Talk:3037: Radon
The sun is a white star. It looks yellow from within the atmosphere because blue light is scattered out of it, the same reason the sky is blue. How did physicist Randall not know that? Nitpicking (talk) 20:26, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- Randall is almost certainly a Superman fan, and we all know that Kryptonians get their powers from yellow suns. Barmar (talk) 21:07, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- Wikipedia disagrees; The Sun is a G-type main-sequence star (G2V), informally called a yellow dwarf, though its light is actually white. It formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of matter within a region of a large molecular cloud. 172.71.23.87 20:43, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- Your quote agrees with me. As @Starstar says below, it might be intentional on his part. Nitpicking (talk) 20:53, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- No "his quote" doesn't?? (Unless I'm understanding your meaning with "his quote") Yes the sun is White. HOWEVER, it is NOT called a "white star". Stars aren't categorized by color but by tempeture. Which I mean I guess it sorta means their catagorized by color but thats being nitpicky. Our sun is 5,772 K, which according to wikipedia means its a class-G star which is known by the not nerds as a yellow dwarf. Being a physicist means Randell is VERY aware of the category of our Sun. Repeat, the Sun is called a "yellow dwarf", therefore is Ponytail said "white star", she'd be talking about a star that is 9000 K and therfor NOT our Sun. Seriously this was like a 5 minute google search. Apollo11 (talk) 21:01, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- At any rate, I believe it plays into Ponytail just goofing around more than being precise Starstar (talk) 22:12, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- Your quote agrees with me. As @Starstar says below, it might be intentional on his part. Nitpicking (talk) 20:53, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- Perhaps it is intentional? Starstar (talk) 20:36, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
Possible trivia: The effect used in the title text for "²³⁸Umbrella" does NOT use html formatting. It uses unicode for the almost-but-not-technically superscripted "238" before "Umbrella." On some systems, this renders with the "23" being larger than and slightly below the level of the "8". Whether Randall knew of this effect or not is a mystery. If he did know, his motivations are a mystery. Maybe the 8 is radioactive and emitted a non-massless particle, thereby making it smaller (less mass != less volume, but go with it here) and more buoyant (less weight) in the presence of the adjacent characters. 198.41.227.105 21:19, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- You can't use HTML markup in the title attribute, so there's no other way to do super/sub-scripting there. He could have used JavaScript to emulate the title attribute, though. Barmar (talk) 21:38, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
What do people think of Hairstylist Wannabe's near-total rewrite of the explanation? While they added lots of technical details about radon, I think they missed much of the humor. Ponytail's comments are typical of the kind of things a home inspector or repair person will say to the owner, not really "flippant". Barmar (talk) 21:48, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- I like the facts but i changed the joke explantion back. Apollo11 (talk) 22:07, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- The rewrite has waaaaay too much detail. This site is for explaining what's going on in a comic, not repeating everything you know that's related, however remotely, to the comic. Just add wikilinks to things! Like, do we really need to have repeated here how much 238U the Earth contains? How much radiation one experiences from uranium? I vote to remove a lot of the detail and just explain the comic. DKMell (talk) 23:45, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
Possible trivia: 238 Umbrella is a common weight for a patio umbrella stand. -- TallJason (talk) 22:53, 13 January 2025 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
I started to write another paragraph:
- The primary reason why the radon is considered more deadly than the original uranium (and thorium) is its nature as a heavy gas; the earlier states of decay remain stuck in the original rock, interstitially, whereas radon more freely leaches out. This quickly disperses to extremely diluted levels in the open air but, being a gas that is denser than air, it can accumulate to low (but potentially significant) levels in a cellar or basement, having few natural air-currents to drive the heavier gas atoms out of the sump in which the radon sits. Although each atom does not last long in this state, the resulting polonium, bismuth or lead atoms (all being isotopes that are themselves radioactive) can find themselves drifting as dust particles initially (and, after settling, easily disturbed), with the potential
