How to Spot a Psychopath

I'm going to let you in on a little secret, here.

I don't use toothpaste.

Ever.

I was turned off the stuff by the dental-health people who came to my school when I was a wee 'un. They told me to brush my teeth with the ghastly gritty super-minty high-fluoride toothpaste they always brought with them, I begged them not to, they made me anyway, I vomited copiously, and that was the end of toothpaste for me.

Heck, for many years I didn't brush my teeth at all.

You may, at this juncture, be imagining the plausible results of this refusal, on my part, to allow society's frivolous protocols to take precedence over my personal values.

My mouth, you will be surmising, must be a steaming, mangrove-covered bayou, occasionally punctuated by by plopping mud-bubbles and shattered, gravestone-like, lichen-encrusted teeth.

I do not blame you for jumping to this conclusion, for it is perfectly reasonable. That was certainly the response of the dentist I visited, for the first time in at least ten years, a while ago.

But, as the dentist and her similarly terrified assistant immediately discovered, my teeth are actually just a bit yellower than the average.

Every one of 'em was there, not a one had a hole in it.

And my breath didn't, and doesn't, smell.

This is because, as that dentist cheerfully confirmed for me after she regained her composure, brushing your teeth is the least effective way of cleaning your mouth.

Brushing your teeth isn't useless, especially if you're thorough about it and do use fluoride toothpaste. But the danger spots in your mouth are between the teeth, where food particles accumulate and feed colonies of bacteria. And if you want sweet breath but only clean your teeth to get it, the similarly flourishing colonies of bacteria on your tongue will start stinking up your exhalations again as soon as the masking smell of the toothpaste dissipates.

So what dark rituals was I performing, to escape what countless jaunty animated toothbrush mascots have insisted is the inevitable consequence of not scrubbing your teeth with minty froth?

Well, I floss pretty regularly, and also clean properly between my teeth very regularly. I do that now with Piksters "interdental brushes", which are, essentially, tiny tough pipe-cleaners for the gaps between your teeth.

And to avoid smelly breath, I clean the top surface of my tongue, every morning. There are many purpose-made doodads for scraping your tongue; plastic ones cost almost nothing, so you might as well give them a go. I've always found a straight scraper blade to be perfectly adequate, though; I use a little six-inch steel ruler.

Apparently if you use a tiny little scraper it can take three minutes to clean your tongue. My manly metal scraper would have pretty much removed my lower jaw by then. Yes, my taste buds still work.

(When I stay the night at someone else's house, I have been known to use a butter knife. Not known by them, though, obviously.)

And... that's it. Keep the in-betweens clean, scrape the tongue, job done.

Not one filling, for 35 years.

I didn't avoid dentists because I had good reason to be terrified of them. I just didn't see the need.

And then I started taking a medication that reduces saliva production. And less than a year later...

...stuff was falling apart.

(That was my lower left first molar. I took the picture with the little USB endoscope which I reviewed some time ago, and which provided a surprising amount of later entertainment. Also, vaguely apropos of this, every kid who's starting to lose their baby teeth should be made aware of what a terrifying monster they now look like under the skin.)

Loss of saliva production is dangerous for teeth. Saliva actively protects teeth, and decay can progress much faster when you run out of spit.

This is part of the recipe for the "meth mouth" phenomenon, which can occur if you use any drug, like marijuana or the far less interesting medication that I'm on, which inhibits saliva production. All you have to do is habitually take such a drug, then treat your uncomfortable cotton-mouth with sugary and/or acidic fizzy drinks instead of something like milk or water (sugar-free chewing gum can also be helpful). Your teeth will then be rotting out of your head surprisingly soon. Especially if you also grind your teeth in classic tweaker style, and can think of a million very energetic things to do that are not cleaning said teeth.

Anyway, now it's a few years later again, and I've got a couple of fillings. But only a couple, touch wood.

I brush my teeth now, with one of those fancy super-fast circle-jiggling electric toothbrushes, but I still don't use toothpaste. Everything seems to be going pretty well.

But wait, there's more.

My previous interaction with a dentist, before the mysterious alien-implant thing, had been many years before, when my wisdom teeth were coming through. A bridge of gum-flesh remained over the middle, from the back to the front, of at least of one of them.

This is an absolutely prime spot for gunk to accumulate and start destroying the "new" tooth before it's even finished erupting. The bridge will normally separate on one end as the tooth emerges, if like me you're lucky enough to have a jaw that in clear violation of God's plan actually has room for wisdom teeth. But you'll be left with a little flap of flesh over part of the tooth, and probably also a pocket down the side, which is almost as bad. It's basically impossible to keep these areas constantly clear of nasty-smelling... gunk.

So I'd been making damn sure the rotten-ness didn't have a chance to take hold, by digging and flicking and poking at the area with whatever small pointy object came to hand. The wire in the middle of twist-ties did a dandy job of getting some nice cleansing blood flowing.

