
Part of me thinks he'd laugh his ass off at the memes.
Hell, when the accident happened, he said, "Well, that does it."
Yep. It's like someone chain-smoking cigarettes while working with gasoline. There's a "yo, WTF?" humor to how reckless it is.
Off-primary use of a mundane hand tool being the only thing preventing a minor nuclear disaster is simply funny. Like God forming man from mud not with the fine tools of a master clay-worker, but a child's play-doh plastic carving tools and a couple toothpicks.
It's actually pretty hard to ignite gasoline with cigarettes: https://mythresults.com/special7
Sure, but most people light their cigarettes with a match or lighter and those have no problem igniting gasoline.
Modern cigarettes have ammonium phosphate in the paper as a retardant, does that make it harder to ignite gas?
My mom once worked as a gas station attendant and general gopher, back when gas stations had car repair shops attached (late 70s). She used to chain smoke as well. Whenever a customer would complain, she would intentionally spill a tiny bit of gasoline on the ground[1], then put her cigarette out in the puddle. She told me she would never light one while filling, because the spark and flame from the lighter could be enough to start a fire, but that the cigarette itself was not hot enough. I've never repeated this experiment.
1: Yeah I know this is a bad idea itself, but what can you do? She was ~20 and her pre-frontal cortex was still not fully developed.
Nit-pick: the meme about people's prefrontal-cortex not being fully developed until age 25 is not true. What is true is that there was a longitudinal study that found that people's brains continued to change under MRI as far as they tracked the participants, which was below the age of 25.
They just don't burn hot enough to ignite. Remember - things burn at different temps.
The vapor burns at a different temperature from the liquid. That's fun.
Yeah I’ve always thought the juxtaposition of 1) these high level experts with 2) one of the most dangerous objects we’ve ever created against the ways 2 was treated by 1 is part of the entertainment. Like its own unique and wildly unexpected category of the Darwin awards.
Yeah it’s sad but it is almost difficult to believe, so it ends up being kind of funny
American propaganda likes to paint the nuclear scientists as heroes, but I think the younger generation likely views them much more as "evil scientists who worked to create apocalyptic weapons" and feel comfortable with a lack of empathy for them harming themselves in the process.
Yeah the article completely misses the mark there. The suffering is not even a part of the meme, nobody really delves into that.
I think it's about that ecstasy in losing yourself in something that can sometimes cause you to lose your life.
I think it's about something else: In German there's the word "betriebsblind", an adjective that describes a state of knowing better but out of convenience/lazyness/routine foregoing precautions or ignoring warning signs, often resulting in preventable calamity.
It's relatable: It's so human to experience fatigue and just let it go and do it the quick way that one time. From jaywalking to not checking whether the power is turned off.
The Demon Core is an exciting parable about how closely we're flirting with death when we do that. Just one little slip, and life completely changes from one moment to the next.
It's that wretching discomfort of how easy it is to imagine being Slotin.
The nihilistic humor/sarcasm is a way to cope/confront it all.
That doesn't quite fit either. Slotin did the screwdriver trick a bunch of times before the accident. He was showing off.
Weirdly enough that conclusion reminds me of a scene I once saw in a nature documentary. It involved a species of birds where the males showed off their "fitness" to the females by doing dangerous things. One remarkable thing was that in one particular area near a highway, a group had adapted to show off by diving in front of a car without being hit (I guess that that species already used to do that with snakes and other predators before).
Anyway, in a general sense that's a particular type of sexual selection[0] that's been observed more often: showing that you are a healthy individual with good genes by taking risks. It probably has name. I suspect that with humans it's also an instinctual way of showing off who is the strongest in your peer group, without the sexual selection connotations.
EDIT: turns out the wikipedia article was one click removed from what I had in mind: signaling theory! (the evolutionary biology version)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory
I think it does, that’s the normalisation of deviance, slotin had stopped respecting the danger because he’d worked with it so much it had become mundane, innocuous. Doing party tricks with barely sub-critical masses absolutely qualifies for me.
