Nuclear Scanning Catches a Radioactive Cat On I-5

Jeff recommends Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat's story from a community meeting with Northwest border control agents. Seems their monitoring for dirty bombs from the median of Interstate 5 caught a car transporting a radioactive cat. "It turns out the feds have been monitoring Interstate 5 for nuclear 'dirty bombs.' They do it with radiation detectors so sensitive it led to the following incident. 'Vehicle goes by at 70 miles per hour... Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope [in the passing car]. The agent raced after the car, pulling it over not far from the monitoring spot.' Did he find a nuke? 'Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological treatment three days earlier.'"

I know the name of its owner....

[Anonymous Coward]

Schrodinger

Lolcat

[Anonymous Coward]

Schrödinger cat is not amused

asking for a tag

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, please, please, somebody tag this catscan.

Poor thing...

[Katatsumuri]

I heard it hated to be observed.

cool.

[RelliK]

Did the cat have any superpowers?

Radioactive cats...

[Anonymous Coward]

have 18 half-lives.
(captcha: murders)

Look, an Isotope!

[LaskoVortex]

Signal went off and identified an isotope

Holy smokes! Isotopes [thefreedictionary.com] everywhere!

I'm surprised they needed a detector to find something that, by definition, comprises all of matter.

Already invented?

[Circlotron]

You mean they didn't just invent the cat scanner?

Re:cool.

[jx100]

Its purr could attract law enforcement officials.

Re:Proper investigation

[clarkkent09]

You never know with those feline terrorists.

Perhaps it was a persian cat? You can never be too careful with those Al-Qaeda supporters [mwcnews.net]

Re:I know the name of its owner....

[LaskoVortex]

What was the cat's state?

Washington--which is a quantum superposition between Oregon and Canada.

No Human in the car?

[tekrat]

The summary says the car was populated by a "cat", but doesn't mention if there was a human driver. Either that, or the car was driven by a 60's beatnik with a fondness for Jazz music. "Hey dude, I just pulled over this radiocative cat, man, I mean he was smokin'."
Cosmic.

Re:Proper investigation

[asliarun]

I assume they promptly cut the cat open

...and it would have been quite safe as well. After all, the cat had 18 half-lives.

Re:Lolcat

[tubapro12]

Schrödinger's cat is not amused—maybe.

There, I fixed that for you.

Meow

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, welcome our radioactive terrorist cat overlords.

{puts out a saucer of milk}

Schrödinger's cat!

[exekewtable]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat [wikipedia.org]

OMG, they measured and saw it! the paradox is solved!

Re:It's all fun and games...

[dlanod]

I can see the interrogation now...

FBI goon: "What's the matter??? CAT GOT YOUR TONGUE?"

Re:I know the name of its owner....

[piemcfly]

catatonic?

The thing that worries me is...

[Gordonjcp]

... just how radioactive was this cat? If it's sufficiently radioactive to show up at quite a distance in a moving vehicle, how much full-body radiation are the people around the cat getting?

I do not want a hot cat sitting in my lap.

In Soviet Russia...

[mindwhip]

In Soviet Russia... Radioactive Cat scans you!

Re:I know the name of its owner....

[piemcfly]

wait, that was supposed to say

'catatomic'

... and he ruins his own joke as usual.

Re:cool.

[RuBLed]

I'M DA BOMB! LAWL!!

KTHXBAI

Re:The thing that worries me is...

[LaskoVortex]

I do not want a hot cat sitting in my lap.

Obviously a slashdotting geek to the very core. I'll take a hot pussy on my lap any day of the week.

Re:It's all fun and games...

[QuantumG]

Can't say I'm a physicist but I think it is bullshit. Cleaning up the mess of any conceivable "dirty bomb" is a mop and bucket affair. There's no possible pay to render a city uninhabitable or anything like that.. shit, a full-on nuclear weapon exploded at altitude didn't render Hiroshima uninhabitable. It's just a retarded idea.

The man from the cat detector van.

