I can’t help but love a text book that has questions like,
And this is all the more fun because my professor wrote the book! That has to be the sweetest deals ever, to make your own book required reading for a course. Anyway, mundane and pointless, but I had to share it with someone. 
My physics book had a question about momentum and photon torpedoes. I thought it was a trick question, because photons (and hence photon torpedoes too) have no mass, and thus no momentum. I asked in CS, and it turned out the name was misleading. They do have mass.
And also: You have three radioactive cookies, an alpha emitter, a beta emitter, and a gamma emitter. You must hold one in your hand, put one in your pocket, and eat one. What should you do?
Eat the beta, of course, but it wouldn’t matter where you put the alpha - an alpha particle doesn’t have enough penetrating power to go through the dead layer of skin. Gamma rays, however, are of concern. Are the pants made of lead?
I think never ever eat an alpha emitter, although the radiation is the weakest in terms of penetration I believe its damage causing capability is 20 times that of beta and gamma sources, so I guess eat the beta, pocket the alpha and hold the gamma in your hand.
No, no, no.
You eat the gamma, since it’s going to go through you anyways.
The alpha emitter will be stopped by the dead layer of skin, so hold that in your hand, and beta rays are generally stopped by the combination of the dead layer of skin, and the usual thickness of clothes one wears, so I’d put the beta-emitter in my pocket.
Bonus question: What do you do if given a neutron emitting cookie?
Put it in a particle accelerator and watch the world end, or something equally catastrophic, but only if it’s in a movie.
Say, “Hey, I wanted an Oreo!”
I like this answer best.
*we were told to throw away the neutron emitter cookie, but YMMV
And then kick your grandmother for trying to kill you with radioactive love.
Showing off my inner geek:
Photons have momentum, but no mass.
Photon Torpedos are pods containing matter and antimatter in magnetic suspension, and have mass, momentum, and generate a metric crapload of photons. (source: ST:TNG Technical Manual).
-DF
Dunk it in milk and offer it to the obnoxious little twerp that lives across the street. Then watch him die of radiation poisoning from Ca-45, Sr-90, and Na-22.
Yeah, I had plans as a kid. All I needed was a little push. I would have made the Columbine shooters look like babes in the forest. Think The Radioactive Boy Scout writ large.
I’ve mellowed out since people have stopped swishing my head in the toliet. Seriously. Now, I just put people I don’t like on the mailing list for the Church of Latter Day Saints.
Stranger
Note: Never, ever give Scarface Z a banana.
Trade deserts with a liberal arts major.
How many Imperial shit-hauls is that?
This appears to be a perfect place to show off my sig.
Ooh, and I could so use a banana right now. It might settle my stomache after that radioactive cookie I just ate.
If I may ask, Why did you choose a banana? Has something whooshed over my head?
The neutron emitter goes into a bucket full of water mixed with Boraxo[sup]TM[/sup]. The water thermalizes the fast neutrons and the Boron atoms absorb them. It’s intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.
My math teacher wrote his own textbook as well. Unfortunately, he writes very matter-of-factly and so there’s no Star Trek references or anything like that.
Although he did tell us an amusing anecdote about a concert hall built in the shape of a parabola for acoustic reasons. The conductor stood at the focus of the parabola, and was deafened by the noise of the audience’s applause being focusd directly towards him. 
Bananas and other fruit naturally high in potassium are radioactive. There’s enough K-41 in normal potassium to be detected with a sensitive gamma detector. This isn’t to say that you should be worried by the dose you’re getting from your peanut butter and banana sammiches, just that radiation is more common than many people realize.
Although I never had the opportunity to do this, at Rolla many times people would run experiements involving radiation measurement inside the reactor enclosure, as the background radiation inside (adjacent to “the pool” was about 15% of ambient radiation (and regardless of whether the reactor was running or not.) You are getting a larger dose from your smoke alarm averaged over a year that you’ll get at the dentist’s office if you went for x-rays every three months. And don’t even get me started on the amount of radioactives put out by a coal-fired power generating plant as opposed to a normally-operating fission plant.
Stranger