 Sean Bonner is someone who I kept running into online and I never met in real life. We retweet each other a bunch, reply to each other a bunch, and then finally just decided to have lunch one day. And it turns out we have a ton of sort of like shared history and surprising that we haven't met before. We have a bunch of mutual friends. And he's doing stuff with radiation these days. I think he's creating some sort of superhero or superhero defense over in the Japan. So he'll tell you all about that. I think you have your visual aids. He's got a couple of visual aids. Visual aids. Okay, Sean Bonner. So I actually don't have a set presentation thing for this because it's kind of brand new. So what I would have done is like had some sort of professional presentation that then I just didn't show and just talked. But I've never talked about this at all. I'm going to make it up along the way and so expect lots of mistakes and random divergence that would be cut out on something that was more professional. I guess. So yeah, so like two months ago there was this earthquake in Japan and you probably heard about it. Stuff shook and stuff. And nothing really bad happened with the earthquake because Japan's like earthquake proof. Except then there was a big tsunami which was way bigger than everybody was expecting and Japan isn't really giant tsunami proof. There's actually sort of a side grant. But there's actually all around the coast of Japan are these huge rocks that have these etchings in them. They're really old and I'm going to get the translation wrong. But it sort of says don't ever build shit below this or you'll die. And that's like everything below there is what got destroyed by the tsunamis. Everything above them is fine. And they've been there forever. And I guess they were like, ah, these are old. What do they know? You don't have to worry about this. But yeah, there's these huge rocks and they're all around the coast and now everybody's like, oh, weird. But anyway, there's a bunch of nuclear reactors below those rocks that got hit by giant waves and have been causing all sorts of problems. So I have a bunch of friends in Japan who right away were like, okay, this is weird. What do we do about this? And we started trading a bunch of emails to try to figure out how do we actually find out what's going on since they're locking things down. And the only numbers that are being released on anything is by TEPCO, which is the Tokyo Electric and Power Company. And they don't really have a huge interest in reporting numbers that are above what they should be, as well as Greenpeace who's releasing numbers who doesn't really have an interest in reporting numbers that are below what they should be. So with everything being like, well, I can't believe any of these numbers and I don't really know where they're coming from. We're like, well, we're going to figure out how to get some real numbers. And at the same point, we got introduced to a handful of guys in Portland who were trying to figure out how to build a system where anybody could submit radiation tracking numbers from their own devices and then throw those all together somehow and get a little bit of a map that they could try to put something together. So we decided to combine forces with these guys, reach out to a bunch of Geiger counter builder people and see what we could do to create a network of Geiger counters and things that were reading radiation all around in Japan. So we went and tried to buy a bunch of Geiger counters, but they were all gone because everybody in the Midwest of the US bought every Geiger counter. So yeah, literally everybody who sells anything is like, I don't know, I got like a thousand orders for Ohio, so we can't send anything to Japan, sorry. And so we're like, okay, well, that's a little bit of a hiccup in our plan there. So we started searching around and found, well, we found two things. So we found that there's lots of surplus Geiger tubes all over the, so a Geiger counter is actually a stupidly simple thing of DNA. And there's lots of Geiger tubes around from Chernobyl, from Russia, which is weird because the Russian government actually made it illegal for citizens to own Geiger counters right after things started happening. Because, you know, like, I'm sure they would just misread something and, you know, get worried about a bunch of stuff that they shouldn't. So there's a bunch of tubes, most of the tubes don't work because they were all made in the 70s and 80s and they were all in equipment and got used by stuff. And used for years and years and years and then somebody like salvaged them out and was trying to make the top dollar. So you'll see these tubes all over the place that are in class and have like fancy caps on them and all these stuff and none of those work. The only ones that are actually worth any good that are salvaged are these, you can't really see it in here. I'll pass this around in a second, but this is, so this is what we're calling an eye Geiger. And it's a Geiger counter that plugs me into an iPhone and then we have a little piece of software that sort of keeps track of the counts that go through it and uploads it to our server, so a little bit of a geotag and stuff. And so, you know, like, okay, wherever this is, this is where the counter is happening and what's going on with it. And it's pretty cool. So this tube that's in here is an old Russian tube cell and that out from Puster. I'm not sticking my iPhone in it, I'm doing another show without it. Sorry, you have to pretend that it would be counting something if it was in the front. But it works pretty cool. So we got a bunch of those tubes and started putting together random devices like that and some bigger ones that sort of are plugged into networks that people can stick outside their house and