adulthood is just a constant struggle of, “man, i want cookies for breakfast, but I also recognize this is a bad nutritional decision. On the other hand, the only one who can stop me is me. i know that fucker’s weaknesses. i could totally take me in a fight.”
frog and toad are my two remaining brain cells struggling to keep my horrible body alive
If all your atoms gained one neutron, all the hydrogen in your body would become deuterium, so all the water in your body would become heavy water, which is very bad. In most cases, adding a neutron to an atom doesn’t change its chemistry, but hydrogen is special because it’s so light: chemical reactions involving deuterium and heavy water happen at different rates than those with regular hydrogen, and in living cells this messes with various enzymes, especially ones involving cell mitosis. Heavy water is fine to drink in small quantities, but once about 40% of your water is heavy water it becomes cytotoxic. 100% of your water being heavy water would certainly be fatal.
Let’s go through the other atoms in your body and see what happens when we add a neutron:
Carbon: All your C-12 becomes C-13, but that’s still stable. Your dead body would be incredibly confusing to future archaeologists trying to do radiocarbon dating though.
Nitrogen: N-14 becomes N-15, which is also stable. No problem.
Oxygen: O-15 becomes O-16. Still stable, not a problem.
Phosphorous: very bad. Your P-31 becomes P-32, which is a beta emitter with a short half-life of 2 weeks. Humans are about 1% phosphorus by mass, so you’d have something like 0.5-1.0 kilograms of a very hot isotope in you. Worse, since a lot of the phosphorous in your body literally makes up your DNA, the radioactivity would be right in the worst possible place. This would definitely be fatal.
Calcium: Ca-40 becomes Ca-41, which is radioactive, but has a half-life of 100,000 years. Not a big deal.
Sulfur: S-32 becomes S-33. Stable.
Sodium: also bad. Na-23 would become Na-24, which decays with both electron and gamma emission. I think the lower proportion of sodium in the body means the phosphorous is the bigger issue though.
Potassium: K-39 becomes K-40, which is another weakly radioactive one probably not worth worrying about.
My guess is that the phosphorous-induced radiation damage would kill you long before the heavy water cytotoxicity did. Since it’s right in your DNA, you’d probably stop synthesizing proteins almost immediately and have an unpleasant death similar to amanita mushroom poisoning (which inhibits RNA polymerase), which typically takes less than a day.
I think it might be rather less than a day!
If the human body is 0.6% Phosphorus by weight, then we have about 81kg * .6% = 0.486 kg of P-32. Per wikipedia the P-32 specific activity is 10.590 EBq/kg, so this is 5.15 EBq.
For comparison, all the radioactivity released directly after the Chernobyl accident was 8.195 EBq (more than half of which was Xenon which immediately disappeared into the atmosphere), but now it’s concentrated inside a single human.
Wikipedia says the beta-emission electron has an average energy of 0.5 MeV, so this is 5.15 EBq * 0.5 MeV = 412 kW of power. It should heat you up to the boiling point of water in less than a minute.
When I was a student at Oxford, both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were lecturing there, Lewis magnificently and Tolkien badly and inaudibly, and the climate of opinion was such that people explained Lewis’s children’s books by saying ‘It’s his Christianity, you know,’ as if the books were the symptom of some disease, while of Tolkien they said he was wasting his time on hobbits when he should have been writing learned articles…
I imagine I caused Tolkien much grief by turning up to hear him lecture week after week, while he was trying to wrap his lectures up after a fortnight and get on with The Lord of the Rings (you could do that in those days, if you lacked an audience, and still get paid). I sat there obdurately despite all his mumbling and talking with his face pressed up to the blackboard, forcing him to go on expounding every week how you could start with a simple quest-narrative and, by gradually twitching elements as it went along, arrive at the complex and entirely different story of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale – a story that still contains the excitement of the quest-narrative that seeded it. What little I heard of all this was wholly fascinating.
– Diana Wynne Jones
I think about this a lot, often in the context of “the remarkable amount of resources that Tolkien was able to funnel into LotR” but often because I just really like Diana Wynne Jones
actually kind of ticks me off a little because this is an excellent example of what is probably my favorite editing technique, Match Cutting
Note how the Tom and Jerry footage cuts right on the impact frame, going strait to the impact in the anime footage, and how care is taken to maintain the same direction of the momentum in both, creating a feeling of connection between the sources, even when the quality of video and styles of animation couldn’t be more different.
This is a technique that happens all the time in filmmaking, one of my favorite examples is this scene from the Kingdom Hearts 2 opening, which is recapping events from Chain of Memories, cleverly using match cutting to show two important fights that happened at about the same time as each other.
And going back to the original video, not only is it satisfying to look at, but it also (albeit probably unintentionally) illustrates the ways in which western and eastern animation have basically always been in conversation with each other. Classic Tom and Jerry is (at least in my opinion) the pinnacle of slapstick comedy, with it’s excellent animation capable of selling punchy and hilarious impacts. Take this shot for example:
A slow build up, as Tom shaves the log down into a bat, followed by a sudden impact on the dog. It works because it starts slow, and hits fast, and that is the basis of all slapstick comedy. And the wonderful thing about slapstick is that unlike other forms of comedy, like puns or observational humor, it requires no translation. Tom and Jerry in particular almost always depicts a David and Goliath struggle, a clever underdog against a large and powerful opponent, which is relatable and understandable to all audiences, and easily localized due to the shorts having little to no dialogue, thus explaining why the series is beloved throughout the world. It’s been referenced in manga and anime from Stardust Crusaders to Fruits Basket!
And that brings us back to Anime. Slapstick is a huge part of the humor in tons of series, to the point where it even bleeds into some of it’s tropes. Just think of one of the classics, a character finds himself in a compromising situation with one of the girls, and what happens as a result? (for some reason this outdated meme was the best example I could find as an isolated clip im so sorry)
This scene from the same series is practically a slapstick sketch in and of itself:
And of course, that same level of power initially developed for comedy proved itself highly effective for action, and nowadays anime action scenes are well known for their moments of high impact, utilizing the same animation techniques
tl;dr: Without even meaning to, by tying together the western slapstick comedy of the past and the eastern action sequences of the present, this meme edit is a celebration of how far we’ve come. And that’s pretty cool.
I am a 35 year old sometimes college student majoring in History. I love video games, board games, tabletop RPGs, comics, reading, film/television, podcasts, history, astronomy, and pretty much any and all things geeky. I occasionally reblog risqué content (I use the tag 'NSFT') so only followers 18+ please. He/Him.
Major Fandoms: Destiny 2, Mass Effect, Critical Role, Dispatch, D&D, The Magnus Archives, The Adventure Zone, and Marvel Rivals
Minor Fandoms: Pathfinder (the RPG), Stardew Valley, Batman/DC comics, The Dresden Files, the MCU, Apex Legends, Indy Neidell / Time Ghost History, Overwatch, Persona, Resident Evil, Cyberpunk 2077, and Homestuck on the major holidays :p
