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

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.

The nit is that the change observed was not development?

My nit is that we don't actually have evidence supporting the idea that it stops at or around 25. As far as I know, the brain continues to have observable changes throughout your life.

(The person I replied to didn't make this claim directly, but it's an oft-cited myth that it seemed like they were referencing.)

> As far as I know, the brain continues to have observable changes throughout your life.

That would imply that people might retain the ability to form memories past the age of 25, though.

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.

Yes, but it still requires higher temperature than cigarette can deliver.

Also should be clarified that only vapors of gasoline can be ignited - it can't mix with oxygen in non-gas form.

Sure, but most people light their cigarettes with a match or lighter and those have no problem igniting gasoline.

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

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.

That makes this even more funny. Next you'll be telling me it was his daughter's birthday.

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?

Oi you guys, quit confusing my favorite animes with one another! Also Hakase would never do that but Tomo absolutely would. @#$

Hakase would absolutely give Nano a demon core accessory which Nano would have to fuss about keeping properly seperated the whole day at school(Mai being the only one who can tell what it is, though not speaking up).

In the evening, Nano and Sakamoto-San would convince Hakase to defuse it, but in the last second Nano accidentally slips and the core goes supercritical with an enormous flash of blue light.

The light subsides, revealing it was just an elaborate device to make the perfect runny egg.

"The Shinonome household passed another peaceful day."

One of the example memes in the article is Osaka, which may have added to the confusion.

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?

As per their profile I’m sure it’s the hidden Hacker News agenda at work

Stick to the site's guidelines, Sajaar.

Unhappily the era of whinging about victimization and virtue signaling has persisted

The terrible consequences are definitely an implied part of the meme, otherwise it's just someone messing about with some pieces of metal and screwdriver and isn't funny at all.

>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]

  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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#Slotin's_death

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.

> or rabies

Rabies is actually a great comparison. It has similar magical/horrifying feel to it. Like with the screwdriver slip-up, catching rabies can look like a total non-event; here, it doesn't kill you yet, merely starts the timer on a bomb. The countdown can be anything between days and years, and when it runs out - when the first symptoms start showing - you're already dead. Then the dying happens, which... relative to radiation sickness, I'm really not sure which is better.

To add an insult to injury, rabies is very much curable before the symptoms show - but you have to realize you may have been exposed in the first place.

It also reminds me of the horrible stories that exist on the Internet about people committing suicide by means of a paracetamol overdose (usually with a lot of alcohol as well).

They are found, rushed to the hospital, they wake up and feel better, everybody can meet them and see them alive and know of their attempt -- but they're walking dead, their liver is incurably damaged and they die in a few days.

That's also exactly how some poisonous mushrooms kill you, which I mentioned earlier. You become seriously ill for a bit and you recover, but your liver is already destroyed and you die a few days later. The only way to save you is for someone to think to test for that and to get you a transplant before then, so practically impossible.

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%91-Amanitin#Symptoms_of_po...

> suicide by means of a paracetamol overdose (usually with a lot of alcohol as well)

In his final days, my dad, dying from leukemia in home hospice care, had been getting his calories entirely from a cocktail of beer and V-8 juice — and taking a lot of acetaminophen (aka paracetamol, the generic of Tylenol) for the pain. As I brought him his latest "meal," I warned him that too much alcohol and acetaminophen would wreck his liver and kill him. He brightened and asked whether that'd be a way for him to end it. I said I didn't know the details but that as far as I knew it'd take days and be even worse than what he was experiencing. (He died the next day, 15 years ago yesterday.)

But actually there are tons of visual jokes about people looking down the barrels of loaded guns, cannon, even lightsabers:

https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/1hy7fu/never_look...

I didn’t think of it this way before, but yeah, the demon core memes are absolutely cousins of this type of loaded weapon humor.

What they said is that it wouldn't have the same appeal, which is true. Someone shooting themselves by looking into the barrel of a gun as a joke is funny because it's a really obviously stupid thing to do. Luke lightsabering himself in the eye is funny first due to shock value, and second as a form of observational humor by pointing out how even though lightsabers are so obviously dangerous, there's not a single mishap where someone maims themselves with their own weapon in the movies.

Someone playing with a screwdriver and a few pieces of various metals is funny because its danger is unintuitive. It's so strange that someone can mishandle such seemingly innocuous objects and then die a few days later because of it, that it's comical. It's a non sequitur.

Weren't the Jedis actual wizards, and others were forbidden from wielding that weapon exactly because someone would get maimed? The weapon is tech but the reason they don't damage themselves is clearly spelled out magic.