just a whole bunch of things that we could actually farm out to hacker spaces. I run a hacker space here in Los Angeles called Crash Space and I was working with a hacker space in Tokyo called Tokyo Hacker Space. And you know a bunch of other hacker spaces around. So we put together some little PCBs with the really simple stuff that goes into what drives a geiger counter and so we're in the process of getting parts out to these people all over the place so they can sort of put them together and then ship them back or do whatever they need to do with them to start tracking them. And then at the same time we got in touch with this guy. His name is Dan and he runs a company called International Medcom and he helped design the sensor networks at Chernobyl and at Three Mile Island so he knows a little bit about radiation and tracking it and stuff. So he's got a whole bunch of commercial devices like this that he has these brand new sensors on them that are these big round like two inch pancake shaped sensor that picks up so that one that's going around those old tubes they track mostly gamma and a little bit of beta which is what people are mostly worried about when there's some sort of a nuclear event because gamma is the stuff that if you get a dose of it you're dead in like a couple hours or a huge blast. And sort of the common thing that's set around is not really to worry about alpha because it can sort of bounce off clothing. It's such like really slow and light. But alpha is actually a really big problem in stuff like this because the surrounding areas are farms and alpha rains down and falls on the ground and gets in food and if you eat it the things like Sysium 137 and these particles look a lot like potassium and things that your body thinks is good. So if you eat them your body takes them and like sticks them in your bones so that you'll have them for later when you eat them so that you basically start creating yourself all the time and that's where the really big problems come like 20 years down the line and stuff. And so people in Japan are sort of freaking out because they don't know what's going on and they just want to know what's going on. They're like anything, any data would be great but the numbers that are being released are like here's this one reading from this one city that's 50 kilometers away from where you're at and that was taken three weeks ago. You're fine, don't worry about it. And radiation can change by the minute. The number here can be normal and over there can be like a super crazy hot spot. So we got a whole bunch of these counters and a whole bunch of these tubes that we're building into other counters and so we've been giving those out to people and then we rigged up some car settings with a couple of these outside of car, a couple of these inside of car. We mapped out where all of the schools are within like a 60 or 70 kilometer radius of the evacuation zone and there's tons of them that are still open and still with kids playing on them. And so we went and started driving the cars there and walking around in the schools and just tracking numbers and putting them online and just publishing everything as you can. So I'll pass this around too. So this, be careful of that back sensor, don't poke anything in it. Otherwise it's fairly rugged. So as you can see like right there, the CPM which is sort of counts per minute of particles that are flying through that sensor, there's radiation everywhere so don't be worried about that. There's radiation everywhere like this is radioactive, everything's radioactive and you can walk around and see a few counts different depending on what you put on the bananas So you can see that's like 20 counts per minute on that. I was in Portland yesterday and flying back from Portland, it was about 250 counts per minute. I was in Tokyo like two weeks ago and flying from Tokyo to LA is like 800 counts per minute. On a lot of several of the kindergarten and elementary schools that we've gone to like on the playgrounds, it's like 9,000 counts per minute. So it's sort of concerning and the parents at these schools don't know that and they're not being told that. So we got this site set up which is called SafeCast.org and we're publishing all of the data that we can get from any place as well as all of the data that we can collect ourselves and putting it up there. And the driving around is sort of the stop gap until we get enough devices that we can just hand them out everywhere and then sort of create this thing. But there's still this problem with those where people have to, we have a little piece of software for smartphones and stuff where people can take a picture of it and then it automatically sends up to like a Flickr account and then OCR is what the reading is and sort of geotags and stuff. So we know they're barely where it flows but there's still a little bit of interaction. So we have a couple folks working on designing our whole new, our own device which will be based off that same tube that measures alpha, beta and gamma and it'll be a network connected device that will connect to all sorts of different networks, 3G networks, Wi-Fi networks, any different number of networks. It'll, it's going to be powered by a Reno. It'll have modular pieces. We can plug other things into it to measure other things beyond radiation if and when we want to and it'll just automatically upload new readings to our server like every five minutes or something. So once we get these things made, which is maybe six or eight months down the line, then we're just going to send them all over the place and people just stick them outside their house in place and then they'll over-report back to us and keep track of it. So that's kind of what we're doing with it at the moment. I don't know. That may have been way too