The Cobalt-60 in that cinnamon stick has a half-life of about 5 years. It says it was made in 1963 so with the drop in radioactivity you’ve probably got a few months left to live!
12 half lives is 4096x drop in radioactivity.
Which is why they have a few months to live, and not a few minutes.
Your overestimating the lethality of radiation. The “Demon Core” guy lasted 9 days. The firefighters from Chernobyl lasted a month. The only criticality events that I can find with immediate fatalities also involve steam explosions.
For those who know, steam is scarier than radiation or fire.
I’m just explaining the joke.
The sensor noise would be distributed evenly, and not clustered around the rod like bees.
Why not? Isn’t most of the radiation coming from the rod itself? I’d expect a vertical, high-intensity cloud over the rod, which gets less intense the further it goes to the left and to the right of it.
The high frequency of the gamma radiation mostly ignores the relatively thin lens material, you have to be very very close for the geometry of the sensor and source and their alignment to significantly impact the noise in the image
