This is one of those things I would have never thought about, if I hadn’t discovered the SDMB. The idea that there is more than one common usage of this phrase. I’d always heard it:
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
Did a quick google on the version I’m familiar with and found this column.
I would just point out that the apparatus shown in lemur’s post looks suspiciously like a magnetic sector mass spectrometer, and in order to work properly, would have to be operated at a vacuum of <1 x 10-5 torr, which would kill the woodchuck.
I think you mean my post, since Lemur’s is to an Aplodontia.
Since the method requires ionizing the woodchuck, its survival of the process is unlikely.
From the site:
As the site notes, testing the proposition will require the construction of a woodchuck/timber collider 30 km in diameter.
Hey! You were right by me - I live off Route 62.
Anyway, I’d concur that it was a woodchuck.
Also, you said:
A river runs parallel to Route 62 for quite a ways. You can’t always see it but it’s there. I forget how far west it goes - it comes up from Beverly and follows 62 into Danvers.
Glad you missed the whatever-it-was. The other day I was driving down Route 1 into Boston and saw something waggle its way to the right-hand lane (where I was) and I saw it was either a woodchuck or a 'possum and I started beeping and shouting, “NO, NO!!” Thank god the critter stopped. I probably would have had to stop and throw up if I had hit it.