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Comment Re:OK, X-Rays are banned (Score 1) 225

Do you have any evidence that it is harmful? Because I have not seen anything convincing. Let's look at some facts:
  1. - Frequencies used in security applications have a water penetration depth of on average 0.3mm. So any potential damage is limit to surface layers of skin.
  2. - A purely mathematical model suggests that photon energies involved have a potential to break bonds in the loaclized sites of the DNA helix which may interfer with RNA transcription. No practical experiments have been done to confirm this.
  3. - Probabilty of these photon interactions is extremely small due to the tiny photoelectric cross section of the bond sites.
  4. - You're body is exposed to orders of magnitude more radiation which is actually ionizing from cosmic and terestrial sources daily.

Comment Stunt Island (Score 1) 172

One of the best games of the early 90s was Disney's Stunt Island. You could either just play the game as a stunt pilot or better yet was the sandbox mode where you could set up stunts, perform and film them and then edit them with sound effects and music. It was an extremely creative game.
I believe it's available as abandonware now: http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/287/Stunt+Island.html

Comment Equatorial surface temperature (Score 1) 223

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet) shows the equatorial rotation velocity as 10.892 km/h. So the train would need to travel that fast to keep out of the Sun. That number is reduced by the cosine of the latitude so at 85 north, it would be just under 1 km/h. Of course teperature cycling would be enormous. Wikipedia gives the range as [100K 700K] at the equator and [80K 380K] at 85 latitude. What material can withstand that heat expansion and remain true? I wonder if a space station in mercury's L4 Lagrange point would be feasable? Is Mercury's L4 still withini Mercury's umbra?

Comment Re:Well? (Score 0) 981

Because you are negleting the order of birth. You are counting, for example, "Older boy on Monday, younger boy on Tuesday" and "Younger boy on Monday, older boy on Tuesday" as the same event and they are not.

The correct enumeration of events are as follows:

If older boy is born on tuesday:

7 possibilities of younger girls
7 possibilities of younger boys

If older boy is not born on Tuesday

7 possibilities of younger girls
6 possibilities of younger boys (because you have been told that at least one boy was born on tuesday)

There are 27 total possible events, 13 of which are both boys.

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