Well, Luke wasn't a Jedi when he was first handling it, and Obi Wan didn't seem to mind at all giving such a dangerous object to a completely untrained person. Hell, he didn't even tell him which side to point away from himself.

Obi Wan knew who is it. He said "It's your father's" when he handed it to him.

Reminds me of "Do not look into laser with remaining eye"

> This is unlike basically every other form of death.

It's unlike many deaths. But there are plenty more that share that quality.

> Wetterhahn would recall that she had spilled several drops of dimethylmercury from the tip of a pipette onto her latex-gloved hand.

> Approximately three months after the initial accident Wetterhahn began experiencing brief episodes of abdominal discomfort and noticed significant weight loss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn

That onset reminds me of a children's book about postwar Japan, in which a little girl is running around on the playground and falls down. This extremely ordinary event is treated as an emergency, and it turns out to be one.

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.

This was the United States in the mid 1940s, I doubt euthanasia (or even assisted suicide) was much of a thing back then. Plus, as someone else mentioned, there was also the scientifical aspect of being able to study the effects of irradiation.

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.

Are you sure that's not a JIS screw?

This particular core didn't go to Japan.

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.

That's something that seems to be missing from how people perceive the threat of nuclear weapons. It's pleasant and convenient to believe you'll instantaneously combust in a fireball as hot as the sun, but actually only very few people will be so lucky. Mostly it'll take days, weeks, months, and years. Not seconds or fractions of seconds.

Same with accidents involving nuclear power generators (and their waste). Most people on HN won't have the chance to engage in Slotin's flavor of bravado... But the kind involved in recklessly, breathlessly advocating for nuclear power? Quite common, here.

People gave their lives so Chernobyl didn’t destroy every well in Eastern Europe for a thousand years.

I have operated a nuclear reactor. There is nothing in common with this tragic experiment. We have strict procedures that are rigidly followed, and are at all times far, far away from fissile material. We don’t suffer bravado.

And when we build dozens more, to cover the capacity nuclear pushers assure us that actual green energy can't? Chernobyl happened. Fukushima happened. Three Mile Island (almost) happened. That's an incident on almost every continent with more than one large reactor. You absolutely suffer bravado, and it's not isolated by culture or geography; it's bravado that's baked into the widespread use of the technology itself. To lack bravado would be to accept that human civilization, in this stage of development, is incapable of responsibly utilizing nuclear power generation at-scale.

Cost vs benefit. Nuclear power has less deaths per kWh than any other source, including wind and solar. Flying is safer than driving by orders of magnitude, but a scary high profile plane crash effects people more than mundane everyday car crashes. Saying to stop using a lower risk option because you are personally more scared of it isn’t exactly a compelling argument.

what? how do you measure deaths per kWh for solar power and get anything above background noise?

People fall installing the panels

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Chernobyl happened because they didn’t have enough spare capacity in the grid to allow the more experienced day shift to do a spin down test, and instead of moving the test or ensuring the right people were on site overnight, they let the inexperienced night shift run the test. This, because management didn’t want to look bad, and they didn’t listen to the engineers.

Fukushima happened because their backup generators flooded and couldn’t provide emergency power to remove decay heat. They flooded because management didn’t listen to the engineers who spec’d a much higher (and more expensive) sea wall.

Three Mile Island can’t be blamed on management in the same way, but indirectly in that they allowed a culture of accepting defects to fester. Operators had so many inoperable or inaccurate alarms and meters that they were initially unaware of any problems, and then they didn’t trust / believe the readings they saw.

Nuclear power, when built and operated correctly, with strict procedural compliance, is incredibly safe. The U.S. Navy has over 7500 reactor-years of safe operation spanning over 75 years, with zero reactor accidents.

I am all for wind and solar where it’s feasible, but you simply cannot beat the density of nuclear fuel, nor its ability to provide 100% base load day in and day out. If you want sustainable green energy (and I do), it must involve nuclear power; fossil fuel plants cannot be replaced by anything else we currently know of.

Reactor accidents will happen with enough reactors. And Chernobyl and Fukushima show that the consequences can be quite severe. Fukushima had "luck" that there was a lot of water involved, which is a decent radiation absorber. We also know that radiation doesn't disperse homogenously, so it could just enrich the food chain at specific points, probably without us noticing.

And there have been incidents on nuclear subs as well.

This is not against using nuclear power, but you should not downplay the risks. Because if something happens, the consequences can be devastating. There is also the problem with nuclear waste, which isn't really solved either.