There is Slotin and his motivations and then there is the visual vocabulary of musume art and how it represents emotions. The quickest way to get schooled on the latter is to watch the anime for
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azumanga_Daioh
which has a mad scientist character that I can easily picture screwing around with plutonium half-sphere and a screwdriver.
I don't remember a scientist in Azumanga Daioh, were you thinking of Nichijou?
That makes this even more funny. Next you'll be telling me it was his daughter's birthday.
The author seems to have missed the memo that the era of victimisation and virtue signaling is finally over.
I just want to highlight the amazing irony of the parent post trying to virtue signal something about "virtue signalling" and then getting down voted to oblivion, thus possibly proving his point?
Unhappily the era of whinging about victimization and virtue signaling has persisted
I feel like some conclusions of the intent here are born from being very well versed in the actual outcomes, including what I can only assume was a very painful end to someone's life.
But on the surface level of it, it's a scientist doing something knowingly incredibly dangerous and dumb for no particularly justifiable reason.
We've all felt a bit like that at some point. We just probably didn't have a core and a screwdriver.
It's a master-tier Darwin Award win. That's why it's funny. Same reason should-have-known-better accidents often get a laugh even when the consequences were pretty grave.
"I'm a highly-trained scientist who helped develop the bombs that leveled two cities and usher in the nuclear era... yeah, lemme just fuck around with this bomb core and a screwdriver such that I'm one muscle-twitch from killing everyone around me, that seems fine."
Oddly the art is largely Japanese in style, not just the musume (e.g. "girl") images but that first one.
Between that accident and the year 2000 there were about 60 criticality accidents causing about 20 fatalities
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml0037/ML003731912.pdf
After a software project failure that overturned my life I got interested in the quality movement, Deming, Toyota Production System and all that. I was also interested in nuclear energy, actually opposed to it at that time, an opinion I have changed.
Before the Fukushima accident I became aware that Japan was leading the world in nuclear accidents, especially this criticality incident
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
as well as the comedy of errors at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant
which I could summarize as "makes Superphenix look like a huge success"
Causes floated for that were that (1) Japan was more aggressive at developing nuclear technology post-1990 more than any country other than Russia (who is making the FBR look easy today) and (2) the attitudes and methods that served Japan well in cars and semiconductors served them terribly in the nuclear business. Workgroups in a Japanese factory, for instance, are expected to modify their techniques and tools to improve production but takes detailed modelling and strict following of rules to avoid criticality accidents.
> Workgroups in a Japanese factory, for instance, are expected to modify their techniques and tools to improve production
If you go through the Fukushima disaster handling, that doesn't seem to have happened at all. In fact, people seemed to be super inflexible and actions seemed to have a long authorization chain.
The Toyota Production System wasn't actually that free, it expected people to report the changes before they happen and had plenty of opportunities for a manager to step in and stop it. Anyway, I'm not sure how widely it was adopted in Japan, the system famously came from there, but the country isn't famous for applying it.
I feel like it's a totally different scenario. In usual times, you can afford to innovate - trade some risk for potential improvement.
In disasters, you want to follow the established procedure, to minimize risk in an already confusing and unusual situation.
Despite it being so famous, and the memes, I still don't understand what Slotin was doing.
So I get it, it was a demonstration of how to perform an experiment. But I can't understand how the screwdriver makes any sense at all. What's being measured? What does success and failure look like? What does the experiment produce, what data in what format?
Because in my head, a proper experiment has data collection and precise measurements. Somebody's working on a data table that says "At position X, we measured value Y". But randomly wiggling stuff around with a screwdriver, I can't see how one can do anything of the sort. And I figure at this level, "more coverage = more radiation" is kind of a trivial point that doesn't really need to be demonstrated.
It's all in the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
> It required the operator to place two half-spheres of beryllium (a neutron reflector) around the core to be tested and manually lower the top reflector over the core using a thumb hole at the polar point. As the reflectors were manually moved closer and farther away from each other, neutron detectors indicated the core's neutron multiplication rate. The experimenter needed to maintain a slight separation between the reflector halves to allow enough neutrons to escape from the core in order to stay below criticality. The standard protocol was to use shims between the halves, as allowing them to close completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion.
