u/MisterMisterYeeeesss

I've been listening to Jack Benny since I was a kid, and I've heard any number of other programs sponsored by Lucky Strike as well. For the life of me, I can't figure out what the "chicka-chicka" noise in the ad is supposed to be.

They'll start out with something like "chicka-chicka. chicka-chicka. L S, M F T! L S, M F T!". The LSMFT is of course "Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco", but is the noise supposed to be a telegram printer? A stock ticker? Something at one of the tobacco auctions?

While listening to a variety of shows, there's a sound effect that keeps popping up. It's a police car siren that ends with what, depending on the the context in which it is used, is either two tires squealing, or slamming on the brakes. It's identical every time, so it's clearly some kind of stock audio effect. I would like to know the history of that effect, and if anyone knows where it came from originally. Naturally, as I write this I can't find an instance of it, but it's common enough that I'm sure others have noticed it.

I listen to OTR on my way to work, and lately the show that's been playing as I arrive is "The Challenge of the Yukon", sponsored by Quaker Puffed Rice and Wheat ("The breakfast cereal shot from guns! *ricochet sound*").

During the ad, sometimes the announcer will say something along the lines of "enjoy Quaker Puffed Rice or Quaker Puffed Wheat covered with fruit and yellow cream!".

Yellow cream? Is it just that cream is significantly more industrialized now, and "real" cream is actually yellow? I do not, and have never lived on a dairy farm but this is the only place I can think of where cream is referred to as yellow. Anyone grow up around cows? Maybe the way we use the word "yellow" has changed somewhat?

One thing I love about OTR is that you can occasionally glean information about what life was like in that era, that was never written down. There are so many details that don't get recorded in history, simply because they're "so obvious" or so mundane, that no one would bother writing them down. These details will come out of an episode now and then, not as a plot point or part of the story but rather as something mentioned in passing between characters that the audience doesn't even react to.

I came across something I hadn't known about life in (in this case) the 50s, so I thought I'd share. In the episode of "Our Miss Brooks" I was listening to, the phone company was delivering the updated phone books to each house. I'm not old enough to remember that, but I am old enough to remember them showing up in the mail every year.

What I hadn't known was that you had to turn in your old phone book in order to get the new one. Couldn't find it when the guy arrived? Tough luck, he'll try again tomorrow. Important? No. Interesting? Well, not really, by itself, but I get so much enjoyment out of information like that the sort of...leaks out of an episode.

Anything like that that you've come across?

I was having a conversation with myself in the shower this evening, and I can't tell if "Life with Luigi" is just a kind of quirky that I don't appreciate, annoying, or something else. I'm curious about other people's opinions. As a frame of reference, I've listened to maybe a dozen episodes all the way through, and have heard fragments of many others. Is it just one of those shows you need to start at the beginning?

It dawned on me that any place where fissile material is stored would have a potential problem most places don't, when it comes to fire. If you had a fire in, say, a nuclear fuel fabrication facility you probably wouldn't want to dump a ton of moderator into the rooms where the fuel-to-be is being stored. They had to have considered this during the planning, so if anyone knows anything about how fire suppression is handled in a facility like that, I'd be curious.

Would it even be problematic to add a bunch of water in a situation like that? Obviously there's water in a reactor core, but there's also a lot more concentrated fuel, and shielding.

I was reading something that mentioned the pressurizer, in passing, and it spawned a few questions.

a) While the role of the pressurizer was clear (maintaining pressure) it didn't give any kind of idea of how frequently it had to take some kind of action. Is the pressurizer constantly making tweaks to small changes in pressure, or does it pretty much stay inactive unless there's a larger pressure change?

b) Roughly what percent full of water would a PWR's pressurizer be under normal running conditions?

c) Are there any appreciable differences in size, placement, etc between pressurizers in PWRs and BWRs?

I'd greatly appreciate any knowledge anyone wants to drop on me, including any fun pressurizer facts you might have come across. Thank you!

I was reading the Wikipedia article about the Windscale problem and came across something that didn't make sense to me. In brief, it said that periodically they would anneal the graphite to release the Wigner energy, by raising the temperature to 250 °C (482 °F). However, the article said that releasing the energy grew increasingly difficult without offering any other details.

This suggests that something else is in play since it would presumably be easy to raise the core to that temperature. I don't understand what made it progressively harder; did they have to get it to a higher temperature each time, or hold it at the temperature for a longer period? The only other thing I can think of is that the annealing didn't fully "reset" the graphite (I'm note sure what word would be appropriate here, so please correct me), and imperfections accumulated over time, despite their efforts. Is something along those lines what happened?

