(For reasons unclear to me, Mixed States doesn't seem to pick up scheduled posts in the RSS feed, even after they're published. I don't know if other RSS aggregators have the same problem, but if you were wondering what happened to the promised True Lab Story, here it is.)
A question from yesteerday's final exam, paraphrased slightly:
Element X decays into Element Y with a half-life of 30 minutes. You are given a sample containing three times as many atoms of Y as X. If the initial sample was pure X, how long ago was it prepared?
One student wrote:
It seems like a lifetime ago...
(He also did the work to obtain the correct answer, namely two half lives, or one hour, so he got full credit. That beats out his classmate, who offered Final Four picks in lieu of an answer to one problem...)
And now I am done, done, done with my classes for this term.
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Looking into it. Bizarre.
Ok, I just added it by hand, but I'm going to need to do some more testing. The feed set up and ScienceBlogs is very odd. The link over to FeedBurner works very slowly and, for some reason, your feed does not appear like the rest of the feeds from ScienceBlogs do. For some reason, my computer (browser and wget) can grab your feed, but it appears to be without any data. No text at all. I grabbed it from elsewhere, though.
I put an update to the software that I've been holding back on the server but I don't this this will prevent future problems. But I've got your feed on my hard drive and I'm going to put it through the ringer here on my system sometime tomorrow or this weekend.
Thanks for looking into this. I'll pass it on to the ScienceBlogs developer, too-- there's a lot of tinkering going on backstage, and it's entirely possible that something has been screwed up in the process.
I hope he submits the problem for extra credit in Engish class.
2 * HalfLife = 1 Whole Life?
If this student's sense of humor and ability to think out of the box is as good as this indicates, I'd offer him an assistantship.