Johanna Faust, a mixed race Jew, prefers to publish pseudonymously. She is committed: first, to preventing war, ecological disaster, and nuclear apocalypse; last to not only fighting for personal privacy & the freedom of information, but, by representing herself as a soldier in that fight, to exhorting others to do the same. She is a poet, always. All these efforts find representation here: "ah, Mephistophelis" is so named after the last line of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, whose heretical success flouted the censor for a time.

March 28, 2011 Radiation Spike Mystery Solved


"A Boy and his Destiny, or, William Lucas Prepares To Give A Paper"
a faustian image manipulation
copyleft 2013



Remember those incredibly high radiation readings, luckily captured by screenshot, for the 28th of March?





Residents in and around Alabama are becoming quite uneasy with the most recent radiation level readings produced by the Rad network as they fear nuclear rain from the Japan – Fukushima crisis has hit U.S. soil. According to the Rad Network, anything over 100 CPM is cause for alert and today in northern Alabama, the radiation level hit 175! Now before you think the world is going to end or that you are going to die if you live in Alabama, you won’t. The radiation levels may be cause for an alert they are not high enough to kill anyone…yet. More than likely, the high radiation levels have nothing to do with Japan or the Fukushima disaster. Don’t go planning any doomsday parties as this is probably the result of a faulty reading. [I have included a screenshot of when the radiation levels were at 160 in Alabama]

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Mystery solved in full. 

It seems a certain bright young man, having just opted for a Geiger counter for Christmas, and having just signed up to be part of the crowd sourced Radiation Network, found his hands full after 3/11.  Then one day -- the 28th to be exact -- the readings went so nuts that Suits showed up at his house.  They took his piece of the network offline, but not before his father had had a chance to save the data.

And this incredibly smart young man did not stop there: he deduced that the readings came from the heavens -- a gamma ray burst -- and wrote to the British Interplanetary Society to see if he was right, only to find that he had discovered the burst himself.

No, really.

“We called British Interplanetary Society and they said ‘Oh this looks like your first,’" said Diana.

The 13 year-old had detected a Gamma Ray burst originating from a black hole 3.8 billion light years away from Earth and he was the first to do it.

"I just feel very happy that I was the first person to discover something," said the now 15 year-old, "but if it was anywhere closer to Earth we would be dead right now,” he continued.

His findings were verified; the burst was traced to the Draco Constellation and cataloged as 110328A. William calls it the Draco Kill Shot. He was later asked to speak before the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop. Diana says luck had a little to do with his accomplishment, but only a little.

“He had to work to develop it and that's what I’m really proud about as a mother."

The Draco Kill Shot is considered to be the longest lasting Gamma Ray burst ever observed.
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This, if I am not mistaken, explains this:



Read more here.




And so there you have it: background sources  here and here and here -- h/t to Energy News.


Be seeing you.