>Nuclear power, when built and operated correctly, with strict procedural compliance, is incredibly safe. The U.S. Navy has over 7500 reactor-years of safe operation spanning over 75 years, with zero reactor accidents.

What this says to me is that it's unfeasible at-scale unless it's a nationalized venture administered by a workforce with literal military discipline.

This is Soviet propaganda. The real number from Nagasaki and Hiroshima was about half of the casualties were instant. Furthermore fallout is much more understood: after a few short days of hiding inside, the radiation levels will have fallen to where normal life can largely resume without fear, reducing the number of slow casualties.

In Scandinavia we're still sending samples of hunted wild boars to check for cesium. Large parts of Belarus are quite contaminated and the local tyrant is the reason we know very little about how it affects the population in those regions.

Do you have any sources to back these claims? Also, what specifically do you mean by "half the casualties were instant"--is it that "of those who died, half of them died instantly" or "of those killed and injured, half of them received their injuries instantly". Or is it some other thing?

I think you're falling into exactly the sort of trap I was talking about, that the enormity of the devastation is so unimaginably great that it's difficult to imagine what it would actually be like, and to (somewhat lazily) conclude "well, it'd probably be instantaneous". But, for example, this analysis doesn't support that idea at all: https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/counting-the-dead-at-hiroshi...

Your source says "most died on the day of the attacks, and all within a few months". Your source also says that cancer rates are not as high as commonly believed.

Right, so not instantaneous? Or is this also "soviet propaganda"?

As instantaneous as arial bombing generally.

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.

Time is also money, and it is claimed to be the root (square or cube?) of all evil. We’re halfway to a mathematical proof of some sort.

The OG source says that love of money is the root of all evil.

I don't know what's the correct way of extracting the love operator from under the square root.

Love of money would be parameterized by the lover, without loss of generality we can call it L_p($). This would be equal to the sqrt(Evil), so L_p($)^2 is Evil.

I don't know if it is a differential equation or a simple relation. Does having more money (or less love) have a linear or non-linear relationship with its codomain (in terms of the number of p)?

I wouldn't joke about a nuclear bomb, but a nuclear scientist who died because of messing with that stuff?

It doesn't sound like you really do disagree with the author at all. I never had the sense that he was trying to shame anyone. In fact he almost exactly echoes your 2nd paragraph:

> 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.

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 can't help but feel like this (completely overlooked) facet played a part in the humor for its original audience. From a certain point of view, he was 1 more casualty of a weapon that went on to kill 150-240k people thereafter. Live by the sword, etc.

>he was 1 more casualty of a weapon that went on to kill 150-240k people thereafter. Live by the sword, etc.

The Slotin incident happened in 1946, after WW2 had ended.

OP was referencing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The total deaths from those two atomic bombs is estimated at 150-240k.

I wonder how much of that is all the WWII vets being gone and not being able to hear their thankfulness at not having to invade Japan the hard way (after what happened on Iwo Jima and Okinawa).

Those bombs and the "Operation Meetinghouse" firebombing of Tokyo was mostly directed at civilian targets. The subsequent invasion and occupation is unlikely to have been harder to perform without it.

More important is that physically dangerous workplaces have mostly been written out of popular culture over the past half-century.

Vs. if your day job routinely involves high voltages, roofing, heavy equipment, or other "one stupid slip, and your life is effectively over" situations, then you have a rather different outlook on this.

Yup, I was in one of those situations. Working for a building renovation contractor who I liked and respected, we'd done several jobs on roofs, but low flat porch roofs, maybe 10' up. No problem. This one project was on a barn where the low edge of the roof was probably 30' up (vertically) and the peak 50', and it was pretty steep. I felt this was not a good place to free-solo and try to work at the same time. I asked about getting some way to rope in, and he had nothing. I told him I regretfully had to quit at the morning break.

Despite having been in all kinds of alpine rock climbing and international downhill ski racing competition experience, or perhaps because of it, that was just a hard NOPE. I think it was just the intense awareness that, once a slip starts, there was no recovering or stopping before the ground. The weird thing is just how totally casual he was about it, even seeming to think my question about protection was a bit odd.

I'm just damn fortunate to have the option, especially considering the statistics for roofing work.

Traditional barns are damn dangerous. My family's old (1 1/2-ish centuries ago) wisdom about community barn-raisings is that you'll average one worker killed or permanently disabled per barn that is raised.

WOW, I did not know that.

It always seemed barn raising events were a very effective and efficient way to build community infrastructure. But a death or crippling per barn is a damn high cost in blood!

If one wants to ignore that German scientists were working on the bomb as well, and the American scientists just had more resources to pull it off first.