clumma

Radionuclides Calculation

I recently asked Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro, and GPT 5.2 Thinking to compute some radionuclide data. I have $20/month plans with GPT and Gemini and a $100/month plan with Opus, so it's not a fair comparison. But Opus did perform best.

From the Gemini UI, it wasn't clear whether I should choose Thinking or Pro. From a web search, it seems Thinking is the small model with CoT, whereas Pro is the big model. So I chose Pro.

Claude's split-view UI for artifacts is a big win. I'm amazed the other two haven't copied it. Though according to Claude, it doesn't know which artifact you're viewing, so you have to mention it all the time. How hard could it be to make Claude aware of this?

None of the models could produce a complete list of radionuclides with half-lives 4-40 years. So I made the list myself with NuDat 3 and gave it to them. Fun fact: there are only 24.

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Nuclear Tweets

2025-03-04 - Real or fake (335) https://x.com/clumma/status/1897004025079587298

2024-04-12 - Infinite energy unlock (193) https://x.com/clumma/status/1778817780579750359

2025-02-27 - Valar prototype (147) https://x.com/clumma/status/1895358436516470931

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Health Physics

2013-08-14

How many linear relationships in biology persist over more than 6 orders of magnitude?

Whether a given dose is hormetic or deleterious should depend on the stress on the animal at the time of exposure. I conjecture that wartime stress could be responsible for deleterious effects in Japanese bomb survivors at ~ 100mSv, compared to other exposure cases that suggest hormetic effects at that dose.

The doubling dose for double-strand breaks is about 1.5 Gy per cell cycle.[^1] That is, ROS from normal metabolism are worth about 0.3 Gy/hour. DNA repair machinery is nearly at capacity at that level, so an additional 1.5 Gy can be deadly. Exercise seems to derive its benefits from stimulating the same systems [^2][^3] and whether it is good or bad also depends on one's existing stress level. Exercising a fatigued person is deleterious, but exercising a sedentary person is beneficial.

If oxidative stress is hormetic, antioxidant supplements may be harmful.[^4]

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Radiation Primer

2019-05-23

Light

Light is made of photons.

Light has both color and brightness. Color is related to the energy of photons and brightness is related to the number of photons.

Color determines how light interacts with objects. Black surfaces absorb photons of all visible colors, while white surfaces reflect them. Glass is transparent to visible light; many materials are transparent to radio waves.

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Economics on Twitter

2012-11-26 - Possible vs Actual https://x.com/clumma/status/273138304449396737

2014-04-20 - Trade vs Production https://x.com/clumma/status/457949289658859520

2014-08-12 - Supply vs Demand https://x.com/clumma/status/499250743069532160

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Thermoeconomics

last update: 2022-11-12

Garrett model

1. How persistent is civilization growth? (Garrett 2011)
2. Can we predict long-run economic growth? (Garrett 2012)
3. Modes of growth in dynamic systems (Garrett 2012)
4. Thermodynamics of long-run economic innovation and growth (Garrett 2013)

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Literary References in the music of Yes

Starship Trooper - Starship Troopers (Heinlein)
I've Seen All Good People - Through the Looking Glass (Carroll)
Close to the Edge - Siddhartha (Hesse)
And You And I - Foundation (Asimov)
The Remembering - Jonathan Livingston Seagull (Bach)
The Gates of Delirium - War and Peace (Tolstoy)
Awaken - The Singer: A Classic Retelling of Cosmic Conflict (Miller)
Circus of Heaven - Something Wicked This Way Comes (Bradbury)

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2019-05-18

Jonathan Blow on societal collapse

It's uncanny how closely this talk follows a line of reasoning I've been working on lately. If you're copied here, we may have discussed one or more of its aspects

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

(Jonathan Blow is an independent video game developer, speaking here at a conference in Moscow.)

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China

In the 1980s and early '90s, Japan seemed poised to overtake the United States. I remember "Japan-bashing", and concern there was too much Japan-bashing. But by and large, there was the sense Japan deserved its success. Their education system was better, it was thought; their people worked harder; we Americans had been caught lazy and short of discipline. One remedy was karate class for your kids.

Whether any of that was true is almost irrelevant. Discipline is a virtue, and karate practice hasn't ruined too many children.

Today we face a similar situation with China, and there is plenty of China-bashing. But I see little concern about the China-bashing and no reflection on why China has been able to do so well.

Instead, we say China is evil. Their government isn't a "democracy", in whatever watery sense of the word. Our own government is supposedly led by a fascist who was elected by a minority of voters, but at least it's democratic. We're told human rights are violated on an industrial scale in

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Returns to Scale vs Experience

How many wristwatches are cheaper than Big Ben?

Abstract

Big machines are sometimes more efficient. But they cost more, so fewer can be produced with a finite budget. Small machines are cheaper and may benefit from improvement over time, driven by experience in building more units. When does this experience lead to greater overall efficiency? We derive an approximation which, given a learning rate, tells how much smaller a machine must be to overcome an initial efficiency disadvantage.

Background

Learning curves were characterized in the context of industrial production in the 1930s by Wright.[^1] The production cost of a machine follows a power law in the number of units made so far