A dastardly X-ray puzzle....

[X-ray]

I am trying to bring back some excitement in the students' lives. I've been giving them little challenges here and there and some rewards, but now I want to do something special. I want to give them an unusual puzzle to solve (it has to involve the skilful use of an X-ray machine). This is one of the things I have been thinking about doing:

I can make a wooden box with a set of ramps and contacts inside. There will be a steel ball inside, and depending on the tilt of the box this ball could close some circuits or be trapped in a compartment. I can mask some of the compartments with lead strips and then give the students the sealed unit to X-ray in order to figure out which way to tilt it to achieve a certain objective. I could mount this box on a jig that allows for precise lifting of the box per corner.

Do you dudes and dudettes have any other ideas for a most cunning and dastardly puzzle, something that involves a bit of noggin and X-ray imaging to solve? I was also thinking of raising the stakes: maybe I could rig a wire to the student and if they tilt that box wrong and the ball makes a fatal contact, the student can get a mild (or somewhat mild) electric shock  :evilgrin:

There will of course be suitable prizes, paid for by the qualified radiographers...but I want this to be quite a challenge.

[x56h34]

How about swallowing a penny? Who ever x-rays you and pinpoints the penny wins. :-)

[X-ray]

he he

Even if I went along with that, it would be far too easy for them.

[PMC]

Okay, they've got to guess the exact currency denomination and the year of minting.

[X-ray]

"...Okay, they've got to guess the exact currency denomination and the year of minting..."
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 :lol:

Actually, I would be the big loser in that contest because these guys and girls are keen and would probably demand that I crap through a mesh to prove what coin it was. They know me to be dastardly and wouldn't put it past me to swallow a South African coin and not say anything about non-British currency being used.

Nah, people can't be X-rayed for the sake of a puzzle. I need an inanimate puzzle that I can reproduce for at least three sets of students exactly. I'm not swallowing anything and I'm not letting the students X-ray ME, no sir...

[metalman]

steel densitys are between 7 to 8 gm/cc, too easy to find

Use various materials for construction of the box (In layers)

wood densitys are between .45 to .7 gm/cc
leather density =.945 gm/cc
acrylic density = 1.18 gm/cc
polyurethane density =1.00 gm/cc
Aluminum density = 2.6 to 2.7 gm/cc

Use springs, weights, strings, to open or close interior openings so they vary depending on box position.

That would makes it more of a challange

[metalman]

Include some gas lantern mantels in different areas, they are naturally radioactive because of the thorium and would really confuse them to have naturasl gamma ray sources inside to box!!!!!!!

Might make the X-rays a little fuzzy!

[metalman]

You could make a 3-d maze from 1/2" PVC water pipe using standard Tee's Y's ect, then wrap the pipe with leather in various thicknesses, fill the pipe with a liquid gel, then enclose everything in the a large box partially filled with another gelled liquid of a different density. Object would be to move a ball thru the maze from the entry point to the exit point.

[X-ray]

That's more along the lines of what I want to do. Yup, I will design something with a few pipes and maybe a couple of radio-opaque grates that can be pulled with a string. I'll put a time limit on this. Instead of electric shocks maybe the winner can make the slowest competitor a hat of his/her choice. Could be a dunce cap or a Dr Seuss hat. That'll put some energy into the competition and then at least I don't get accused of molesting students :-)

I hope you work in a private hospital, and you are not wasting my taxes on sillyness. ;-)

[X-ray]

"I hope you work in a private hospital, and you are not wasting my taxes on sillyness"
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Nah, I am always careful to use MY tax contributions in these endeavours. YOURS get spent giving radical clerics free heart operations    :-P

[metalman]

X-ray wrote:

Nah, I am always careful to use MY tax contributions in these endeavours. YOURS get spent giving radical clerics free heart operations    :-P

Hope only 100% swine parts were used in the procedure......

[X-ray]

@ metalman

Well, many of us regard the cardiologists as swines themselves  :lol:
But no, my reference is to a scheduled angioplasty, hasn't been done yet, but the NHS is due to pay for it if the cleric comes back from holiday. It is a minimally-invasive procedure.
But anyway that is another matter. The gist of my post to mdma is that there are indeed questionable expenditures on the NHS, but teaching students via creative means is not one of these. In fact if I total up my contributions (in terms of unpaid tasks, research, lectures etc) they far outweigh the trivial expense of using a few X-ray films to teach the students techniques that can be applied to live forensic cases later. Hell, I even paid the department for a box of 100 films and I am only going to use about 70 of those, so I feel an X-ray party gonna happen with the other 30  :-D

[metalman]

@Xray

I assume your talking about cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed who was arrested in Lebanon today?

I understood the point of your puzzle to be to teach students to read ambiguous xrays. Thats why a moving gel fluid would really mess them up. Density easily varied by adding salt

I have used radioactive materials myself, usually gamma or neutron sources. I have used the gas lantern mantle's as a check source for Geiger-Muller and Scintilliation type gamma ray detectors.

[X-ray]

@ metalman

Yup, I also want them to be able to improvise and adapt their technique to a non-standard condition. Since we aren't allowed to X-ray people (even volunteers) and we don't get cadavers or whole-body phantoms, I have to come up with something from scratch. Otherwise they just observe us with real patients and if they X-ray somebody, they usually have to hand over to us if something non-standard happens.

radiocative stuff: not our bag really. It would fog our films. We do X-rays to locate radiotherapy 'seeds' such as prostatic brachytherapy but that's a very carefully-controlled source. We don't deal with anything that isn't enclosed in a lead carrier or embedded in the patient. Our radiation is strictly electromagnetic.