[Aussie]

C: The man didn't have the right form.
S: What man?
C: The man from the cat detector van.
S: The looney detector van, you mean.
C: Look, it's people like you what cause unrest.
S: What cat detector van?
C: The cat detector van from the Ministry of Housinge.
S: Housinge?
C: It was spelt like that on the van (I'm very observant!). I never seen so
      many bleeding aerials. The man said that their equipment could pinpoint
      a purr at four hundred yards! And Eric, being such a happy cat, was a
      piece of cake.
S: How much did you pay for this?
C: Sixty quid, and eight for the fruit-bat.
S: What fruit-bat?
C: Eric the fruit-bat.
S: Are all your pets called Eric?

Re:So let's say...

[glwtta]

All I'm getting from you is a lot of Freedom hating. Why do you want the terrorists to win?

When my father was radioactive...

[Anonymous Coward]

My father once was given a tracer, which is a very small doses of radioactive diagnostic drink. It makes you slightly more radioactive than normal. Maybe 6 or 8 times as much as normal, which is still very low and can be easily dealt with by a human. It is a lot, a lot less than when obtaining a cancer treatment. Two days later he walked into a science fair. People could hold their finger on a Geiger-Teller to measure the radioactivity of their body. My father lined up as well. The two people before made the loudspeakers do: '...tick........tick...tick..........tick..................tick....' When is was my fathers turn it went: 'TICK!TICK!TICK!TICK!TICK!TICK.' and you saw some people behind him step out of line.

Re:cool.

[Eponymous Crowbar]

We seem to be missing the real news here -- this has to be the first cat that can drive a car on the interstate, right?

Re:cool.

[kevingolding2001]

And Eric, being such a happy cat, was a piece of cake.

Excerpt from terrorist handbook

[edwardpickman]

"Feed cat Plutonium pellets with kibble. Wrap cat in detcord. Place timer on cat and set for five minutes. Release mouse on crowded street. Release cat after mouse. Run. Remember to face Mecca at 4:29 after you release cat." "Oh, don't forget to plug ears."

Warning. Re:This is Nothing

[freedom_india]

Hey, that piece of information ought to be classified and you ought to keep your trap shut instead of blathering out in open like this.
If the terrorists read about this, then they would plan like below:
1. Come to Oak Ridge, TN with an empty 2-tonner truck.
2. Squash and drive over thousands of radioactive frogs in a matter of weeks shouting their usual battle cry "death to infi..."etc.
3. Buy a Geiger counter locally and check for enough radioactivity.
4. Skip to Mexico/border country and get a dirty bomb (I was watching "Goldfinger" Bond movie yesterday), the iodine kind which emits less radioactivity.
5. Load onto this radioactive-tired truck (of course you would be stupid enough to drive out from TN all the way to Mexico on same tires and expect same radioactivity. So you stove away the tires and buy new/used ones which are NOT radioactive to drive to mexico. When you drive back you latch on the radioactive tires).
6. Border guards stop your truck since it seems to be glowing with radioactivity. They look at the tires and the tired guys at wheel. Of course the terrorists would be telling the truth about Oak Ridge TN and telling them they had just made a delivery to that place. They can also produce a newspaper clipping or something which proves even the frogs are radioactive and ask the border guards to talk to the Sherrif there to prove it.
7. Border guards allow the truck with "Medical Cargo" to enter US.
8. About two weeks later somewhere an incident happens....
9. Bush gets elected for a 3rd Time after tearing up the constitutionand is actually seen on Fox News using it as toilet paper to wipe cheney's ass with it.
10. Cheney asks "So?"

There, see the probabilities of imagination? ..and that is why you must never discuss confidential or "could be potentially confidential" stuff on slashdot.
The KGB was right.

Re:doesn't add up

[tehdaemon]

This is a story about Schrodinger's cat. This is exactly the kind of result you should expect.

T

Re:So let's say...

[freedom_india]

Let me play FoxNews plus Gonzales for a while:

1. I'm remodeling my house. I go down to Home Despot/Slowes and buy a dozen smoke detectors. Would I get pulled over for being a suspected terrorist?