> Because in my head, a proper experiment has data collection and precise measurements.
In your head yes, in early nuclear science it seems protocols weren't that important as long as it went boom in the end. As with many industries, regulations are written in blood
I've read about this in a few different mediums before and no it's not just that protocols weren't that important.
The guy doing this experiment was *notorious* for it and multiple other manhattan project people had already told him he was going to die if he kept doing it. But he had the kind of bravado and personality that he kept doing it.
So to be clear: all of the other people whose risk tolerance levels already had them handling weapons-grade plutonium as a career ALSO thought this guy was insane for doing this.
He took a dip in a pool with a functioning nuclear pile some time before that just to avoid having to shut the thing down before doing some maintenance, taking a pretty big dose. He was a daredevil and had the kind of bravado of someone on a work site who scoffs at PPE and rolls their eyes when you tell them they need to wear a damn helmet. Those types usually end up having a bad time eventually.
> He took a dip in a pool with a functioning nuclear pile
xkcd published a What If? video about the consequences of swimming in a nuclear fuel pool: https://youtu.be/EFRUL7vKdU8
> Those types usually end up having a bad time eventually.
It's entirely possible to build up skills allowing you to avoid using PPE, but every kid who sees you is being put at risk just so you can swing your dick around.
> It's entirely possible to build up skills allowing you to avoid using PPE
Yes, but you only need to mess up once and your skill doesn't save you from other people mistakes.
What skill do you develop to avoid the need for a helmet? Is it like a spidey sense, or do you hit yourself in the head so frequently your skull thickens enough to protect your brain from falling objects?
Don't mind me, boss. Just hitting my head off of this pipe to build up a resistance to physical trauma.
I would like to learn the skill to dodge harmful prolonged sound waves. A technique similar to the safety squint, but with your ears?
No, it's not.
Humans don't have perfectly consistent attention, and by the time you think you have any skill like that your attention is even less consistent than before you started "practicing".
No it isn’t. Over an 80,000 hour career in construction/other dangerous field, you will eventually have an incident that will make you thankful for PPE.
> multiple other manhattan project people had already told him he was going to die if he kept doing it
To me it seems quite reasonable that the people hired
to work on a bomb intended to kill 150,000 people in one go
against the backdrop of a war where 70-85 million died
might not place the greatest value on health and safety, and the sanctity of human life.
On other human lives. They'd probably damn well care about their lives; otherwise, they wouldn't even make an effort to create "better weapons".
I've read that and it doesn't really answer those questions. How can you measure the core's neutron multiplication rate if you're not exactly controlling the distance? Isn't the measurement going to be all over the place?
In a demonstration, not an experiment, it’s sufficient to have the Geiger counter go clicky at different rates while the demonstrator plays the sphere like a theremin.
The point was to show it to people, not to collect data.
It was a boy's club with unlimited funding working on things that were never attempted before, a lot of things weren't exactly done by the books, even their original "safe" protocol would seem completely insane by modern standards. As long as it went boom in the end and they kept it secret I doubt they had many rules
Imagine if you'd invented the world's first modern sink, in a world that had never seen a faucet or a plughole before. And you're training some new guys on the details of what you're working on.
Sure, some of that training is going to involve blackboard calculations and careful measurements.
But you're also probably going to demonstrate a sink to them and say "As you can see, when we turn this knob more hot water is added to the mix. Note how, after I put the plug in the plughole, the water level starts rising."
The purpose of the demo isn't to precisely measure the depth of the water or the temperature at the faucet or the angle the tap is turned to. It's just to let them see the thing in practice, so as they study it in theory they know what to imagine and how the model maps onto the real world.
Regardless of the outcome, this still looks like a poor demonstration: what's the point of showing how it is done, if you're not following the protocol anyway? My understanding is that those in the room where nuclear experts, so they didn't need a demonstration to know that, the closer the two cores where, the higher the radiation.
