Oh they still haven't figured this one out at knowyourmeme?

Demon Core meme came from KanColle(2013) communities in Futaba, and permeated to nicovideo.jp as well as to Twitter. That's why it is predominantly image based with few GIFs inbetween, why it is Demon Core and Demon Core only, and why there are few comical non-girl versions created years after inception.

I'd guess overlap between outspoken (ex-)Futaba users AND HN readers(hops_max=3) OR knowyourmeme users is exactly 1.0f, and this won't ever go on record anywhere unless someone say it somewhere, so here you go.

> Because it’s a meme derived from human suffering. It’s meant to be in bad taste — that’s the source of the humor.

I don’t agree. To me, it’s derived from many things, like juxtaposing something incredibly stressful and dangerous, with something else.

I’d go further and say the suffering that happened is only important in that it made the demon core popular and well-known, but the memes would still work if it somehow became well-known without the death and suffering because no accident happened.

I feel like some conclusions of the intent here are born from being very well versed in the actual outcomes, including what I can only assume was a very painful end to someone's life.

But on the surface level of it, it's a scientist doing something knowingly incredibly dangerous and dumb for no particularly justifiable reason.

We've all felt a bit like that at some point. We just probably didn't have a core and a screwdriver.

Despite it being so famous, and the memes, I still don't understand what Slotin was doing.

So I get it, it was a demonstration of how to perform an experiment. But I can't understand how the screwdriver makes any sense at all. What's being measured? What does success and failure look like? What does the experiment produce, what data in what format?

Because in my head, a proper experiment has data collection and precise measurements. Somebody's working on a data table that says "At position X, we measured value Y". But randomly wiggling stuff around with a screwdriver, I can't see how one can do anything of the sort. And I figure at this level, "more coverage = more radiation" is kind of a trivial point that doesn't really need to be demonstrated.

Oddly the art is largely Japanese in style, not just the musume (e.g. "girl") images but that first one.

Between that accident and the year 2000 there were about 60 criticality accidents causing about 20 fatalities

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml0037/ML003731912.pdf

After a software project failure that overturned my life I got interested in the quality movement, Deming, Toyota Production System and all that. I was also interested in nuclear energy, actually opposed to it at that time, an opinion I have changed.

Before the Fukushima accident I became aware that Japan was leading the world in nuclear accidents, especially this criticality incident

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...

as well as the comedy of errors at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant

which I could summarize as "makes Superphenix look like a huge success"

Causes floated for that were that (1) Japan was more aggressive at developing nuclear technology post-1990 more than any country other than Russia (who is making the FBR look easy today) and (2) the attitudes and methods that served Japan well in cars and semiconductors served them terribly in the nuclear business. Workgroups in a Japanese factory, for instance, are expected to modify their techniques and tools to improve production but takes detailed modelling and strict following of rules to avoid criticality accidents.