Starship Asterisk*

bystander wrote:

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.”>>

Beyond wrote:
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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McElligot%27s_Pool wrote:
<<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.>>

Beyond wrote:Stay away from radioactive pools!

Beyond wrote:Beyond also wrotes:

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

• 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

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

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

bystander wrote:Ships

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

http://satirist.org/whale/2008/10/13.html wrote:
The basic theory behind allowing Lehman Brothers to fail:

• "A sinking boat lifts all tides."

neufer wrote:

bystander wrote:Ships

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

http://satirist.org/whale/2008/10/13.html wrote:
The basic theory behind allowing Lehman Brothers to fail:

• A sinking boat lifts all tides.

• 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

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

bystander wrote: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

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

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

• 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

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