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.