[time-nuts] Variation in Radioactive Decay Rate with Solar Activity

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <4E39C16D.9020809 at pacific.net>, Brooke Clarke writes:

>Yes.  I think using the isotope with the shortest half-life will make 
>for the most sensitive measurement, nest pas?

Not so fast, or rather: not too fast.  You need to be able to detect
as high a percentage of all events as possible, so high activity is
bad because you run into detector dead-time and double events.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.