I’ve got an infrared thermometer, and I’m not afraid to use it.
Brian should be terrified.
Should we explain to him that:
- I think he meant “neurons”, not “neutrons”. Neither are destroyed by an infrared thermometer.
- While many infrared thermometers have a laser to identify the spot being measured, it’s low intensity and doesn’t penetrate the skin. Or the bones of the cranium. Or the brain, or “brian”.
- They work by measuring the infrared radiation emitted by your skin. Not by zapping you.
So this is the quality of the opposition to basic health care measures? We’re doomed.
By the way, I have one for measuring the approximate temperature of spiders. I couldn’t find a regular thermometer tiny enough to shove up their bottoms. (Also, they’re not particularly accurate — I’m primarily measuring the approximate temperature of their environment.)
Who the hell is Brian?
What’s up with that “ó” in the first neutron? Is that how the indicate the spin value nowadays?
Death of Brian.
Ah! So this explains why neutróns have ben leeking form my ears. Iv’e recently purchased a lazer shooting temperature gun. Evey time I use it it goes “Pew pew!” and, I now reelise, some more neutróns evaporeat.
At last, a picture of the notorious (for 15 minutes in 2008) Pharyngula cyberpistol!
You make fun but Experimental Brian Research is a highly respected journal.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/feeling-stupid
I can no longer stay neutral on plasticity. It is neutral plasticity that allows for the changes “they” induce with their neoliberal temperature guns to affect the victim and next generations by a combination of epigenetics and formative causation. If enough people (100?) have their neutrons altered by this Illuminati scourge the changes will be induced (action at a distance) across the globe and mind control will ensue. This was foretold on the dollar bill with its panopticon eye. When the US went off the gold standard it altered the niche construction in a way that freed the greed mongers to print fiat money and bankroll their evil science agenda. They found a mind ray crystal on dark side of moon that could control thought which had to be used a certain way. Chemtrails were abandoned because successful cloudbusting countermeasures so temp guns are “their” new method. Very clever.
Oh, geez, I’m waiting for some 2nd amendment guy or cop to decide that an infrared thermometer is a gun and start shooting. — even with the bright yellow tip.
Good conductors are really good mirrors in thermal wavelengths with no signal of their own – you could try putting an aluminum extension tube on the thermometer and then trying to get that close to the spider – it will lightpipe from the tip.
A cone should work but you might have to correct for the ratio of the tip opening to the cone base by adjusting the emissivity setting. You can always make a calibration table with a hot plate. (Ceramics are 0.95 emissivity as a source – like organic things for instance.) If you can see the sensor area you might be able to just match your tube to its area.
I expect small spiders are ectothermic although some larger spiders like tarantulas can be somewhat endothermic.
Can you get a thermal imaging camera? This would allow you to see the temperature of the spider separately- although you may not easily get a macroscopic lens on it.
https://www.alliedelec.com/product/flir-commercial-systems-flir-division/flir-c2/70469862/ they say works to 6″ but it’s $500 and oops – fixed focus.
Is there some reason it says a comment has been posted already but doesn’t display it?
So it got my comment #8 but still squawks about the other one. I’ll try again:
Oh, geez, I’m waiting for some 2nd amendment guy or cop to decide that an infrared thermometer is a gun and start shooting. — even with the bright yellow tip.
Good conductors are really good mirrors in thermal wavelengths with no signal of their own – you could try putting an aluminum extension tube on the thermometer and then trying to get that close to the spider – it will lightpipe from the tip.
A cone should work but you might have to correct for the ratio of the tip opening to the cone base by adjusting the emissivity setting. You can always make a calibration table with a hot plate. (Ceramics are 0.95 emissivity as a source – like organic things for instance.) If you can see the sensor area you might be able to just match your tube to its area.
I expect small spiders are ectothermic although some larger spiders like tarantulas can be somewhat endothermic.
bcwebb you have three comments showing for me. :-)
We all know you’re just a shill for Big Thermometer, dude. And if you just kinda look at the word, you can see that “Thermometer” is really “The Rome Eater” — The Great Whore of Babylon!!! And when they point that thing at our good God-fearing heads, it makes a mark — the Mark of the Beast!!! And it’s shooting particles at you — sub-atomic particles!!! And we all know that “sub” means “below”, and the region “below” is “infernal”!!! Those particles from Hell include bosons and phonons and photons and tackyons and tardyons and barryons and furyons and pixons and waxons and taxons and axons!!!
Axons of Evil!!!!!!!
Oh and cervantes? Brian is the snail from the Magic Roundabout a children’s animationn from the 1960’s.
“So this is the quality of the opposition to basic health care measures? We’re doomed.”
Yes it is. And yes we are. Absolutely fucking astounding. In the year 2020 of Mango The Fucktard, Teh Dumbth has won.
Dude, wait. Can we talk about this? I need my neutrons.
Guy how am I supposed to believe anything you say when you wear a mask, which completely blocks out oxygen, which means you are already a zombie.
@13 Time for bed .
I blame that bloke wot held up a sign saying “Get A Brain Morans for the Brian /Brain confusion .
@17, What, now, and miss Danger Mouse?!
(Yes, yes, two different eras (as I recall), &tc, &tc, but seems appropriate whilst we’re on the subject of things that make more sense than the picture in the OP.)
Hey, I like my atoms hanging around. If you take away my neutrons, my atoms will split.