short. Yeah, absolutely. So how much do these devices cost and what are you doing to bring prices down? Well, so there's not much you can do to bring prices down because, because the devices are expensive as hell. So we just, we ran a, we had, we got a couple people who chipped in some cash right initially that we were able to like just start doing things with. A lot of people are just kind of buying things on their own. We just did a Kickstarter campaign and made about $37,000. I think it ends sometime this afternoon, but we passed our goal, so we're good. That pays for about 150 counters or so. So that device that I'm passing around, the more made one, that's like $800. Those, that sensor, just the sensor tube inside it itself from like the plant that manufactures it is like 220 bucks. Just on its own. So the way Geiger tubes work is it's a pretty simple thing, but it's kind of complex to design is it's, it's an almost vacuum filled with like a very specific combination of noble gases that both explode and extinguish depending on what particles are flying through them at any given moment. So, and then like a receiver that counts how many little explosions there are that goes through and then calculations after the fact, but maintaining that, that sensor devices, getting that set up correctly is, is kind of pricey. So we're, we're working on a couple of grants as well with this. So the team is, so it's this, like I say, this, this webshop in Portland called Uncorked. And there's a couple of guys there. It's not the entire, the entire guys, it was just a few of the guys there who were sort of jumped on and tackled it with us. There's me, there's Joey Ito, Ray Ozzie, and Dan Sinfu is running this thing. There's a guy named Bunny who you may have heard of from hacking Xboxes and Chumbies and things. He's heading up our hardware piece and there's a guy Peter on the ground in Tokyo who is organizing all the volunteers who are driving around to schools and stuff to track this stuff. And then, yeah, that's sort of the core team of people who are all kind of volunteering to do stuff as we can at the moment. Yeah. Has anything come of the information that you've been publishing in Japan? Well, there hasn't, there hasn't. So we've just started publishing stuff in the past few weeks. And the Japanese government has made two statements which are completely unrelated. They should never be combined at all. They're two independent statements. And the first of which is that there's this thing, it's kind of like a press club in our sort of connotation. But if you're not a member of the press club, you're not considered an actual media and you don't get into press conferences. So you have, like everybody who is a journalist joins this thing and that's like how they're allowed to go to any official press conference or anything. Like basically you can't be a journalist if you're not in this organization. So the two statements that were made were that anybody who reports any radiation numbers that are not official will be instantly kicked out of the press clubs. And then the second completely, don't tie these two together, they're separate, is any number that we didn't tell you is not official. So the press is kind of like hands tied in a whole lot of it. So what we're doing is, you know, we're doing it online. I'm not a part of the Japanese press club so I don't really care about getting admission to any of that. You know, bloggers and people on Twitter and Hacker Spaces and all of these people are sort of doing what they can to get the readings out of it. First of all, it's really to try to get stuff to the people in the cities around there because radiation is a really kind of scary thing in Japanese culture for obvious reasons. And it's invisible and you just don't know. And so people are sort of like, I just want to know. Like if it's good, I want to know if it's bad. I just want some answers that I'm not sitting here just like freaking out. And so, you know, when we've been giving these counters to people, the first thing they're doing is taking them and like sticking them on themselves. Like that's their immediate like first reaction is like, am I radioactive? And unfortunately those things, I mean, that's not the way it works. You need other equipment to find out if you're actually screwed or not. But you know, I mean, that's kind of like a slice of the psychology of how concerned and freaked out people are. That's the thing they want to know is like, are they already dead and they just don't know it. I know we all laughed with that statement about Geiger counters in Ohio. But it seems sort of implied that perhaps we cannot necessarily trust official numbers or they may not even exist. So maybe your project implies creating a citizen network of radiation. Japan is definitely the sort of start of this. But assuming this all works and assuming that we don't lose like, you know, all of our cash that we possibly have doing Japan and exhaust any output. We realize that there's a need for this everywhere. There's no independent source of radiation data anywhere. And the problem is that there's counts per minute, there's microceverts, there's nanoceverts, there's grays. There's like 15 different ways that radiation is tracked. And they're not really easy to calculate from one to the other. And so it's really, really confusing system. And so part of what we want to do, so we want to get this network. And that's why we're building this device, because it'll be outside of the actual sensor piece as cheap as possible. And then we're going to get, we're going to do a little bit of like sort of one laptop per child model, get them out there, get grants, get rid of some of them. One Geiger counter for child. Exactly. But I mean like lots of different ways to sort of get those out