xkcd: What If?

[owlice]

Oh bystander, that's great!! Thanks for posting it!

[Beyond]

It's nice to hear that there's at least one reactor that would be hard for terrorists to get into!

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Spent Fuel Pool

• <<For the kinds of radiation coming off spent nuclear fuel, every 7 centimeters of water cuts the amount of radiation in half. So, as far as swimming safety goes, the bottom line is that you’d probably be ok, as long as you didn’t dive to the bottom or pick up anything strange.
  
  But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool. “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”>>

The bad news is that Wikipedia states that every 7 INCHES of water cuts the amount of radiation in half.

The good news is that lead is 18 times more effective that water in radiation shielding...so gunshot might actually help the situation (accordingto the NRA).

[Beyond]

Hmm... on the one hand, lead. It will kill you s-l-o-w-l-y, unless fired at you, which may kill you quicker. On the other hand, radiation poisoning will kill you s-l-o-w-l-y, unless you get a BIG dose, which may kill you fast enough so you don't hurt to much. The only real choice... is to STAY AWAY FROM THE POOL, Stupid

[neufer]

Hmm... on the one hand, lead. It will kill you s-l-o-w-l-y, unless fired at you, which may kill you quicker. On the other hand, radiation poisoning will kill you s-l-o-w-l-y, unless you get a BIG dose, which may kill you fast enough so you don't hurt to much. The only real choice... is to STAY AWAY FROM THE POOL, Stupid

<<McElligot's Pool is a 1947 children's book by Dr. Seuss.

It is a tale of a boy named Marco who is ridiculed for fishing in a small, polluted pool. In typical Seussian fashion, when confronted with the limitations of his situation, the young boy imagines ways in which he could catch any number of any kind of fish in the small pool.

The simple story features many Seussian themes, including the imaginative boy and his fantastic fancied fish. However, it is far more repetitive than his later works. The illustrations are shaded colored pencil rather than the later pen and ink which defined his style. Marco's mind goes from the logical to the ridiculous and Dr. Seuss provides fanciful images of fish as a child would imagine them by their name alone.>>

Marco Neuendorffer

[Beyond]

Stay away from radioactive pools!

Beyond also wrotes:

And pools with BIG fish stories attached to them. The side-splitting laughter can be hazardous to your health

[bystander]

Interplanetary Cessna

• What would happen if you tried to fly a normal Earth airplane above different Solar System bodies? — Glen Chiacchieri

[bystander]

FedEx Bandwidth

• When - if ever - will the bandwidth of the Internet surpass that of FedEx? — Johan Öbrink
  
  Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. — Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981

[bystander]

Hubble

• If the Hubble telescope were aimed at the Earth, how detailed would the images be? — Kyle Rankin

[bystander]

Ships

• How much would the sea level fall if every ship were removed all at once from the Earth's waters? — Michael Toje

[neufer]

Ships

• How much would the sea level fall if every ship were removed all at once from the Earth's waters? — Michael Toje

The basic theory behind allowing Lehman Brothers to fail:

• "A sinking boat lifts all tides."

Note: The above statement is a Woozle.

[Beyond]

Ships

• How much would the sea level fall if every ship were removed all at once from the Earth's waters? — Michael Toje

The basic theory behind allowing Lehman Brothers to fail:

• A sinking boat lifts all tides.

I use Tide Free. It's free of all skin irritants, like ships, crustaceans and the like. It may have helped Lehman Brothers 'clean-up-their-act' before they failed, IF they had used it.

[bystander]

Twitter

• How many unique English tweets are possible? How long would it take for the
  population of the world to read them all out loud? — Eric H., Hopatcong, NJ

[Ann]

140 characters may not seem like a lot, but we will never run out of things to say.

(Reminds me of a Swedish-American astronomer whose name I have forgotten, who tried to estimate how large and full of stuff the universe had to be before it would be forced to repeat itself - to the point, indeed, of coming up with an Earth exactly like our own and with people like us - indeed, with you and you and you and me, apparently!)

Ann

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Twitter

• How many unique English tweets are possible? How long would it take for the population of the world to read them all out loud? — Eric H., Hopatcong, NJ

[Ann]

Right, after a billion tries, a monkey might write, "To be, or not to be, that is the Guzornenplan." (Or whatever that word was.)

It reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges' The Library of Babel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Librar ... ot_summary wrote:
Borges's narrator describes how his universe consists of an enormous expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival—and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just a few basic characters (23 letters, spaces and punctuation marks). Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. The narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages. Conversely, for many of the texts some language could be devised that would make it readable with any of a vast number of different contents.

Despite — indeed, because of — this glut of information, all books are totally useless to the reader, leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. This leads some librarians to superstitions and cult-like behaviour, such as the "Purifiers", who arbitrarily destroy books they deem nonsense as they scour through the library seeking the "Crimson Hexagon" and its illustrated, magical books. Another is the belief that since all books exist in the library, somewhere one of the books must be a perfect index of the library's contents; some even believe that a messianic figure known as the "Man of the Book" has read it, and they travel through the library seeking him

What a perfect dream, and what a nightmare. But in Borges' library, there would be all the works of Shakespeare, and some versions of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet that were even better than the ones by Shakespeare (DeVere).

Ann

[rstevenson]

John Lennon probably came out of one of those hexagonal rooms with his story, "Snore Wife And Some Several Dwarts". And we'll never know if it's supposed to be like that.

Rob

[bystander]

Hair Dryer

• What would happen if a hair dryer with continuous power was turned on
  and put in an airtight 1x1x1 meter box? — Dry Paratroopa

[Beyond]

I never realized a hair dryer could be so dangerous, other than to frizz out your hair.

th--2.jpg (3.94 KiB) Viewed 5373 times

But according to how this guy talks, at some point, you could actually set your hair on fire.

thCAPLIJ6W.jpg (4.48 KiB) Viewed 5373 times

Even though he goes way beyond just setting your hair on fire, I'm out of pictures.

[bystander]

Cornstarch

• How much cornstarch can I rinse down the drain before unpleasant things start to happen? — Anna R., Fort Wayne, IN

[bystander]

Supersonic Stereo

• What if you somehow managed to make a stereo travel at twice the speed of sound, would it
  sound backwards to someone who was just casually sitting somewhere as it flies by? — Tim Currie

[emc]

it provides a new meaning to the term "boombox"

[bystander]

Voyager

• With today's technology, would it be possible to launch an unmanned mission to retrieve Voyager I? — Elliott Bennett

[emc]

i just hope the Voyagers aren’t going to be violating any intergalactic federation territorial treaties… at this lowly stage in our development, i don’t expect we would be able to appease any civilization that would generate such a treaty… of course we should have an out since no one informed us of a treaty, but then again there’s no telling what to expect when it comes to space aliens...

[geckzilla]

How about accidentally sending an entire civilization's planet into nuclear winterl?