Same reason that chemistry professors demonstrate dramatic reactions in front of the class from time to time. It's fun, and keeps things interesting, even if you already know the chemical processes that are happening.
My understanding is that he was demonstrating a technique for how to bring the system to near supercriticality, without causing it. I.e. the objective was to look at the measurement devices they had and monitor them, and build an understanding of what the data was showing. This would then (in principle) be repeated by others with more specific objectives later.
Obviously they should've built a rig for that (at least), but I guess there was a "ain't nobody got time for that" attitude.
Right, but shouldn't distance be a critical part of such a measurement?
Like if we measure the amount of noise a device makes, we do it in a quiet room and at a standard distance. Without precision there's no useful data being generated.
So that's the part that I don't get. Shouldn't there be a screw being turned precise amounts, precisely made shims, or at least calipers be involved?
The honest truth is there's just a certain acceptable level of jank in a scientific lab.
Not everything needs to be measured to a high precision to be useful, and it's always a balance of how much effort you want to expend versus how useful that extra accuracy/precision is.
If all you care about is "when you're getting close to a critical mass, your instruments will look like this," you don't care that you have a wide swing in your data. You just want to show a difference from baseline.
Sometimes science doesn’t have to be precise to demonstrate a result.
Consider trying to measure feedback from a microphone and speaker. You don’t have to be an expert to know that there’s a quick change in system behavior when the microphone gets too close to the speaker.
If the goal is to collect precise data and use it after the experiment to draw conclusions, update a model, etc. then sure.
If the goal is to demonstrate to observers how the neutron output (reaction rate) increases as the reflectors are moved closer together over the source, then that isn't really necessary.
This seems more like an incredibly dangerous version of a demonstration you might see at an interactive science museum or a classroom. You don't need precise measurements to demonstrate the relationship between two phenomenon.
I think it was more about being able to understand/read what the measurement devices were showing. The exact distance probably wasn't as important as the criticality could also vary with other variables (e.g. geometry).
As in, you're trying to understand the situation as "shouldn't they have precisely nailed down all the parameters, if the goal is to measure when X starts happening". But it seems Slotin was more demonstrating "this is what you're going to see on the monitors when stuff is close to going boom". It wasn't about "this specific distance is a safe gap" and more "here's how you can tell whether the gap is safe".
He was about to be reassigned out of the lab, and was demonstrating equipment to his designated successors.
IMO the demon core incident resonates with people as kind of the ultimate case of "playing with fire". Humans have always played with fire, so we see the attraction, but also the dangers of it. It's a primitive behavior that's put us at risk, but also been the origin of most of our technology. The juxtaposition of a top nuclear weapons scientist taking such a "caveman" approach, playing with a new kind of "fire" that's millions of times more powerful, is poignant in the way it's absurd, but also relatable, sad & darkly funny.
Just about all humor derives from some degree of suffering. Compared what the core could have done, the three deaths from the accident are nothing. Even things that are joked about often have much higher death tolls like wars and natural disasters.
The author mentions 2019. That was the year that the "Demon Core Kun" videos were put on YouTube[0]. There's no mention of them in the article, which is a bit odd. I don't know if that was the first to "memeify" the demon core, but it certainly is one of the most popular memeifications, with each of the eight videos having somewhere between three to six million views.
This also would explain the relatively large presence of anime memes in particular, since the "main" meme is a series of Japanese animations.
EDIT: knowyourmeme.com actually has an article about the Demon Core and its popularity in Japan as a meme[1]. Apparently the latter predates the Demon Core Kun series by about a year at least. Still, the latter being on YT made it a lot more accessible to non-Japanese people which might explain the spike in meme popularity in 2019.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjjzx95hXRLvbVeHuE8fT...
