Scintillating Us!

Typically, I Cannot Remember Where -
 - I came across the term "Spinthariscope", except that it was recent.   Probably tangential to something else altogether, because I simply had to look up what it was, and it wasn't what I thought it would be.
     Anyway, let us abruptly change subjects - don't complain, it's good mental exercise - and instead focus on: CARVALHO.
     Again, one of those words that just happen to pop up in the seething stew of my subconscious, with no apparent reason.  What is it? 
     A small freight vessel of the Middle Ages?   The hammer used to strike notes out of a sackbut?  A breed of small dog used to hunt smaller dogs?

A sackbut.  Okay, okay, so it can't be struck.  Sue me.

     None of the above.  It is a Portuguese surname, meaning "oak", for your information.

Wooden it be nice ...

      Why on earth it cropped up at the forefront of my mind is - well, I wooden't know.*
     Oak is of particular historical interest to us here in the Allotment of Eden, because of it's use in shipbuilding, and the Allotment being an island, if we wanted to go invade someone/liberate lost lands/see what was lying around unclaimed (delete where applicable) we needed ships.
     Now, shipbuilding needing timber, and trees taking a long time to grow, you couldn't just plant an acorn, come back 6 months later and hay Pesto! A tree. No.

Hmmmmm.

     It took from 10 to 20 years for an oak tree to grow sufficiently large before it could be felled and used as lumber.  This is quite beside the issue of masts; these were single pieces of timber made from the very tallest trees, of which the Allotment eventually ran out.  Oops!  This is where South Canada came in, because they had forests of very tall trees which they could export back to the Mother Country, and everyone was happy.

Look at 'em - happy as Larry.

     I realise we've covered quite a bit of metaphorical ground here, and the journey's not over yet!  because -

More Of Van Oord
The company that keeps on giving!  By the time I've run through their current fleet, they ought to have commissioned new and different strange-looking ships.  Okay, Art?

The "Bravenes"

     Yes, it does look rather peculiar, and the Van Oord marque makes it look like a giant child's toy.  This, gentle reader, is a "Subsea Rock Installation" vessel, designed to deposit crushed rock on the seabed to a maximum depth of 0.6 miles.** Not merely out of spite at the rock, the intent is to cover pipe and cables, protecting them from the dreaded 'scour' caused by tides and currents.  And, get this, the rock is deposited via a MOON POOL! which of course you remember the blog going on about a few weeks ago.
     Tying stuff back together, the Bravenes was ordered from the shipbuilders in 2014 and delivered in 2017, which, for an ocean-going ship with 45 crew that masses 14,000 tons, is not bad, and considerably better than 10 to 20 years.  Art?

Just in case!

Back To The Spinthariscope
I know what you're thinking (that DARPA telepathy helmet comes in handy) and no, it's not a Victorian parlour device that works because of the persistence of vision.  Art?

What it's not

     It's actually a lot more technical than that, being a device that displays the scintillations caused by radiation affecting zinc sulphide.  The device was dreamed up by a physicist in 1903, and was pretty much at the level of a Victorian parlour device; it made pretty flashes and that was it.  Devices that could perform useful measurements rapidly made it obsolete.
     However!  It did make a comeback in the mid-Twentieth Century as a children's educational toy - something along the lines of "Look, Timmy!  The mighty forces of atomic fission can entertain as well as DESTROY" (I think, I may be a bit hazy on how to speak to small children).  Art?

Then there was this.

     This is 'Kix' breakfast cereal, which gave away a Lone Ranger atom-bomb ring that was a spinthariscope, which Art can illustrate -

Behold

      Bear in mind that the Lone Ranger is a late 19th Century kind of chap, and the atom bomb, wonderful though it was, did not exist prior to 1944, and one wonders what the heck they were thinking, and if I can get a job like that, too?
     That's not all.  Remember that Chemical From Hell, Polonium?  The one that can kill in billionth-of-an-ounce**  amounts if inhaled or ingested?  The stuff that's 250,000 times more deadly than hydrogen cyanide?  Yes, that Polonium.  What do you think the radioactive source in that super-shiny ring was?
     That's right.  Polonium.
     YIKES.  In a packet of breakfast cereal ...


*  Sorry.
**  None of that metric rubbish here.