I was, and still am, delighted to say that this dentist, also, endorsed and encouraged my bizarre oral-hygiene activities.

("Oh," I hear some of you ask, "on the subject of your hatred of the taste of toothpaste - do you, in far-off Australia, have in addition to your bizarre pink candies the things which we foreigners call 'Spearmint Leaves'?" Why yes, gentle reader, we do. "And do they taste exactly like numerous dental concoctions described as having a 'pleasant mint flavour', which statement is just as much of a... it can't be a lie, it's more of a cruel joke, really... as the similar statements made on cough-medicine bottles?" Yes, they do. "And do Spearmint Leaves, also, make you want to heave?" Yes, indeed they, also, do.)

A reader writes:

So....At times things eat at my mind, it makes me good at some things, but at other times it just stresses me out. I thought you might have a point of view that would be reasonably sane on my dilemma. Though I acknowledge it's something that is far from your field of expertise, but you may have an idea... Just because radioactivity is cool.

So my flatmate visited Chernobyl. I thought that was kind of cool, but we somewhat agreed they'd discard their shoes and clothes afterwards (see where this is going? ;)

The tour got pretty close, they were standing within 100m of reactor 4. The digital Geiger counter was registering 4 mSv/h (I zoomed in on a photo.... will check that again at some point). Most of the tour group stayed on paved ground, though in some places quite broken. A few ignored the tour guides and were wandering around on the somewhat radioactive grass at one point near reactor 4. They ate at a nearby cafe, visited some of the local sites driving around in a small bus, then left the exclusion. On leaving they each went through some kind of radiation measuring device, it looked like a big metal arch, you put your hands on the sides of a console at head height and your face was pretty close to something, no one set that thing off. Though no one was really sure what it was measuring, or if your shoes were included.

Said flatmate spent another week travelling before returning to Australia, along with their Chernobyl clothes and shoes. The tour operators seem to think no special precautions needed to be taken with clothes and shoes after leaving.

Do you think particulate matter bought back poses a health risk worth worrying about? I made them leave their shoes outside the house....But on their clothes packed in the same bag as their shoes, it seems inevitable that some radioactive isotopes have made it inside. Though, they're only a problem if I inhale or digest them, damn cesium. I do acknowledge that I'm already host to unstable isotopes of carbon in measurable amounts.

I recently, fortuitously, bought a nice enough Miele vacuum cleaner which I hope effectively implements its HEPA filter.

Unfortunately I'm cynical enough about our own government's competence to have serious doubts as to whether the Ukrainian government has enforced effective safety procedures. Especially given the USSR's history at this site...

Roscoe

Summary, before I start talking about ways in which radiation can kill you horribly: Radiation is almost certain not to kill you horribly. Those clothes, especially the shoes, may be detectably contaminated, but they're very unlikely to be dangerously contaminated. And if they've been worn and washed a few times since the visit, contamination may not even be detectable any more. Even if you did big shoe-fetishist sniffs all over your flatmate's sneakers as soon as they got home, you'd probably still be at much greater risk from everyday non-radioactive air contamination.

Like you, I wouldn't have much faith in the dedication of Ukrainian Chernobyl-tour outfits to customer safety. Lord knows the Western world's airports are now full of staggeringly expensive "security" hardware that doesn't bloody work at all, so a country with a GDP per capita a sixth that of Australia, and with the usual ex-Soviet wall-to-wall government corruption, could be worse. But the tours are a regular event now, so even the defective imaginary-terrorist-obsessed Western world's governments would probably have noticed people coming back with shoes that glow in the dark.

Plus, I'm sure plenty of people have taken their own Geiger counters with them on these tours, and yet the most newsworthy result of a trip to Chernobyl remains that chick who pretended to have taken a solo motorcycle tour.

On the subject of Geiger counters, I think it's important to mention that if you decide to get yourself your very own ionising-radiation meter, be aware that there are two basic kinds on the consumer market. Both may be sold as "geiger counters", but only one of them is.

A geiger counter can measure low levels of radiation. You can, for instance, use a geiger counter capable of detecting alpha particles (which many can't) to verify that a lump of unremarkable granite measures above (but probably nowhere near dangerously above) the background level of radiation. (Unless your house is built on granite!)

The other kind of radiation meter is the "ion-chamber survey meter", which is much less sensitive. If the needle on a survey meter ever budges, you should get the hell out of there. Survey meters are only meant to be used in places with high radiation levels, like serious nuclear accidents or after an actual nuclear war.

A lot of cheap eBay radiation meters are the distinctive yellow US Civil Defense versions, which come in geiger and ion-chamber versions. If it's pleasingly cheap, it's probably a useless ion-chamber meter.

