It’s like it’s still the Cold War, and everyone is afraid of abrupt nuclear explosions and slow death by radiation. People associate “radiation” and “nuclear” with “bomb”, because the only time anything relating to these terms is reported in the news, it is about something bad. Usually either an explosion, or a poisoning.

The recent situation at Fukushima in Japan gave reporters both, of course, which I’m sure they loved. Why, this hysteria practically creates itself*.

*It doesn’t.

As did Chernobyl, although back then, there was no 24 hour rolling news to keep the hysteria level up. Chernobyl is particularly interesting, and I’d encourage anyone to read up on it, there’s plenty of material around the web to start with. What’s most interesting to know, though, is that people seem to constantly expect nuclear-related things to explode, when in fact they just can’t or won’t. Chernobyl was a steam explosion, not a nuclear explosion. Fukushima was some loose hydrogen igniting. The real risk is a leak of radiation, which news agencies also misreport as being lethal/non-lethal, without mentioning the time factor. A lethal dose is only a lethal dose after a certain amount of time. Jamming your hand in a fire for half a second is nothing like as bad as leaving it in there for an hour.

And so to today’s news of a Swedish man attempting to build a nuclear reactor in his house. Here are two of the questions the BBC interviewer asked:

“But the difficulty is, if you had achieved your aim of splitting the atom, you would have killed yourself in the process, wouldn’t you?”

“Do you live with anybody else, any neighbours that could have been affected if you had managed to create this explosion?”

Yes, if it’s nuclear, it has to be about explosions and death. Even if you don’t know much about the topic, the clue is in what he was was arrested for: possessing nuclear material, not trying to cause an explosion.

Germany’s government, a country whose nuclear reactors are at, shall we say, a lesser risk of an earthquake and tsunami, has decided that it’s now too risky to have nuclear power at all. Build them right, Germany, and you’ll be fine. Additionally, is coal pollution somehow risk-free? No problem there? Doesn’t matter, because news-fuelled nuclear hysteria can take hold at any time, and it can lose your government precious votes if you aren’t seen to be having a knee-jerk reaction.

Also, because I’m me, this totally reminded me of that episode of Stargate SG-1 where some guy builds a stargate in Sam’s basement out of bits of old toasters and stuff ordered off the internet.

I’m fascinated by things that are, to be fair, quite dull. Usually, these things are related to old-school computing or lack of it. I’m intrigued by ingenuity of people who had to solve problems that simply don’t exist today. Here’s an example.

Turn away now if you are in any way cool. You won’t be after you’ve read this.

These days, you can create anything you like on a desktop PC with a 3d graphics package. Back in the indistinct period of time known as “the day”, it wasn’t so easy. Various tricks had to be used, be it miniatures or combining simple computer generated effects to give the illusion of something much more complex than it was.

The BBC, during continuity announcements, used one of these before 1985:

It’s a camera that points at various panels that hold mechanical versions of the BBC world (top left of the picture), the clock, various “techinical difficulties” captions (bottom) and the school’s programmes countdown clock. You may remember that one if you went to school at any point in the 80s.

Here’s another look at the mechanical globe.

It had mirrors and lights around it meaning that after a bit of video colouring it came out looking like this:

In 1985, a computer generated title card was created to replace this. How, in 1985, did they created such a smooth, antialiased bit of CG when my BBC Micro outputted pixels the size of a baby’s fist. Was this really a fully rendered, shaded and textured globe?

Nope.

Here it is:

For anyone too young to remember, the globe spun.

The images is made up of three components. The sea is a single shaded circle, and the land is another shaded circle, both drawn on a Quantel system. Data is then read from a rack of EEPROM chips for each frame, telling the video hardware which bits of the gold globe to render, and which bits of the blue globe to not render. This means that only two full colour frames are stored (the “BBC1” text was part of the blue globe’s frame) and the rest is smaller chunks of data read in for each frame. There was data for 600 frames. Some compression was used, meaning the two full frames were 600KB each, and each frame of land mass data was just 7KB. All this was placed into a single metal box with a switch. The switch triggered the “SUBTITLES 888” text to appear under the “BBC1” text. The BBC also had to produce versions of these boxes for each region, so that on regional programs, the correct regional identifier appeared beneath “BBC1” (ie “Northern Ireland”, “East Midlands”.

In all, 6000 EEPROM chips had to be sourced and filled with data, for which the BBC used a VAX-11.

There’s a few more pictures of the hardware, some test output and links to some further, more technical reading here.