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/demon-core
Twice bitten, three times shy. After the Slotin incident, prompt critical assemblies by hand were prohibited. Los Alamos then built a series of remotely operated critical assembly machines. There is a fair amount of open source literature on them, especially the "Godiva" series. Some of these machines have experienced criticality excursions that damaged the machine, but spared the biological organisms operating them by remote control.
Which reminds me, I can unfortunately not turn this up, but iirc at one of the national labs they've been working on dismantling a particular set of hot cells and iirc the whole thing has been stalled for a couple years trying to figure out how to do it. Sort of like a "demon hot cell".
Fun fact - if you eat the demon-core, at 124 trillion calories, it will provide enough energy for the rest of your life.
Which is the equivalent of ~4,000,000 gallons of gas, or 10,700,000,000 Tesla powerwalls.
Bear in mind, however, that some napkin math suggests that this is gross overkill, 2,250365100 = 82,135,000, suggesting that even a fairly long lived person only needs a mere 2,650 gallons of gas, or ~7,070 Tesla powerwalls, and that the demon-core can easily supply enough lifetime calories for a solid large city of ~1,500,000.
All 30 seconds of it.
I can count on the fingers of one hand, the number of times I've been to Chernobyl
Eight?
Close enough
You won't die in 30 seconds unless you shoot yourself in the head afterwards (which may be the preferable option).
Well plutonium metal aside from the radioactivity is actually poisonous, like most heavy metals. I wonder which would kill you first?
I still can’t believe that there exists rocks on this world that will make a room glow blue and kill everyone in the room if the rocks are brought close together.
Heavily processed rocks that very few nations can produce. A bit like your cpu is just sand, heavily processed sand
I likewise “can’t believe” we have CPUs. The two things are equally wild to me.
Sometimes i imagine how I would explain our current tech to someone clever and curious from the past. Like what would Jules Verne, Edison or John von Neumann do if you took your iphone out of your pocket and show them as you unlock it with your face, click youtube and search their name. (Just as an example of something super pedestrian and mundane which might just blow their minds.) We are trully living in an age of wonders.
Right? Also there are an awful lot more totally boring and simple things that “if brought together” make exciting stuff happen.
Sodium and Chlorine? Potassium and water?
> Heavily processed rocks that very few nations can produce.
“Are allowed to” is probably more accurate than “can”, given that the main constraint is other nations looking for signs that you are doing it and... reacting negatively if they see them.
Well, a determined individual could make a few grams a year, but they'd likely be told to stop early on by one of those few nations.
Honestly, we don't spend enough time feeling appropriately amazed at the processed sand we're using to communicate right now either.
"A computer is a rock we tricked into thinking."
It’s because “rocks” aren’t the fundamental nature of our reality. There are also ugly giant bags of mostly water posting comments in this very thread.
The alchemists are still with us, more powerful then they ever could have imagined.
Origin of the idea for the Loc-Nar?
Reminds me of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2115/
I'd argue Kyle Hill [0] should have been mentioned since his coverage appears instrumental in this trend.
Also, if you are so inclined, there are also Chernobyl memes [1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z497lu4t5XI
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQeC06SdicI
My spouse works in a nuclear research facility. Everytime they talk about radiation or something i make jokes from the HBO "Chernobyl" series like "3.6 Röntgen, not good, not terrible".
Some years ago i gifted them a snow globe for birthday, but not one with a snowman and white particles, but one with a little chernobyl plant and black particles. Their coworkers found it funny. It is still at their desk these days.
> but one with a little chernobyl plant and black particles.
Now I want one. Where did you buy it from if you don't mind me asking?
From Ukraine via eBay. It shipped within 2 weeks despite the ongoing war. It is apparently a popular tourist souvenir.
Nice! Here are some AI-generated images using your snow-globe description as a prompt:
https://imgur.com/a/q2fyCuP
It is very interesting that my comment above was downvoted!
No one wants to read someone else's AI generated stuff. We can all do this ourselves. It's like linking to a search result page.
Again, good to know.
Although, my AI-generation was a response to an interesting comment. You do not think readers are interested to see how the Chernobyl snow-globes look like?! (Looking at AI generated images or store links.)
