h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

hi gullibility personified,
i came across one of your guidebook entries, and i'd really like to know where you got your info from. i'm doing research on a similar topic. it's the one about egyptian tomb traps. can you get back to me as soon as you can?? (i hope you still check this site out every now and then...)
cheers,
something_clever

wow! Never did I think someone would want to know more about Egyptian tomb traps! How exciting

I'll just go and hunt through my junior high school records...

Here is my bibliography (thank goodness that was a habit instilled into me early on!)

http://dig.archaeology.org/drdig/egypt/6.html
www.alchemylab.com/history_of_alchemy.htm#EgyptianAlchemy
www.newscientist.com/ns/1999023/newstory3.html
http://guardians.net/hawass/mortuary1.htm
www.magicmakers.com/egyptsite/skeleton.html


A random article I found in my research:
Pharaohs left behind a radioactive curse

FORGET FATAL FUNGI and diabolical booby traps. Some of Egypt's ancient monuments harbour a more insidious threat--they contain high levels of the radioactive gas radon.

Jaime Bigu of Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, and researchers with the Atomic Energy Authority of Egypt in Cairo looked at seven ancient monuments. Three had potentially hazardous radon concentrations. The highest level--5809 becquerels of radon per cubic metre--was in the Sakhm Khat Pyramid at Saggara, south of Cairo. Nearby, there were 1202 becquerels per cubic metre in the Abbis Tunnels and 816 becquerels per cubic metre in the Serapeum Tomb.

Radon is produced by the decay of uranium in the ground and in rocks used to build the monuments. High levels increase the risk of lung cancer. Britain's National Radiological Protection Board, for example, recommends that homes with radon concentrations above 200 becquerels per cubic metre should install fans to disperse the gas.

In the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity (vol 47, p 245), Bigu recommends improving ventilation at the three sites. Guides currently work inside the monuments for around four hours a day. But if their working hours doubled they would exceed the international safety limit for workers of 20 millisieverts a year.

Visitors are not at risk. But concentrations of radon would have been much higher when the sites were opened. "The high radon levels may not have caused the Curse of Tutankhamen," says Murdoch Baxter, editor of the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, "but it probably won't have done those early Egyptologists much good.
Rob Edwards

From New Scientist, 23 October 1999

Hope some of that is useful! Sorry, I assumed no one wrote to me on here any more, and been busy with uni, so didn't check I loved that assignment - so much fun! I built a model tomb with little traps and all sorts of things Good luck with everything!

Thanks!
I haven't been on here in ages, but just checked on to see if there was any reply from you. Actually, I'm still sort of researching it, and I never could find anything about the head wires. Too bad.
Hope university is going well for you!
Cheers

No, nor had I - but it's nice to get a reply! What level are you researching it at (like, high school, college, uni...?). I don't know where you'd find out more! I guess it's a little too obscure. Maybe a museum? Certainly not one I can think of near me with a big display about Egyptian tomb traps! Perhaps with head wires its easier just to imagine . Although it always did puzzle me about how fast someone would have to be walking in order to have enough force behind them to cut their head right off. Also, I guess they would have had to have used an average height, but no dought there were the unexpectedly tall and short, who ended up with unfortunate lines across their foreheads or shoulders.

nope, keep going. graduated uni. this is for a media project. true about the headwires. it's sort of fun to think there really were indiana jones style traps. seems mostly made-up tho.

Hehe, but if you can't find anything out about it, who's to say you're wrong? Not that I think you should just write it to see who you can believe it! Media project? Awesome...would have been good when I'd been doing my assignment...althought I loved picking that topic do deliberately flummox my teacher...(where did my sense of academic adventure go? I hate that at uni tests and assignments are so ingloriously recycled that one girl was devastated that a lecturer had changed an assignment, and wondered "What kind of lecturer actually CHANGES an assignment??" lol!).