u/works-in-progress

This chart plots real-world radiation exposure cases on two axes — daily dose rate and cumulative dose — and color-codes them by observed health outcome (no clear harm, increased risk, or severe/lethal effects). The pattern that jumps out: severity tracks daily dose rate far more closely than cumulative dose. Chernobyl firemen and the Peabody lab criticality accident received extremely high daily doses and suffered severe or lethal effects, while radium dial painters and Kerala's high-background-radiation residents absorbed cumulative doses in a similar range but at far lower daily rates, and saw little to no clear harm. The clearest illustration is the atomic bomb survivors' cluster: same single event, but outcomes varied by how fast the dose was delivered, not just how much was absorbed. The piece behind this chart argues that most low-dose-rate chronic radiation studies (like the Taiwan cobalt-60 apartment cohort) show weak or statistically fragile evidence of harm, and that regulatory frameworks treating all radiation exposure as equally dangerous per unit may be miscalibrated.

Source: Various sources compiled by Jack Devanney (2026), from Works in Progress

This is a first-person defense of Flock Safety's license plate cameras, written by a police officer, published as the technology faces a wave of vandalism and over 150 city contract cancellations. The author acknowledges documented abuse cases — including officers using the system to stalk people — and innocent drivers wrongly stopped due to database errors, but argues these are rare, get flagged by internal audits, and typically end in officers being fired or charged. He leans on a 2026 Virginia federal court ruling and a 1983 Supreme Court precedent to argue plate scanning doesn't violate Fourth Amendment protections, and cites Atlantic City's crime statistics after its camera expansion as evidence of the technology's core case. Worth noting: this is one side of an active, contested debate — opponents (including the Institute for Justice, cited in the piece itself) argue real abuse is undercounted and audits only catch what officers choose to log.

Source: Works in Progress

Why were Victorian elites so effective? They slept till noon, drank port, and partied through the Season

A cool guide to Victorian dressing: exactly what a gentleman wore to a wedding, the office, golf, or a ball

Medieval German merchants had no head of state, no formal territory, and no army of their own — yet they blockaded Bruges into submission and helped overthrow the King of Denmark. How the Hanseatic League actually worked, and why it eventually fell apart

1865: King Mongkut of Siam in Western-inspired dress. King Mongkut greeted the British envoy with cigars and wine, spoke English, signed a treaty that kept Siam sovereign, and offered Lincoln war elephants during the Civil War. [1080 × 1350]

The US could likely eliminate mosquito-borne diseases like dengue and malaria using existing gene-editing and Wolbachia bacteria technology — one company's approval took 15 years across three federal agencies

Iron weaponry brought down the empires of the Bronze Age. Could technologies like drones do the same today?

Clean drinking water is a modern miracle. But it has become expensive, and it doesn’t need to be.

Why Japan has such good railways

Greece went from a handful of Mycenaean palace-kingdoms to dozens of fragmented city-states after the Bronze Age collapse — a map comparing 12th century BC vs. 8th century BC political consolidation

[OC] Nuclear radiation harms come largely from acute high exposure — a log-log scatter of daily dose vs. cumulative dose across dozens of real radiation events, from Chernobyl to radium dial painters

The Brooklyn network of the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transport Corporation, effectively a monopoly on trams in the neighborhood.

The US dairy industry's productivity revolution wasn't really about better cows — it was a data infrastructure story: a 1930s public-private data-sharing deal between the USDA and farmer cooperatives

Alberta is the world's second-largest rat-free landmass after Antarctica — maintained since the 1950s through a border buffer zone, active surveillance, and continuous low-level intervention rather than eradicate-and-forget

Manhattan and London dedicate ~26% of their land to roads. Dhaka, Kolkata, and Nairobi dedicate 10–14%. A piece argues this gap is quietly strangling growth in developing-world cities.

Demolition & rebuild in early 20th-century American cities: even young skyscrapers were razed for bigger ones. Top to bottom: Gillender (1897) and Bankers Trust (1912); Home Insurance (1885) and Field Building (1934); Astor House (1895) and Temple Emanu-El (1930); Gerry Mansion and the Pierre (1930)

A 1986 White House memo applied a 1976 industrial chemicals law to engineered microbes. Since then, only a handful of 240+ applications have ever been approved — this is why plastic-eating and landmine-detecting microbes never left the lab.

The first MMO economy exploit happened in 1986 — a pricing bug let players arbitrage dolls and crystal balls until they'd quintupled the entire game's money supply overnight

Cutting Rue Reaumur in Paris (1895–97). [1080 × 809]

The Hobrecht Plan (1862) — the development plan that shaped modern Berlin's street grid and housing form

A cop defends Flock's license plate cameras after the recent wave of vandalism and city contract cancellations — using crime data, audit logs, and Fourth Amendment case law to make his case