But we wouldn't know what it looks like, we would only know what your AI thinks it looks like. So no, we're not interested in filling up our heads with vaguely related AI slop. If you had actually posted the store link that would be an entirely different question, which you've somehow tried to conflate with generated images.
It is wrong to assume/state that people do not want to see these AI-generated images. At this point, ≈40 people have seen that _hidden_ Imgur post.
I clicked on it at least twice and found it disgusting. If more people were like you, thinking this is a good idea, i would stop posting my IRL stories to the internet.
Sorry. If I knew you will have such a negative reaction I would have not posted my reply to your IRL story.
Please don't stop. I want to hear more about "said a meme to my wife."
How are the images any more or less disgusting than the original snowglobe itself?
> Although, my AI-generation was a response to an interesting comment.
Yes, that's why the comment it was in response to was not downvoted. But being interesting and HN-appropriate isn't something responses automatically inherent from their parent comment.
> You do not think readers are interested to see how the Chernobyl snow-globes look like?!
Actual Chernobyl snow globes... maybe a link to that would be appropriate.
AI hallucinations of what they might look like? Maybe if the context was a discussion of the capacities of different AI models and it was offered as a demonstration of the one that generated it, but not in the context it was presented, no.
Viewing this image has less value than someone reading the parent comment and imagining the snow globe for themselves.
I think this _is_ indeed interesting and also indicative of where AI art is going, unironically. People has much higher tolerance for human made low-effort memes.
For comedy one needs to subvert expectations, and this is why making light of grave events (Black Comedy) is a big phenomenon.
There are many examples from WW2 comedy to 9/11 memes. Sometimes the examples are more indirect, like in film: American Psycho, American Beauty, Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short, Fargo, Don't Look Up, Fight Club, Quentin Tarantino's stuff, etc. All of them deal with dark themes in a light way.
Given the prevalence of this in our culture, the author seems a bit surprised. Maybe they didn't connect it to dark comedy.
>Maybe they didn't connect it to dark comedy.
I think they made the connection to dark comedy:
>this somewhat kawaii rendering of the Slotin experiment, along with the “I love science” phrasing, was a form of dark humor.
And later
>Dark humor, in its own strange and inverted way, is arguably a sort of coping mechanism — a defense against the darkness, a way to tame and de-fang the horrors of the world.
Oh yeah. My bad. I maintain the author reads as surprised though.
Also Dr Strangelove... the subject matter doesn't get much darker but it is also quite hilarious.
Strangelove is funny because it was true. Serious people really were doing studies on how to survive a nuclear war.
But just as in the movie it was politicians who weren't down with it. On both sides. Khrushchev was removed when his colleagues figured out just how close he got them to WW3.
Many argue the basis for true comedy is dealing with fear, rejection, and embarrassment...
With Thermonuclear War: no one is around to experience anything after a comedian bombs on the world stage.
Stanley Kubrick was famous for making actors miserable, but reminded us film is ultimately a collaborative art form. =3
Yeah, in spite of the author's claims to not want to be the humor police, this really just reads as someone who takes their work as a historian of nuclear weapons 'very seriously' and doesn't want it to be joked about. The SNL joke he identified as being particularly offensive ("Having received the Novel Peace Prize, the survivors of the nuclear bombings called the award the second biggest surprise of their lives") is ... pretty anodyne? It's not making fun of the survivors or glorifying cruelty, it's just contrasting the banal things people say when receiving awards with the extreme reality of having endured one of the most awful events in human history. That kind of juxtaposition is pretty par for the course in comedy, let alone dark comedy. And when it comes to engaging with the reality of awful events, not everyone wants to or has the capacity to treat them with the grave solemnity the author seems to expect.
IIRC John Cleese has a talk from years ago where he makes a very interesting point that seriousness and solemnity are two very different things.
In his opinion, killing humor is the same as killing creativity and killing creativity is the same as inviting disaster and/or failure for the sake of your ego.
Not being solemn is not the same as not being serious.
