6 ms·

This is a very interesting story, but this article is pretty light on a lot of the details of his life. He got into a lot of mischief throughout his life and un

by macksd 4y ago

This is a very interesting story, but this article is pretty light on a lot of the details of his life. He got into a lot of mischief throughout his life and unfortunately died a few years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn. It's a real shame, because he was obviously bright and highly motivated and I feel like he was just never able to really put all that potential into action. My favorite part of the story is that he was arrested for stealing smoke detectors from his apartment building trying to collect radioactive material. One of my first jobs was shipping / receiving for an electronics manufacturer, and smoke / gas detectors were the lion's share of our business. I was told I always had to classify the products as "components for a nuclear reactor" on international shipping manifests, which I thought was silly. Until I read this story...

mjevans 4y ago
This is also the reason modern smoke detectors are all annoying BS. We can't have nice things because this one guy went through a whole lot of trouble to do something silly. Now they're all oversensitive steam sensing BS models. I'd rather have freaking IR cameras looking for too much heat (outside of kitchens).
- Syonyk 4y ago
  The "nuclear" ones are ionization type, which have the useful quality of being cheap. Otherwise, they're almost, but not entirely, worthless as far as being a smoke detector goes. The other type is the photoelectric type, which is generally more expensive, but rather radically more likely to alert for the sort of fires that kill people. Ionization types are really good at detecting the emissions from flames. They're disturbingly bad at detecting actual smoke - so the name "smoke detector" for them is a bit misleading, IMO. If you've got a grease fire or something going with basically no smoke, an ionization type will detect this in a hurry, and they're also rather prone to false positives as noticed by anyone with one of them near a kitchen. The photoelectric types aren't so good at detecting flames, but are quite good at detecting smoke in the air. In some tests, they alert 30-40 minutes before an ionization type notices a problem. But the problem comes when you start looking at the type of fires that actually kill people. The bulk of fire deaths are from overnight fires, in which something is smoldering (and smoking...) for half an hour or longer before the heat gets to the point that the piece of (usually furniture) ignites. The photoelectric type will alert to this smoke. The ionization type waits until the [whatever] has actually caught fire to bother doing anything - which is far less useful, because by the time the couch has caught fire, the room and the rest of the house aren't far behind. Some realistic tests have shown that there's literally half an hour or more of alert from the photoelectric type, down to "A minute or two" for the ionization type. Skip Walker has done a number of presentations, and some of his work can be found here: http://www.propertyevaluation.net/Photoelectric%20vs%20Ionization%20Smoke%20Alarms%20-%20Deadly%20Differences.html http://www.propertyevaluation.net/Photoelectric%20vs%20Ioniz... > In tests, ionization alarms will typically respond about 30 to 90 seconds faster to “fast-flame” fires than photoelectric smoke alarms. However, in smoldering fires ionization alarms respond an average of 15 to 50 minutes slower than photoelectric alarms. Several studies indicate that they will outright fail to activate up to 20-25% of the time. The vast majority of residential fire fatalities are due to smoke inhalation, not from the actual flames and almost two-thirds of fire fatalities occur at night while we sleep. > In 2007, UL published the “Smoke Characterization Study”. This study tested both types of smoke alarms using current UL testing standards and materials; they also tested the alarms using UL test criteria integrating a variety of synthetic materials and current tests such as smoldering toast. The results are frightening. Ionization alarms failed the UL 217 test 20% of the time using the current standard test materials. This is the test that the alarms must pass 100% of the time to be offered for sale and installed in US homes. When tested using synthetic materials, ionization alarms DID NOT TRIGGER (DNT) in 7 out of 8 synthetic test scenarios. In the one test where the ionization alarm did trigger, it activated at a level exceeding maximum allowed under the UL standard and nearly 43 minutes after the photoelectric alarm in the same test. He also has a presentation up that just drills down, over and over, into data, studies, etc. The results are quite clear: in the sort of fires that actually kill people, photoelectric smoke detectors radically outperform ionization types - and this is found in study after study that looks at "fires vs fire deaths vs smoke detector types" as well. https://structuretech1.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Ion-vs-Photo-Smoke-Alarms-CREIA-April-20121-1.pdf https://structuretech1.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Ion-vs... You can spider off those if you want, but you really should put at least a few photoelectric smoke detectors in your house. Don't bother with the combo detectors. They're either an "or" gate, which gives you the worst of both worlds, or an "and" gate, at which point the photoelectric sensor can be screaming its head off about the smoke, but the alarm won't sound until the ionization type detects flame products. > I'd rather have freaking IR cameras looking for too much heat (outside of kitchens). They've been tested against smoke detectors and are worse than even ionization types for detecting early fires.
