“At my age, the radiation will probably do me good”*…
The “banana equivalent dose” (BED) is a measure of radiation used to illustrate levels of emissions. Bananas contain lots of potassium, which contains 0.01% potassium-40– which is radioactive. The radiation exposure from eating a banana is deemed “1 BED,” roughly equivalent to 0.01 millirem (mrem). (Happily, one would never be able to eat enough bananas to be dangerous, as our bodies excrete the potassium we’re consuming before it can do exposure damage.)
The existence of a clearly-understandable unit of this sort allows for easily-understood apples-to-apples (or, bananas-to-bananas) comparisons…
This is also roughly the exposure from having a single smoke detector.
Due to increased altitude; Mt Everest is more like 800 mrem (80,000 bananas) per year.
The granite in the walls is mildly radioactive. By comparison, the Vatican is about 800 mrem (80,000 bananas) per year.
More fruity comparisons at Mad Art Lab‘s “Yellow Alert”
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As we peel, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Richard Philips Feynman; he was born on this date in 1918. A theoretical physicist, Feynman was probably the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field in the post-WW II era.
Richard Feynman was a once-in-a-generation intellectual. He had no shortage of brains. (In 1965, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum electrodynamics.) He had charisma. (Witness this outtake [below] from his 1964 Cornell physics lectures [available in full here].) He knew how to make science and academic thought available, even entertaining, to a broader public. (We’ve highlighted two public TV programs hosted by Feynman here and here.) And he knew how to have fun. The clip above brings it all together.
– From Open Culture (where one can also find Feynman’s elegant and accessible 1.5 minute explanation of “The Key to Science.”)
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