Yes. You would get pulled over and charged. You need to prove to the Police and the judge beyond doubt that the detectors are for your home. A work contract signed by your contractor, a REAL ID and a passport are necessary to get discharged from the case.
Plus if you live in Montana or California, tough luck. These states support terrorism by rejecting REAL ID and thus endangering you! (endangering you by your rendition to Gitmo).

2. I'm a cancer patient undergoing radiation therapy. What can be done to prevent the horror of being pulled over by the KGB? Would it be reasonable to issue "radiology patient" tags, like they issue handicapped tags for the handicapped?

Yes. That badge would need to be accompanied by REAL ID. The badge itself would be built by the highest bidder who has offered better quality, 3D hologram embossed with your wife's or Eva Longoria's photo on the badge and also has Bluetooth enabled. Oh BTW, your insurance would not pay for the badge which would cost $399 each.

3. What is the false positive rate of such monitoring? Here, we have a cute example of a sick cat setting off a false positive. What about other incidents like this that fail to get into the newspaper?

Those details are "deemed classified." Much like information about cellphone tower coverage which companies used to provide publicly but stopped in 2003/04 when Bush deemed them classified at their instigation. Similarly if you continue questioning about false positives, you would be classified as a "person of interest" and be subject to such intense surveillance that the movie Enemy of State would be outdated. Heck, even your stool shit would be studied after scraping it from toilets.

Re:cool.

[die444die]

No, I believe Toonces [geocities.com] drove I-10 a few times.

Oh! Come On.

[camperdave]

You know perfectly well that the news would be: "Manhattan has been contaminated with radioactive Uranium dust.". Lines like "The radiation level is entirely harmless." and "There is no reason to panic, the radioactive dust will not affect your health." might appear in the article, but it would be after the "continued on A7" hyperlink.

Re:Lolcat

[Anonymous Coward]

How about this? [tinypic.com]

Re:Ha, ha

[chrish]

Yeah, some people are lazy and still throw out the waste from our Home Fusion reactors instead of shipping them to one of the government-owned CANDU reactor sites. What's even more WTF is that the fuel comes with a pre-paid shipping label, you just have to shove it in a box, slap the label on, and call Purolator to come pick it up.

Re:Ha, ha

[Loucks]

Hey, they made me take off my shoes. My shoes! Then they couldn't immediately identify an X-ray of my obscure, specialized electronic device, nor could they easily see through the ~5 miles of cable I routinely carry on when I travel (better not check it--those criminal baggage handlers would STEAL it.), so I was delayed by FIVE WHOLE MINUTES. I didn't say anything at the time, but now I'm waging a passive-aggressive internet-based war of words against the TSA. It seems like the most sensible way to express my neurotic fury at a mild inconvenience, and it's ever so easy to couch my rhetoric in terms of attacks on TSA employees' intelligence and rants about civil rights that display a depressing ignorance of actual law.

Re:Oblig. 'Heroes' Reference

[jrjarrett]

That could be cat-astropic.

Re:I know the name of its owner....

[scubamage]

Its state doesn't matter, because it changed when it was observed. My guess is either alive or dead.

Don't feel bad for the cat

[elrous0]

I have it on good authority that he thinks of nothing but murder all day.

Re:cool.

[Nimey]

How much did you pay for this?

Re:In Soviet Russia...

[yanyan]

i can haz cat scan?

Yes, and I have the solution.

[pavon]

The reason for this is simple - people have a personal connection with their pets and their friends but not with strangers. The solution is equally simple - allow rich people to keep poor people as pets. All their needs will be taken care of and, they will have a more leisured life than the vast majority of people even in the first world. Instead of a chihuahua, Paris can doll around the street with her little Mexican kid. Instead of having a hunting dog, the Joneses can have their very own Appalachian Redneck. An why have a pit bull when you can have your property protected by an Urban Gangsta? Naturally we would need places to train these people to be obedient - we could call them public schools.

</satire>

Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's one hot pussy!

ObFuturama

[sconeu]

No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!

Re:I know the name of its owner....

[Anonymous Coward]

> Actually, Washington is a superposition of the northwest state in which Seattle is located, and the District of Columbia in which the White House is located.

Which is, of course, the capital of the Eigen States of America.