Not much you can do to shield these events, it's mostly highly-penetrating gamma rays and muons. Maybe spend a lot of time a few dozen meters underground or the

Not much you can do to shield these events, it's mostly highly-penetrating gamma rays and muons. Maybe spend a lot of time a few dozen meters underground or the the basement of high-rise buildings. If it helps, you basically have to be within a meter of these things to really experience significant radiation (rough estimate; I don't know what dose actually corresponds to cancer). At a rate of 1/km^2/yr, that means the odds of one of these hitting within 1m of you in a year is 3e-6. In other words, you can expect to get hit once about every 320,000 years. So I wouldn't worry about it personally. However it's interesting to note that the same logic implies that about 22,000 people are affected globally each year. As for directionality, they can come from pretty much any direction, but as the angle deviates from zenith (straight up), the particles have to travel through more atmosphere, so the intensity is decreased. Neutrinos can travel upwards through the earth, but you don't have to worry about those causing health problems (for the same reason they are able to pass right through the earth).