  - hermitdev 4y ago
    The false alarms you get from the heat detectors are exceedingly annoying to. My last apartment, I had heat detectors as well as carbon monoxide detectors. I could not use the oven in my kitchen without setting off the heat detector in the hallway. Literally open the door after a preheat, and the damn thing goes off. Nothing burning that should be burning (it was a gas oven after all). Lots of open doors and windows (always fun in winter Chicagoland) and waving of towels at the detector... I lived in that apartment for over 10 years... Never once had a "real" fire, but easily had hundreds of alarms. Very, very low signal to noise ratio...
  - picture 4y ago
    Now I wonder how we allow companies to try to squeeze every drop of profit from life saving devices. Smoke detectors cost a good few tens of bucks here in US, and they still feel the need to use ionization instead of photoelectric? I've taken a few photoelectric smoke alarms apart, and it's literally just an LED, a photodiode, some cleverly shaped black plastic, and a few integrated circuits. I imagine doing reliable averaging/signal conditioning wont be super trivial, but surely it's something that can be all integrated into a single IC for cheap. All of that should seriously cost no more than half a dollar to produce at large scale.
    - Syonyk 4y ago
      I have no idea. That sounds cheaper than trace radioactives to me, but the photoelectric ones are reliably more expensive than ionization, at least around here. And a lot harder to find, too. I'm pretty well annoyed that ionization types are still allowed and the default, if it doesn't show. "YOU LIT THE KITCHEN ON FIRE!" alarms are nice, but radically less useful than "Hey, something's smoking and has been doing so for a while and you're all asleep," based on empirical evidence from the studies on fire deaths. Fires while someone's awake and (often enough) involved in the process are important to warn about, but if one has to pick between that and the stuff that kills people at night, I'd bias towards the ones that (a) meet the requirements they're supposed to meet and (b) provably save lives. I suppose I ask too much... :/
dymk 4y ago
Highly motivated yes, bright, probably not. He never actually managed to build anything useful. He did manage to designate his backyard a superfund site though. And managed to get arrested for trying to do it again, this time in an apartment building full of people. If you read through the history of his life, it looks much less like a smart, resourceful person trying to do science being kept down by The Man. It's more like untreated mental illness putting others in danger, and resulting in his premature death.
- adolph 4y ago
  "smart, resourceful person" | "untreated mental illness" "smart, resourceful person" + "untreated mental illness"
  - dymk 4y ago
    Yeah, I'm saying he was not smart, nor was he resourceful. He was certainly mentally ill. He didn't build a reactor. He didn't build an x-ray machine. No experiments took place. There was no scientific method employed. He took apart a bunch of smoke detectors. He irradiated his mother's back yard, and then he tried to do it again in an apartment building. He wasn't a misunderstood savant. The guy did nothing that should be emulated, lauded, or praised. He's a cautionary tale of untreated mental illness.
    - water-your-self 4y ago
      Smart or not he had a lot of domain knowledge and had the ambition to learn more. Its vastly disappointing that none of the authorities or adults in his life steered him towards work in the nuclear field
      - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
        > none of the authorities or adults in his life steered him towards work in the nuclear field How do you know they didn’t?
mynameishere 4y ago
I don't care how much booze and drugs and radium-powered neutron guns you die from, if the coroner finds Benadryl in your blood, it's going in the report.
sharkweek 4y ago
If only you had met Nathan Fielder when he was attempting to rebrand smoke detectors as musical instruments to avoid these customs declarations. (If you haven’t watched the show Nathan For You, I can’t recommend it enough).
- ortusdux 4y ago
  I've actually called the US Dept of Commerce to get help figuring out which Harmonized System code to use for some shipments. I managed to stump them and they had to give me a callback, but throughout they were extremely helpful.
- jamal-kumar 4y ago
  Was that a new episode/season of that show? Huge fan I actually met the guy many years ago a few times before he was ever famous. First time he was SO OBNOXIOUS, like we had to be mean as possible and kick him out because he just wouldn't listen to us trying to tell him to shut the hell up with name-dropping Seth Rogen and some early hiphop comedy act he used to do on this website loadingreadyrun when we were trying to watch a movie... Second time he was a security guard at a parking lot next to a rave and we smoked a blunt with him Sometimes I wonder if he remembers any of that
  - sharkweek 4y ago
    LOL that's hilarious that you have those memories with him. I sort of imagine the show isn't a big stretch for who he is in real life. Yeah the smoke detector episode is from the most recent (and final) season. If you liked the first couple, the last season is the best imo.
- shepherdjerred 4y ago
  https://youtu.be/X7odcV25sHg https://youtu.be/X7odcV25sHg
1-6 4y ago
Agree that his potential could have been put to better action, like YouTube.

