It’s worth having some iodine tablets on hand.
I live in Toronto, and there is a nuclear power plant east of the city, and in case of a problem with containment at that facility, anyone living in the city proper can request iodine tablets free of charge. The expiry date for iodine tablets is about 12 years, so get them in, and store them in your safest place, maybe the basement, if that’s the place you may take refuge.
Always good advice!
Might I suggest “pesky?”
I mean I’ll freely admit that dark humor is what I turn to with things like this. Otherwise I’m just going to go home, nail the doors to my house shut, and spend the next few weeks cuddling my cat and my sweeties. (Which might be a good plan, but if nothing happens then we’ll be out of money and food; this way we continue to have a home and the cat doesn’t starve.)
Maybe needs a “deucedly”?
“Deucedly inconvenient!”
“A teensy bit,” perhaps.
Welp, if Austin’s on Putin’s list, SXSW is already over for this year.
Austin City Limits is in October.
City Hall is a few blocks from the Texas State Capitol Complex.
Thank you for coming on our tour.
Please exit through the gift shop.
I believe that gallows humour is perfectly appropriate when the gallows seem near.
depends if your in the way of a plutonium cloud
No school like old school:
[…]
While the Chrysler-Bell siren achieved its acoustic goals, its other specs were not quite as advanced: The first production models were manually controlled. A seat was provided, requiring a single brave soul to climb aboard, Slim Pickens-style, rotating until the nuclear flash relieved both man and machine of duty.
[…]
Here in Canada, our government quietly removed all of the SAME transmitting equipment last year. In an emergency, we’re expected to be notified by a 4G network text message (only 4G) or with an app.
Super good stuff.
Most governments implement a multi-prong alert system: phone, radio, text, etc. Last I heard, Weatheradio Canada only shut down about 20% of their transmitters? Those were mostly in urban areas with good cell coverage, but they still have some nearby weather transmitters. (I would be interested to know if if that’s changed in the last year or so, though. The last bulletin I saw was in 2020.)
Also, since I never meet anyone who’s heard of SAME, how have you heard it pronounced? While this video clearly assumes “saym”, I’ve only ever heard it said as “sammy”.
Pyschoacoustically speaking, two tones like this exhibit a phenomenon called roughness, because each interferes with the perception of the other. Humans hearing can be divided logarithmically into critical bands of frequency. Humans aren’t very precise at distinguishing frequencies, so any tones within a critical bandwidth of each other are going to sound similar if played one and a time, or beat together unpleasantly if played at the same time.
(In music, this is how you arrive at the chromatic scale: every semi-tone of the scale is separated by the bandwidth of a single critical band. You can clear distinguish the tonal notes from each other without them stepping on each other, but you also can’t pack any more tones in without some beating against the other. You tune an instrument against other instruments within the same semi-tone/critical band to make sure they are all close enough in frequency as to avoid roughness.)
Though I haven’t seen any documentation on the selection, 853 Hz and 960 Hz were probably chosen because they are close to 1 kHz, which is a common audio test frequency because it sits roughly at the logarithmic center of nominal human hearing (20 Hz to 20 kHz), well away from the frequencies you start to lose first as you age.
They fully shut down about 25% of the transmitters, and every other transmitter is running at half-power with the SAME headers removed, running a terrible text-to-speech stream of the barometric report.
I had to get rid of my weather radio because it sets off an alarm in the middle of the night to let me know that they’re no longer sending the weekly test signal.
I live in an urban part of Canada that gets semi-regular tornados. The fact that they’ve intentionally handicapped a system that is not only fully-implemented but fully-functional is borderline criminal.
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