I think your last sentence there really is the right take away here. But even more than that, I think the right way to prevent future tragedies is with humor not solemnity.
It's pretty funny to see so many anime memes when you consider that demoncore was originally planned as the third bomb for japan.
As Shaw said, “Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”
Things can be, and often are, both at the same time.
Remember learning about this from the crossover with fake "bowling alley animations" like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q6MQwsJCA4
The first time I saw the Demon Core as a "meme" is from the Japanese creator からめる, a person most known for short absurdist humor animations.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6ZIjbX1gj88
I'm not sure if this is the genesis of the demon core meme (probably not), but it definitely came fairly early on.
If anyone is interested, there are more animations like this e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNZnfbl_Z7M , https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Od_RTVirPCo , https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Eyl3WQCttQ8 . Sadly I see english subtitles only in the last one.
If you scroll far enough in the comments of most of からめる's videos, there will almost always be a English-translated transcript somewhere. Of course, in many cases you barely need them, since most of their videos don't really need much explanation, or maybe more accurately, utterly defy attempts at being explained.
I feel like this had to emerge on 2ch. The mix of cute/death is very much that community.
I was going to comment that I'm disappointed there is no mention of Demon core-kun.
I really liked this telling of the story with illustrations: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230719-the-blue-flash-l...
Azumanga Daioh mentioned :)
I like the pun on “hot girl stuff” https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/hot.html
> So perhaps if anybody has a “right” to make jokes in poor taste about the “Demon Core”… it might be the Japanese?
> I’m not here to be the humor police, or to say things should be “off limits” for comedy, or that it’s “too soon,” or make any other scolding noises. Dark humor, in its own strange and inverted way, is arguably a sort of coping mechanism — a defense against the darkness, a way to tame and de-fang the horrors of the world.
I am always of the opinion that as long as the joke lands with the audience or does what the teller intended, it's a good joke. Comedy is about a give and take between the comedian/artist/whatever and their audience.
The problem arises when people think they are an intended audience when they are not (the pope going to a Bill Hicks show), or when a comedian thinks that they're in front of their intended audience when they are not (a conservative comic at the Appolo). A lot of people need to learn this on both sides, and more importantly need to stop complaining when they come to this realization.
There's also this one from last year:
https://old.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/comments/12x9rxi/the...
Based on The Ol' Spicy Keychain:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-ol-spicy-keychain
I had never heard of this story. What an absolutely horrible way to die. Not only do you have ample time to suffer with the knowledge of your impending death, but you get to do so in agony the whole time. I wouldn't wish that upon anyone.
No mention of the earlier XKCD mentioning the demon core? It's what set in motion my particular interest in nuclear accidents.
I don't agree with the author's analysis here. I think the demon core is simply memorable. It has a scary name and the beryllium sphere is iconic in a way the Kelley and SL-1 accidents simply aren't.
https://xkcd.com/1242/
What's the Helvetica Scenario? Just a joke? I know all the other ones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y-yKmzP-4U
A bit from Look Around You, a (fantastic) British comedy show made to look like retro science classroom educational videos, from the minds of Peter Serafinowicz and Robert Popper
Explain XKCD to the rescue: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1242:_Scary_Names
As per Aquinas, every joke is a disguised form of sadness. You can only laugh at something that is sad.
My favourite one is the flail with the demon core attached to it. Memes aside, I find it fascinating how absurd was thinking that experiment was a good idea
Mine is the cup-and-ball style toy.
They didn't include my favorite example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymbal-banging_monkey_toy
Memes are fun. Crossover memes doubly so. There's no need to overanalyze.
The front page of hacker news is not where I expected to see Gura fanart today.
Let me tell you about 9/11 memes…
Didn’t read it, just went for the memes. The kinder surprise one is absolute genius!
The "Demon Core kun" short anime series on YouTube is the most hilarious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZIjbX1gj88
Im on the internet a ton. Very familiar with the two horrible nuclear research accidents that occurred around this time. Never once seen these meme.