by macksd 4y ago

mjevans 4y ago

This is also the reason modern smoke detectors are all annoying BS. We can't have nice things because this one guy went through a whole lot of trouble to do something silly. Now they're all oversensitive steam sensing BS models. I'd rather have freaking IR cameras looking for too much heat (outside of kitchens).

Syonyk 4y ago
The "nuclear" ones are ionization type, which have the useful quality of being cheap. Otherwise, they're almost, but not entirely, worthless as far as being a smoke detector goes. The other type is the photoelectric type, which is generally more expensive, but rather radically more likely to alert for the sort of fires that kill people. Ionization types are really good at detecting the emissions from flames. They're disturbingly bad at detecting actual smoke - so the name "smoke detector" for them is a bit misleading, IMO. If you've got a grease fire or something going with basically no smoke, an ionization type will detect this in a hurry, and they're also rather prone to false positives as noticed by anyone with one of them near a kitchen. The photoelectric types aren't so good at detecting flames, but are quite good at detecting smoke in the air. In some tests, they alert 30-40 minutes before an ionization type notices a problem. But the problem comes when you start looking at the type of fires that actually kill people. The bulk of fire deaths are from overnight fires, in which something is smoldering (and smoking...) for half an hour or longer before the heat gets to the point that the piece of (usually furniture) ignites. The photoelectric type will alert to this smoke. The ionization type waits until the [whatever] has actually caught fire to bother doing anything - which is far less useful, because by the time the couch has caught fire, the room and the rest of the house aren't far behind. Some realistic tests have shown that there's literally half an hour or more of alert from the photoelectric type, down to "A minute or two" for the ionization type. Skip Walker has done a number of presentations, and some of his work can be found here: http://www.propertyevaluation.net/Photoelectric%20vs%20Ionization%20Smoke%20Alarms%20-%20Deadly%20Differences.html http://www.propertyevaluation.net/Photoelectric%20vs%20Ioniz... > In tests, ionization alarms will typically respond about 30 to 90 seconds faster to “fast-flame” fires than photoelectric smoke alarms. However, in smoldering fires ionization alarms respond an average of 15 to 50 minutes slower than photoelectric alarms. Several studies indicate that they will outright fail to activate up to 20-25% of the time. The vast majority of residential fire fatalities are due to smoke inhalation, not from the actual flames and almost two-thirds of fire fatalities occur at night while we sleep. > In 2007, UL published the “Smoke Characterization Study”. This study tested both types of smoke alarms using current UL testing standards and materials; they also tested the alarms using UL test criteria integrating a variety of synthetic materials and current tests such as smoldering toast. The results are frightening. Ionization alarms failed the UL 217 test 20% of the time using the current standard test materials. This is the test that the alarms must pass 100% of the time to be offered for sale and installed in US homes. When tested using synthetic materials, ionization alarms DID NOT TRIGGER (DNT) in 7 out of 8 synthetic test scenarios. In the one test where the ionization alarm did trigger, it activated at a level exceeding maximum allowed under the UL standard and nearly 43 minutes after the photoelectric alarm in the same test. He also has a presentation up that just drills down, over and over, into data, studies, etc. The results are quite clear: in the sort of fires that actually kill people, photoelectric smoke detectors radically outperform ionization types - and this is found in study after study that looks at "fires vs fire deaths vs smoke detector types" as well. https://structuretech1.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Ion-vs-Photo-Smoke-Alarms-CREIA-April-20121-1.pdf https://structuretech1.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Ion-vs... You can spider off those if you want, but you really should put at least a few photoelectric smoke detectors in your house. Don't bother with the combo detectors. They're either an "or" gate, which gives you the worst of both worlds, or an "and" gate, at which point the photoelectric sensor can be screaming its head off about the smoke, but the alarm won't sound until the ionization type detects flame products. > I'd rather have freaking IR cameras looking for too much heat (outside of kitchens). They've been tested against smoke detectors and are worse than even ionization types for detecting early fires.
- hermitdev 4y ago
  The false alarms you get from the heat detectors are exceedingly annoying to. My last apartment, I had heat detectors as well as carbon monoxide detectors. I could not use the oven in my kitchen without setting off the heat detector in the hallway. Literally open the door after a preheat, and the damn thing goes off. Nothing burning that should be burning (it was a gas oven after all). Lots of open doors and windows (always fun in winter Chicagoland) and waving of towels at the detector... I lived in that apartment for over 10 years... Never once had a "real" fire, but easily had hundreds of alarms. Very, very low signal to noise ratio...
- picture 4y ago
  Now I wonder how we allow companies to try to squeeze every drop of profit from life saving devices. Smoke detectors cost a good few tens of bucks here in US, and they still feel the need to use ionization instead of photoelectric? I've taken a few photoelectric smoke alarms apart, and it's literally just an LED, a photodiode, some cleverly shaped black plastic, and a few integrated circuits. I imagine doing reliable averaging/signal conditioning wont be super trivial, but surely it's something that can be all integrated into a single IC for cheap. All of that should seriously cost no more than half a dollar to produce at large scale.
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    I have no idea. That sounds cheaper than trace radioactives to me, but the photoelectric ones are reliably more expensive than ionization, at least around here. And a lot harder to find, too. I'm pretty well annoyed that ionization types are still allowed and the default, if it doesn't show. "YOU LIT THE KITCHEN ON FIRE!" alarms are nice, but radically less useful than "Hey, something's smoking and has been doing so for a while and you're all asleep," based on empirical evidence from the studies on fire deaths. Fires while someone's awake and (often enough) involved in the process are important to warn about, but if one has to pick between that and the stuff that kills people at night, I'd bias towards the ones that (a) meet the requirements they're supposed to meet and (b) provably save lives. I suppose I ask too much... :/