(Note also that if Australians buy a geiger counter from overseas, it may not make it through Australian Customs, especially if it comes with a mildly radioactive calibration object.)

It is unlikely that any Chernobyl/Pripyat tours go anywhere remotely hot enough to get a reading from an ion-chamber meter, though you may be able to see places that'd be hot enough, like the secured, deserted scrapyards where they parked the emergency vehicles used during the disaster, or particularly choice parts of the Red Forest.

And yes, dirt or otherwise broken ground around Chernobyl is in general more radioactive than hard surfaces, because rain washes particulates off roads and footpaths and buildings onto soil, where they accumulate. Chernobyl is a particularly delightful test case for this phenomenon, because the combination of the reactor's design and the astonishing fuck-ups that led to the disaster meant that the Chernobyl accident caused a roaring fire in its graphite moderator, spewing a vast plume of radioactive smoke into the sky and raining particulate fallout over a huge area.

(The far less disastrous Windscale fire happened in a graphite-moderated reactor too, but it was the fuel burning that time, not the moderator.)

The recent TEPCO disaster in Japan has released an amount of radioactive material comparable with Chernobyl. The Fukushima Daiichi reactors don't have much burnable stuff in them, though, so most of the escaped isotopes are just sitting around in the neighbourhood of the reactors, or washed away into the ocean where tedious scientists say they're diluted out of significance but we all know they'll really wake up Gojira.

I am, of course, kind of winging it on this answer, because I am indeed not what you'd call an expert on the particular perils of tramping around in the Zone of Exclusion. (I'd probably walk straight into an anomaly and die.) I invite readers to tell me what I've overlooked, and thereby scare the tripes out of Roscoe.

From Modern Mechanix:

Yes, these things are exactly what they look like. And when the design was tested, no, it didn't work. You can't power an aeroplane with a sail.

"Common sense", whatever that is, says it's impossible to make a sail-powered aeroplane. And common sense is right.

But if your vehicle has a connection of some sort to the ground, or water, it is eminently possible to sail faster than the wind. Tacking sailing ships do this routinely. Common sense doesn't say that's impossible, unless it's the common sense of someone who's never seen a boat race.

But common sense most definitely says that sailing dead downwind, with the wind exactly at your back, cannot be done faster than that wind is blowing. Obviously, whether you're in a boat or in a land yacht (meaning a wheeled vehicle propelled by the wind, not a '71 Impala), when your speed and heading relative to the ground or water are the same as the wind speed and heading relative to the ground or water, there's no more energy to be harvested and you can't go any faster.

In this, common sense is absolutely wrong. A land yacht certainly can sail downwind faster than the wind.

The fastest one to do so thus far is called Blackbird, but there are others:

What all of these yachts have in common is a large propeller instead of a sail, and the prop has a drive connection to the wheels. Common sense says this won't make a blind bit of difference to anything, but it does.

There have been some rather nasty arguments between people who know that this cannot be done and people who, as per the old saying, should not be interrupted because they're busy doing it. Enjoy the comments here, for instance, if you'd like to consume rather more than the recommended daily intake of flame-war.

At this stage, anyone who still objects is in the position of a person in 1910 who still insists that aeroplanes are impossible on the grounds that he, personally, hasn't yet seen one flying.

(Although, to be fair, some of the land-yacht runs are alleged to have been made on the dry bed of Ivanpah Lake. I've been there in Fallout: New Vegas and it's clearly not nearly big enough for any such activities.)

Common sense is, in general, immensely useful. It's what tells you that, when you want to cross the street and see a car coming, you shouldn't just step out in front of the car, even if you've never subjected this belief to empirical testing by walking out and seeing what happens.

But common sense, like memory and even perception itself, is unreliable. Common sense only works on things that it's worked on before, and the only way to expand your common sense to deal with new concepts is by making those new concepts fit into some part of the existing framework. Expanding your common-sense framework to accept genuinely new ideas is possible, but it doesn't happen automatically.

If you're trying to figure out whether to step out in front of a type of oncoming car you've never seen before, the common-sense shortcut will work. But if you're trying to understand some new, counter-intuitive physical oddity like these land yachts, common sense will fail you miserably, just as it so often does when people try to think about tax brackets or daylight saving, and on the rather fewer occasions when people try to think about aeroplanes on conveyor belts.

I don't think all of the people who got into shouting matches over the downwind-faster-than-the-wind idea were just emotionally invested in a position they'd not thought about at all, as is so often the case in, say, political arguments. The physics involved is decidedly non-obvious; that, plus Sayre's Law, could account for the whole kerfuffle. And this new development doesn't seem likely to revolutionise land transportation, or anything else.

The next time you're inclined to take a common-sense view of some new idea that actually matters, though, try to bear in mind that common sense also says that the world is flat and the sun goes around it.