I think every intro to radiation book or video is required by law to say that alpha particles can be stopped by a sheet of paper. I've never seen anything (close to entry-level reading) that talks about how long paper could stop alpha particles. Just at a high level, could paper stop lower-power alpha particles more or less indefinitely? For a few days? Is paper more likely to be eventually worn away physically or catch fire?

I understand there are considerations like the activity of the source, thickness of paper, distance, etc but I'm sure there are probably some generalities that would be interesting. Presumably something like a gram-scale mass of polonium would just roast the paper, but I'm curious what would happen if the situation weren't that extreme.

I was reading about production of nuclear-grade graphite, most recently, here. The text made it seem like there's a ton of importance on precision of the shape/size of the blocks, which makes sense considering they need to fit into certain spaces. Is there any kind of special geometry involved in the design besides the blocks having to fit inside the reactor?

If OTR researchers magically found a heretofore unknown season of a show, which show would you hope it is?

I'll spare everyone the full explanation, but this is more or less what happened in a dream I had last night.

When boiling creates voids in a reactor, I've read that hydrogen and oxygen gas (byproducts of radiolysis) tend to bubble out of the water. It also said that hydrogen is intentionally injected into the water to help prevent that radiolysis from happening as frequently. It didn't however give any kind of idea of scale as to how much hydrogen is dissolved/injected intentionally. Would this be something like "3ppm" scale or "back up the hydrogen tanker truck" scale? I don't have the chemistry knowledge to even make an educated guess here.

In pre-war action shows, it seems like all the bad guys are named something like "The Spider", "The Octopus", or "The Weasel". Further, a lot of the bad guys (especially in theater serials at the time) hold meetings with their henchmen via radio or other gadget, and are referred to as "racketeers". Post-war, it feels like that went away in favor of obviously Nazi-inspired bad guys, and then a little later sometimes communists, both of which makes sense for the time period. Does anyone know where that pre-war trend/trope came from?

My nominee is Kathy from "Father Knows Best". The shrill, incessant see-saw intonation makes me want to invent time travel purely to tell her to shut up. Any other nominations?

I was reading about the concept of "resonance escape probability" and a question came to mind. What I was reading said, in effect, "if an incident neutron is close to a resonance energy, it's more likely to be captured". Does the neutron energy have to be below the energy level for capture, or just close to it?

These are garbage numbers, but as an example, if the resonance energy was 200keV, could a 204keV neutron be captured, or is it more of a "close to resonance without going over" scenario? If it could be captured would the extra energy just be dealt with as a slightly excited nucleus or would it try to dump it as a gamma ray?

Like most people (I imagine), nuclear power was first explained to me as something like "a neutron splits a U235 nucleus and...". As I started reading more about it, it seems like the neutron induces something that a layperson might describe as "wobbling" or "oscillation" in the nucleus, which eventually results in splitting.

My understanding is that the incident neutron "joins" the nucleus, but I've never read anything that mentions the nucleus briefly becoming U236 before the fission event.

That got me thinking that one of these things is true:

a) The incident neutron DOESN'T join the nucleus; it just starts the oscillation and flies away/disappears, so it IS U235 that splits.

b) The incident neutron DOES join the nucleus, but in some fashion where it's not considered to be U236.

c) The nucleus that splits IS actually U236, but it's just not talked about that way for some reason (possibly because it exists so briefly).

d) Something else.

With the addition of option 'D', I'm sure one of those things is true. Can anyone shed some light on which of those is actually the case?

Edit: I should have clarified that the really intense mathematical descriptions are over my head. So maybe it IS described as U236, but only in more advanced literature.

Every now and then when I'm listening to a show, I'll notice something different about the speech patterns. There are plenty of things we simply wouldn't say because they've fallen into disuse, but there are also grammatical differences. As an example, in English there's something called the "meaningless do".

"Do you have plans for this evening?" / "Do you have a pen?"

We might reply "I don't have plans tonight" or "I don't have a pen". In many shows, I've heard the earlier "I haven't any plans tonight" or "I haven't a pen" constructions.

I know this is kind of a niche area of interest, but if anyone's notice other grammatical changes I'd love to hear them. To be clear, I'm not talking about vocabulary (though that's interesting in its own right), just differences in sentence construction or grammar over the decades.