More fun with time-lapse photography
Daily Archives: April 19, 2010
Games People Play
I don’t play, so I don’t know if the first rule about Farmville is Don’t Talk About Farmville!
As you advance through Farmville, you begin earning rewards that allow you to play Farmville less. Harvesting machines let you click four squares at once, and barns and coops let you manage groups of animals simultaneously, saving you hundreds of tedious mouse-clicks. In other words, the more you play Farmville the less you have to play Farmville. For such a popular game, this seems suspicious.
Colonel Mustard, In the Lab, With a Lead Ingot
Roman ingots to shield particle detector
Lead is, in principle, a shield against radiation, but freshly mined lead is itself slightly radioactive because it contains an unstable isotope, lead-210. “We could never use it for our experiment, which is exactly about keeping background radioactivity to a minimum,” says Ettore Fiorini, a physicist at the University of Milan-Bicocca and coordinator of the CUORE experiment. After it is extracted from the ground, however, lead-210 decays into more stable isotopes, with the concentration of the radioactive isotope halving every 22 years. The lead in the Roman ingots has now lost almost all traces of its radioactivity.