there. And once we're actually manufacturing them, we'll be able to sort of deal with a bunch of the cost on that as much as possible. And then, yeah, we'll try to get them everywhere, because that information, it's not like that information is everywhere except Japan, like nobody has that data. So if we can open that up and make that available for anybody, anywhere, then that's a good thing. And so that's sort of the plan. Yeah. So I guess my question is about... Can we do the wireless for questions so they show up on the... Yeah. So I don't really know what 9,000 units means. Right. How are you deciding to, I guess, educate people about what... What do those relative numbers mean and where is the lethal cutoff? Right. So that's a very important question and one that I am not qualified or prepared to answer. I'm not a nuclear scientist. I'm not a doctor. I don't want to get into where I'm making statements that I can't back up because I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. I can read a measurement and accurately say this says 20. I'm pretty sure that I'm right. That thing actually says 20, but what 20 means, what anything else means, I don't know. But a lot of people don't know and at least knowing some piece that you don't know is better than not knowing anything. And so we want to get that out there and then you want to point to other people who have made statements on it. So we're collecting universities who have made studies. We have like, okay, this is what the legal limit, if you're a nuclear worker in Japan, is on a yearly basis. Oh, this is 300 times over that, probably a concern. I don't know what that means. Is that insurance? I don't know what that means specifically, but when those numbers are being crossed, that's something that people should be aware of. So then if we give them the data, then they can sort of make their own decision about how concerning they are or not or whatever. But at least they have the information and can do research and we're going to try to provide links to people who have done more research and know what they're doing. But I don't want to get into saying some number is safe or not because I don't know. On the set that you guys are building, is there a corollary customer app where people in Japan can install an app and they can see what the radiation reported in their area was? Well, yes sir, I mean that's on a separate thing. We're working on a couple of different mobile apps for different platforms and all sorts of things that will do that. One will show whatever the most recent stuff is from our map on our site that we've taken. There's a girl named Haiyan who is the lead data visualization at IDEO and she's doing all of our maps and all of our data and everything. So she's sort of taking all of this crazy amounts of numbers and making it make sense on a map for us and that should be together very shortly. Right now we just have a whole bunch of Google points which is a little overwhelming at times. So that should be a little more clear and then the mobile stuff should play into that as well. So you can sort of see where you're at and what's been pulled around you recently. But we're also opening, I mean we're putting all of the data, we're publishing it all with a CC0 designation. So it's open for anybody to do anything with at any point. So once it's out there and it's starting to be now, anybody can build any apps on top of it or they can reference it. They can do whatever they want with it as soon as it's out there. So there's nothing to stop anybody else from building those things at all. But every point of data has the actual measurement that measurement calculated into other common measurements. Latitude, longitude, altitude, which is something that's a big issue. So we realize that looking at this, so here's a good example of that. So me, so this thing, this guy that was being passed around, everybody saw. Putting it on here, it goes to 60. Putting it down here, it's at 70, 60, 78. Radiation particles are heavy, they fall down. So surfaces are always heavier, like more than what's above. The number that is here is going to be less than or more than it is out there. So we were able to find out that all the government readings that they're publishing are from six meters above the ground. So that's very, very different than ground level where kids are playing, which is the number that we were taking. So that the altitude of where the reading is actually taken is going to be part of the fee, as well as the device that was used, the tube, the sensor that's in it. All of these pieces are going to be in our data that everybody can build whatever on top of our reference and cross-reference. So you'll be able to take that feed and say, I don't want any of the readings that came from Russian salvage stuff. I only want to see stuff that's from these other sensors and then be able to take a look at what that is and then you'll be able to pull in other pieces and see what it looks like with that. Are you publishing your raw data or just like a service that people can do? Yeah, we're publishing the raw data. Yeah, we're publishing logs with all of it. And then we're creating an API for that that you can do everything on top of. Are you publishing that on GitHub? Yeah, we have some GitHub stuff right now. The problem is that we have AfterSpace in Tokyo, Developers in Portland, all these people, and they all have their favorite flavor of where to publish things and all this stuff that we're trying to sort of tie together with the majority of the people being volunteer, you know, like saying, don't use your favorite thing, use this other thing. People are like putting on my own thing. And so everybody's kind of doing their pieces and we're putting it together and trying to tie that up. Any other questions?