(no subject)

[cuddlefish]

(7:26:59 PM) Yang: Oooh
(7:27:13 PM) Yang: Half-Life 2: Orange Box will be $25 at Best Buy this Fri/Sat
(7:27:20 PM) Yang: I am so there.
(7:56:34 PM) Me: You're getting Half-Life? [This surprised me because I assume Half-Life has something to do with nuclear weapons, possible nuclear winter, and Yang and me have both talked about how that scares us deep down inside]
(7:58:34 PM) Yang: Yeah, but only for the articles

...

L2 was down for the better part of the day last Wednesday and I...really didn't hesitate to jump to RO. Bam. New server. People are nicer. They drop more awesome junk in town (6 Ring of Minor Spirits etc. dropped all at once by someone who I guess DIDN'T NEED THEM) and they invite more people to join their guilds. I'll still play L2. I'm not done with L2. It's just astonishing how much I can find to do in RO, too.

Comments

[moumusu.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know, I've read some things that discuss how inconvenient nuclear waste is because the materials have long half-lives.

Why would they talk about halves, though? Why not just the whole sample? Does the rate of decay change at some point?

[the-olive.livejournal.com]

So if you start with a sample of 1 kg, after one half-life, you have 1/2 kg. Then after two half-lives, you have 1/4 kg, then after three you have 1/8 kg, and so forth. Radioactive decay happens at a rate of 50% of the sample per half-life, rather than, say, a constant 1 kg per hour. They don't use the whole life because the whole-life is infinite, and thus unhelpful.

Soooo in one sense, the rate of decay changes constantly, from 1/2 kg per hour to 1/4 kg per hour and so on, and in another sense, it's constant- each atom always has a 50% chance of decay per half-life.

[rune-devros.livejournal.com]

N = N_o * e^(-l*t)

Yay for exponential decay laws.

[moumusu.livejournal.com]

DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD: I don't even know what the letter stand forrrrrrrrrrrrr

[moumusu.livejournal.com]

O-oh. I think I understood that for a second...so radioactive stuff...lasts forever? But it gets really small so it's not a problem. ._.

[rune-devros.livejournal.com]

The way exponential decay works is the decay rate (how fast the atoms are "converting" is the best way to put it, the actual mechanics of that are... complicated) is really fast but slows down the less stuff there is. You start with a very rapid decrease in amount of your sample at the beginning, but one of the properties of an exponential curve is that it doesn't ever ever every go to zero (until you extend time to infinity). However, for all our purposes at some point the radiation becomes so small it won't even register in our detectors.