The comments are amazing. I literally cannot tell the difference between hemidactylus and owlmirror and the dude from the posting. You guys have the RWNJ paranoia down. Excellent
@19 My late father and myself forced my little niece to watch Chorlton And The Wheelies because we liked it.LOL
Just kidding ,say what you like about youtube ,but i been able to listen to the opening theme song for the first time in years .
A bit off topic ,but i have been banished from a Laurel & Hardy fan site ,because someone posted that commies and atheists are trying to get rid of religion in amurica .I was banned because i pointed out what it said in the first amendment about the state and religion .
Yeah, I remember talking to somebody back in the early days of the epidemic, who went to see a doctor and was stopped at the door for a temperature check. There had been a cold snap and it was around freezing outside, and the person holding the thermometer expressed concern that so many people had body temperatures 5+°F below 98.6.
I find the idea of neutrons being killed oddly distressing. How? Do they decay into quarks?
Dianne #24 In a sense yes, since normal matter is made up of quarks. Neutron decay modes.
@24, Since every time this loon is shot with a laser temperature gun they loose some neutróns, it’s fairly obvious the neutróns are converted in morantróns and densetrinos, which then decay in the presence of a hairfurorfield into bigotsons with a large burst of eejit-rays, all of which can cause nasty rashes, headbanging, and FTL eye-rolling (or, in some people, jackbootery and spittleflood).
bcwebb @5 and PZ,
There are FLIR cameras you can plug into your Android or iPhone too. https://www.flir.com/products/flir-one-pro/ …they are a little cheaper than the self contained version because they leverage the phone cpu.
I use one for work but I have no idea if it has the resolution needed for small thermal targets like spiders.
@#24, dianne:
It would depend on what “killing” means. If it’s like ordinary neutron decay, then the neutron would release an electron and an antineutrino and turn into a proton. (That is, it would turn into a hydrogen atom plus a particle that interacts so seldom that if it went straight down it would probably come out on the other side of the planet without having interacted with anything at all along the way.)
But that’s decay, and they said killing. Since killing is an active process, it presumably involves adding some energy. Thanks to the strong force, it is literally impossible for quarks to simply fly away alone — any process which can tear quarks apart has to provide so much energy that it can produce a quark/antiquark pair by mass-energy equivalence, so by that definition killing would turn a neutron into a bunch of other particles. (Not my field, but I know enough about which things are conserved to know that the immediately obvious “pull out one quark, stick it with an antiquark to make a meson, and put the new quark which balanced the antiquark into the place of the one you pulled out” solutions seem to violate either charge or isospin conservation, unless I’m missing a combination or two, so presumably you’d have to produce more than 2 particles as the outcome. Messy.)
Or it could just mean flinging an antineutron at it and letting them annihilate each other, although that would take even more energy and/or some extremely high tech (certainly well beyond anything we could make in portable form at the moment) to store the antineutron until it was ready to use. (I’m not even sure, offhand, whether we could realistically store antineutrons at all, even presuming we had a reliable supply of them, and I’m not willing to go dig around to see if anybody has a solution to the problem… the usual choice for isolating antimatter is electromagnetism, after all, and the whole point of neutrons is that they don’t react to that.)
(No commentary on the idea of just crushing them cartoon-style with a mallet. Bugs Bunny, if he existed, would either be the world’s greatest physicist or just get us all killed in a massive explosion.)
that top pic makes PZ look a bit like Dr. House (it’s in the eyes, methinks)
@29-
Yeah superficially but as far as I know and I am going on impression PZ never did this:
https://youtu.be/Whl7QMTlHm8
Kinda funny fart humor beneath PZ’s caliber. But damn. Oh well!
Not that he shouldn’t refrain from that sort of thing.
I have to take my temp every morning when I get to work as part of the anti-Covid protocols. I’d love to sacrifice my neutrons to the helpfully-provided temp gun. Instead, I have to substitute my own in-mouth thermometer because my skin is always glowing hot from my bike ride.
Jeez, I live in a country where the difference between neuron and neutron has to be explained.
@25, 26, and 28: That was quite a bit more of a response than I was expecting for a one line flippant comment, you glorious nerds!
Looks like they already got his. Or maybe he experimented on himself. @7: I was thinking the same thing.
Who is Brian, and what RWNJ twitter universe did this come from? Inquiring minds, and all that…
@35, I spent some time the other day trying to track down the origin of the image in the OP. No luck, but this twittering thread does claim it comes from farcebork, with no other details.
Amusingly, whilst searching, I came across Forehead Thermometers — Are They Safe?, which starts off more-or-less rational, and even warns against pointing the laser (if your temperature gun is equipped with one) into the eye. It then goes off the rails:
According to Ye Pfffft! of All Knowledge, “In the late 19th century Madame Blavatsky (who founded theosophy) identified the pineal gland with the Hindu concept of the third eye, or the Ajna chakra. This association is still popular today.” As the embedded link notes, “The third eye (also called the mind’s eye or inner eye) is a mystical and esoteric concept of a speculative invisible eye, usually depicted as located on the forehead, which provides perception beyond ordinary sight.”
There is a loose connection between the pineal gland and vision. The pineal gland regulates the production of Melatonin, which regulates sleep patterns; more Melatonin is produced during darkness. So take a fact or two, add some woo-woo mumble-gobbledygook, and jump the rails…
@ #36 – THX