Also, I love how the author tries to argue for who should be allowed to make the joke, like there is some arbiter who can tell you “oh you don’t fall into that group so you are not allowed to make that joke.”
9999 vip
What is going on here? I am not exceptionally well-versed in anime or manga tropes, but I think the “obvious” reading of this is a classic case of “unexpected juxtaposition creates humor.” That is, moving something from one context (“Demon Core,” radiation experiment, horrible death) into another (cute, anime, girls) creates something that feels novel and unusual
Ah, sir, I guess you’re completely unfamiliar with anime tropes. From absurd brutality to dark drama (much worse than your Titanic Ending and Futurama Dog), everything can be found in anime. Thinking that these are cute animations for teens and children is a big mistake. I, a grown up adult, usually dread when an anime plot is too nice to its actors and think if I want to watch it further. This juxtaposition is well-expected.
There's a lot of light and fluffy fare in anime. Even back in the 90s when I was used to sex, violence, drama, and strong character lore in my anime, I discovered You're Under Arrest and was a bit surprised to discover that it pretty much went nowhere, just an episodic series full of funny things for the characters to do. Especially surprising for a show about police officers, which in American media usually means it's a "procedural" with particularly dangerous criminals and high stakes. But in YUA the officers mainly deal with petty criminals and get up to wacky hijinks. More recent series, like Azumanga Daioh and Lucky Star, are pretty much just schoolgirls doing cute things. And maybe that's just the energy you need sometimes rather than, say, the horror and drama of Attack On Titan.
To paraphrase Brad Bird, anime is not a genre. It's a broad art form that encompasses all genres. This is a common mistake for Western viewers of anime; even in the 90s it was marketed to us as being all dark, twisted Liquid Television stuff. But yeah, actually, most anime is created for and marketed to kids and teens. In Japan, if you're an adult consumer of anime, your peers may wonder what the hell is wrong with you and why won't you grow up. (Manga is different; plenty of manga are produced for adult consumption, and these are fairly serious in tone, and may lack the fantastic settings or big-eyed character designs Westerners associate with the medium.) Adult anime otaku in Japan are viewed with the same bemusement and contempt we might have for, say, the grown-ass men who are fans of My Little Pony. This may have changed more recently, as the Japanese government has leaned into the idea of anime and manga being important cultural exports through its "Cool Japan" publicity program.
Part of the reason why we slowed down in our progress in science is that we do not take risks like that anymore.
Now the risk takers are at private companies.
Would science have progressed more slowly if they had spent a few hours building a decent rig for that that can't slip like a screwdriver instead of losing a scientist?
Yes, but not in the way you're implying. Safety measures don't exist in a vacuum, they exist in a whole system of other similar safety measures. In aggregate, this system of safety measures does slow science down (or anything else). One might argue that it's worth it to slow down output for the sake of safety, but I don't think one can reasonably argue that output doesn't slow down.
It is possible to construct a system of safety measures so absolute that almost no work can get done, and it is possible (in a sufficiently dangerous field) to be so reckless that injuries to and deaths of would-be contributors stymie progress. Even ignoring the value of avoiding death and injury for its own sake, it is likely that optimal productivity lies somewhere in between.
What? We're making incredible progress. mRNA vaccines, CRISPR, access to space research, materials sciences, the upcoming AI-driven research boom. It's crazy out there, and as a bonus, we're not irradiating anyone due to clumsy screwdriver techniques.
Stop paying attention to whatever source is leading you to believe scientific progress has slowed down. They're lying to you.
I am professional scientist. I am not allowed to use certain substances, because exposure is damaging to the unborn child. I am a man. I am not allowed to perform certain procedures, unless I rebuild half the lab. I am not allowed to use lasers you can buy as costumer products in the US and china unless I write a safety manual .
Innovation needs creativity and fast iterations, in our current setup that is incredible hard.
MRNA tech is a good example: It was stuck in limbo for ages due to safety concerns, COVID allowed people to ignore these and push forward.
Costumers need the fancy gear for their mad scientists costumes.