dymk 4y ago

Highly motivated yes, bright, probably not. He never actually managed to build anything useful. He did manage to designate his backyard a superfund site though. And managed to get arrested for trying to do it again, this time in an apartment building full of people. If you read through the history of his life, it looks much less like a smart, resourceful person trying to do science being kept down by The Man. It's more like untreated mental illness putting others in danger, and resulting in his premature death.

adolph 4y ago
"smart, resourceful person" | "untreated mental illness" "smart, resourceful person" + "untreated mental illness"
- dymk 4y ago
  Yeah, I'm saying he was not smart, nor was he resourceful. He was certainly mentally ill. He didn't build a reactor. He didn't build an x-ray machine. No experiments took place. There was no scientific method employed. He took apart a bunch of smoke detectors. He irradiated his mother's back yard, and then he tried to do it again in an apartment building. He wasn't a misunderstood savant. The guy did nothing that should be emulated, lauded, or praised. He's a cautionary tale of untreated mental illness.
  - water-your-self 4y ago
    Smart or not he had a lot of domain knowledge and had the ambition to learn more. Its vastly disappointing that none of the authorities or adults in his life steered him towards work in the nuclear field
    - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      > none of the authorities or adults in his life steered him towards work in the nuclear field How do you know they didn’t?

mynameishere 4y ago

I don't care how much booze and drugs and radium-powered neutron guns you die from, if the coroner finds Benadryl in your blood, it's going in the report.

sharkweek 4y ago

If only you had met Nathan Fielder when he was attempting to rebrand smoke detectors as musical instruments to avoid these customs declarations. (If you haven’t watched the show Nathan For You, I can’t recommend it enough).

ortusdux 4y ago
I've actually called the US Dept of Commerce to get help figuring out which Harmonized System code to use for some shipments. I managed to stump them and they had to give me a callback, but throughout they were extremely helpful.
jamal-kumar 4y ago
Was that a new episode/season of that show? Huge fan I actually met the guy many years ago a few times before he was ever famous. First time he was SO OBNOXIOUS, like we had to be mean as possible and kick him out because he just wouldn't listen to us trying to tell him to shut the hell up with name-dropping Seth Rogen and some early hiphop comedy act he used to do on this website loadingreadyrun when we were trying to watch a movie... Second time he was a security guard at a parking lot next to a rave and we smoked a blunt with him Sometimes I wonder if he remembers any of that
- sharkweek 4y ago
  LOL that's hilarious that you have those memories with him. I sort of imagine the show isn't a big stretch for who he is in real life. Yeah the smoke detector episode is from the most recent (and final) season. If you liked the first couple, the last season is the best imo.
shepherdjerred 4y ago
https://youtu.be/X7odcV25sHg https://youtu.be/X7odcV25sHg

1-6 4y ago

Agree that his potential could have been put to better action, like YouTube.