...but it got out of hand. Was going to edit it down (and correct anything I'd accidentally mispoken/misedited/ispunctuated, in the initial fervour) when I'd finished, but I've got to go somewhere, so leaving it as possible inspiration for someone else to use/ignore/tear part/whatever. Have fun. 172.68.205.92 23:50, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
- "possible inspiration for someone else" Good stuff, but surely it already exists (without xkcd context) many other places? Can be just linked? PRR (talk) 02:33, 14 January 2025 (UTC)
I thought, the title text was a reference to nuclear umbrella. 172.68.50.200 07:45, 14 January 2025 (UTC)
"This process will render the Earth uninhabitable for humans within approximately 5 billion years." That seems very optimistic. Isn't it more like 1 billion years? --Coconut Galaxy (talk) 10:05, 14 January 2025 (UTC)
- Yes the Earth will become uninhabitable in close to but less than a billion years. But not because the sun is expanding at the end of it's life. But because it gets hotter and begins to strip the Earths atmosphere, and this also means the end of the oceans. When they are gone, complicated life forms should not be possible. Bacteria could live until the sun possibly engulfs the Earth (it is not certain if this will happen though.) --Kynde (talk) 12:22, 14 January 2025 (UTC)
This comic sparked a tangentially related discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Chemistry#Radon and Radium spectral lines, leading to the discovery that the spectra given on Wikipedia for multiple chemical elements (including Radon) had been wrong since 2013 -- the result of a bug in a 15-year-old Matlab plugin. Rexon Mobile (talk) 17:03, 14 January 2025 (UTC)
I'm removing th[e] paragraph [on radiation dose] entirely, since it's wildly incorrect and adding negative value; I may or may not have time to add a more accurate discussion later, if someone else hasn't done so first:
The actual amount of uranium experienced
You're actually talking about the total background radiation exposure, not specifically radiation from uranium (and one wouldn't normally describe exposure to radiation from uranium as "experiencing uranium" in any event).
in any given environment,
No, on average across all individuals, in all environments; the amount of background radiation exposure will be much higher in some environments than in others.
according to Randall's own Radiation chart, is 10 microsieverts worth of radiation, on average,
Across all individuals.
over a year
Over a day. It literally says that in the entry in the chart.
the amount in one's body,
The amount of radiation exposure due to potassium decay within one's body.
in contrast, is about 390 microsievert over that same timeframe,
No, that one actually is per year.
again on average. The lowest dose linked to any serious risk is in the millisievert range, over thousands of times stronger than any of these sources. Thus the radiation from radon buildup in a normal house is not of concern,
No, the average amount of radiation exposure per individual -- averaged across the entire population, who vary wildly in not only the uranium content of the local soil, but also the characteristics of their basements, and even in whether they have a basement at all -- is not a concern. There are plenty of "normal" houses in which the radiation from radon buildup is a concern; there are just also plenty of other "normal" houses in which it is not.
as long as it is properly managed in time. Instead it is radon's toxicity that is the problem, both from the radon itself and its "daughter" isotopes, that poses a danger to humans.
This is absolutely false. Radon and its daughter products are dangerous to humans precisely because of the ionizing radiation they emit, which has a tendency to produce lung cancer when decay occurs within the lungs (in the inhaled air for radon itself, or attached to floating dust particles for daughter isotopes). Radon itself isn't poisonous in a chemical sense at all -- as a noble gas, it doesn't react with other substances under normal conditions. Some of the daughter products are chemically poisonous, but are still far more dangerous for their radioactivity than for their chemical properties (e.g., lead-214 is far more dangerous than a similar quantity of any of the stable lead isotopes (206, 207, and 208)).172.70.127.191 20:35, 14 January 2025 (UTC)
I think the title text has umbrella and cover because umbrellas cover things. -- Awesome person (talk) 20:47, 15 January 2025 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
