Re: xkcd: What If? #29
Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2013 7:29 pm
Oh bystander, that's great!! Thanks for posting it!
APOD and General Astronomy Discussion Forum
https://asterisk.apod.com/
The bad news is that Wikipedia states that every 7 INCHES of water cuts the amount of radiation in half.bystander wrote:Spent Fuel PoolClick to play embedded YouTube video.
- <<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![]()
Marco Neuendorfferhttp://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!
And pools with BIG fish stories attached to them. The side-splitting laughter can be hazardous to your healthBeyond wrote:Beyond also wrotes:
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
Note: The above statement is a Woozle.http://satirist.org/whale/2008/10/13.html wrote:
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.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.
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
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).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