More NYC Stupidity
With no offense intended to all my NYC friends, of course.
Some tosser with the NYPD has asked the City Council to give the police the power to authorize people in New York City to possess environmental testing devices, and provide for criminal prosecution of persons possessing such equipment without permission.
Air quality meters, chemical sniffers, Geiger counters. It appears that the NYPD would even be licensing smoke detectors, radon test kits, and carbon monoxide monitors. And anyone merely possessing these things without permission could go to jail.
The justification for this invidious tidbit of legislation is the fear that unregulated test equipment might register false alarms, inciting panic.
The measure brought stiff, unexpected opposition at a Council hearing last week. Its proponent withdrew the bill for further review at the end of the meeting, so it is off the table for now. Unlike the Village Voice reporter, I do not think it will be back, despite the NYPD proponent’s assertions to the contrary. Considering that even the VV reporter notes that there have been no incidents of false-alarm-induced panic to justify the bill, I find it irresponsible of the VV reporter to write what he did in the last paragraph of the article.
I do not expect the legislation to go any further towards becoming law. I think it is too much of an invasion to be accepted by New Yorkers all at once. But if by some chance it does get enacted, it will indicate a substantial shift in the willingness of New Yorkers to accept nanny-city impositions.
As an aside, I carry a Cold War vintage Civil Defense personal dosimeter with me everywhere I go. A Bendix model CDV-138. Not because I am worried about my long-term radiation exposure, but because I find it interesting to track. And I’m a retro-tech fanboy.
Does the dosimeter work?
Indeed.
I bought it from the eBay in a lot of eight meters and a charger. All the meters measure in the range 0-200mR. Average annual civilian exposure in the US is 350mR; mine from last year was a bit lower at 280mR.
Six of the meters were of the type pictured. Two were more modern and recently checked by the manufacturer’s lab. I checked the six vintage ones against the two modern ones, and the one I carry was one of only two that were within 10mR over the range of the meter. (Testing took nearly a year, because I didn’t bother to splurge on sending them off to a legitimate testing facility.) The others were, alas, no longer accurate.
These are carbon fiber electrometer types, which are hermetically sealed and were designed for quantity production, not for adjustment or calibration. So the ones that aren’t accurate anymore are purely decorative now. They are in the closet, in a zippy baggie, next to the charger.
The charger is a beauty of Cold War Civil Defence engineering. The electronics are on a oversized, overtraced circuit board, and the components are all full-size what you could have bought at the Radio Shack any time before the mid-nineties. The idea was supposed to be that every part could be replaced easily by any man with a soldiering iron. Of course, women could fix them, too, it’s just that Civil Defense’s expectation (before it folded into FEMA) was that women raised the children and men knew how to read a schematic and fix a circuit.
The manual for the charger came with a “crash course” on electronics theory and how the charger works, supposed to be understandable by anyone with a high school degree. It was really rather cute.
Modern dosimeters are boring. They have LCD readouts and solid state electrometers what can be adjusted, and are therefore probably better units. But boring. They run off battery.
My meter has to be charged. Hence the charger of which I keep blabbing. The charger resets the meter to 0mR by applying 2,000 volts across the electrometer, which holds the charge. As the air inside the sealed electrometer is exposed to ionizing radiation, some of the charge on the electrodes is lost, causing the carbon filament to move along the scale. More radiation, more charge loss, more movement. When you lose enough charge to hit the high end of the scale, you just pop over to the recharger, write down your current reading and the date, and reset the meter.
I find the whole thing fascinating in precisely the same way I find mechanical clockwork more fascinating than a simple quartz-driven clock movement.
So I like the cool old ones, so long as they still work.
If I can manage it, I’ll post a picture of the actual scale in the meter. I can do it, I just have to get the camera to focus correctly.