It is highly radioactive with alpha decay, so much that the metal containers used to hold it become hot to the touch. It has been used as a heat source in satellites. You had better hope that the container has a good tight seal because it is a very fine dust and the alpha decay gives the dust particles a static electric charge. This means that it will creep out of its container, even through a screw thread. I have no doubt that whoever handled it has spread it all over themselves and all over wherever they have been and whoever they have been in contact with.

Alpha radation is not normally dangerous as even paper is thick enough to block it, but if the dust particles enter the system Po210 is so radioactive that it will immediately start to kill any cells it comes into contact with. It has a half life of 138 days, long enough for even a fraction of a gram to do its work. Po210 decays into Lead206 which is stable and would be undetectable given that any resident of an industrial society has accumulated lead from petrol, pait and oher sources.

The presence of Thallium isotopes suggets that this batch was made in a reactor, probably by bombarding Bismuth with neutrons. It might be posible for someone with access to a research reactor – say a post-doc student – to make a small amount but usually management of a reactor is so tight that the management would need to be aware of it.

More than a gram or so of Po210 will glow in the dark with blue Cherenkov radiation, so it tends to draw attention to itself.

An interesting possibility is that the dose could have been inhaled as a gas – Radon 222 (Rn222). With a half life of 3.8 days this decays into a series of very short lived daughter products each of which is quite radioactive. After less than seven days the Rn222 gas would only exist in the body as Po210, but there would be no thallium, just bismuth and lead isotopes

As for cannonical examples, what about Hillary’ s”vast right-wing conspiracy” to bring down the Clinton presidency. She was ridiculed right and left for that, and even most of those who tried to support her hemmed and hawed about the C word. Does anyone now doubt that she was correct in her inferences? Some quibble about “vast” – more precisely, some simply do not believe in “vast” conspiracies and dismiss what Hillary said simply because of that verbiage. But “vast” in a context like this is too vague a term to decide anything. What is vast? It is a noiseword, but its real function is to lend a melodramatic tone. This leads to skepticism as people tend to reflexively reject things expressed in melodramatic language unless that language confirms what they already believe (hence, in the American mainstream, describing the villiany of bin laden melodramatically does not produce skepticism, but speaking melodramatically about Bush’s undermining of the Constitution would only fly fairly far left. For the others, it does not “ring true”, it is not “plausible”, meaning it is not compatible with their existing beliefs. Melodrama reinforces beliefs; it cannot create them). None of this, though, has anything to do with argument, only with rhetoric.

But these two adages are not, in fact, treated equally in our culture at the present time. Go read the wikipedia entries for Hanlon’s Razor and Cui Bono. The latter has many paragraphs expressing qualification and skepticism regarding its applicability to politics; the former has none of this. Try to make the Hanlon’s entry more balanced and you will have an edit war. Because both of biases of the intellectuals and the interest of the powerful in discrediting skepticism of officially-promulgated truth (as astrongmaybe pointed out in #85). Our proverbial “wisdom” has too much Hanlon and not enough Cui bono.

Doctors have determined him to have been poisoned with,”a poison unknown to civilian medicine”

Speculation is running rampant as to whether or not this is connected to the Russian spy killed by radiation.

Anatoly Chubais, the influential head of Russia’s state electricity company and a longtime associate of Gaidar’s, connected the former premier’s illness with Litvinenko’s death and the recent murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, suggesting the Kremlin’s enemies were behind all three.

But how many people in the world took a shot at an American president? Certainly if would’ve been even more weird if the guy was a H&R Block accountant from Peoria.

It’s not asymmetrical, it is proverbial reasoning. The equal and opposite proverb is ‘qui bono?’.

Deciding which of the two contradictory principles applies is an exercise in skill and judgement.

The fact that you can’t accurately describe how to thrive in the the world with 40 bytes of ASCII text is the reason evolution has so far been unable to optimise out the human brain and replace it with a radically simpler mechanism.