A unique blog about game design and development, by a 40yo professional game sculptor.

The Alexander Litvenyenko poisoned-spy story is still in the news.  I reminds me of a conversation I had a few years ago with a co-worker.  As a rule, programmers can be pretty clueless about the outside world.  While they're filling their heads with BSP algorithms and tricks with IEEE floating point, they pass up less focused trivia.

This coworker suggested that we just use neutron bombs on the middle east, that everyone would die instantly and painlessly, problem solved.  I was revulsed and dumbfounded, and proceeded to set him straight.

Radiation poisoning is a particularly terrible way to go.  Neutrons wizz through your body, bashing into your atoms and changing them into random isotopes.  Almost all of these isotopes are poisonous themselves, and unstable, so THEY in turn give off more neutrons to do more damage.

Cells die.  And your intestinal lining is only one cell thick.  So after recieving a big dose of radiation, the first thing that happens to you, is you start vomiting and crapping blood.  Then as the hours go by and more cells die, your whole body swells up like your thumb when you hit it with a hammer.  The pain might be more bearable, but your brain swells, too, giving you dementia + massive headache.  Finally, after hours of this, your organs fail and you die.

Now, if you get a less than lethal dose of radiation, you can survive these awful symptoms.  But what happened to Litvenyenko was, he ingested the radioactive substance.  Which means it stayed in his body, continuing to spew neutrons and kill cells.  Plus all the heavy metals (including radioactive elements) are amazingly poisonous on their own, without taking radiation into account.

So now you know.  Don't wish radiation poisoning on anyone.  And pray you die by drowning or fire, or almost anything else, before death by radiation.