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短回答环节
Q. If my printer could literally print out money, would it have that big an effect on the world?
Q．如果我的打印机能够打印出纸币，这会对世界有多大影响？
-Derek O'Brien
——德雷克•奥布里安
A. YOU CAN FIT FOUR bills on an 8.5" × 11" sheet of paper.
A．在一张8.5英寸×11英寸1的信纸上能够放下4张纸币。
If your printer can manage one page (front and back) of full-color high-quality printing per minute, that's $200 million dollars a year.
如果你的打印机1分钟能够打印出1张纸大小正反面高质量全彩色图像，那么一年下来就能印出2亿美元。
This is enough to make you very rich, but not enough to put any kind of dent in the world economy. Since there are 7.8 billion $100 bills in circulation, and the lifetime of a $100 bill is about 90 months, that means there are about a billion produced each year. Your extra two million bills a year would barely be enough to notice.
这些钱足够让你过上富裕的生活，但对于全球经济来说简直是九牛一毛。全世界在流通的100美元纸币有78亿张，一张100美元纸币的使用时间大约为90个月，所以每年要印刷约10亿张百元大钞，而你自己印出来的额外的200万张基本没人会注意到。
Q. What would happen if you set off a nuclear bomb in the eye of a hurricane? Would the storm cell be immediately vaporized?
Q．如果你在台风眼里引爆一颗核弹会发生什么？风暴中心会被立刻气化吗？
-Rupert Bainbridge (and hundreds of others)
——鲁珀特•班布里奇（以及其他许多人）
A. THIS QUESTION GETS SUBMITTED a lot.
A．许多人都提过这个问题。
It turns out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-the agency that runs the National Hurricane Center-gets it a lot, too. In fact, they're asked about it so often that they've published a response.
令人意外的是，美国国家海洋和大气管理局——同时也是管理国家飓风中心的组织——也多次被问到这个问题。后来他们也受不了了，于是发表了一个回复。
I recommend you read the whole thing,1 but I think the last sentence of the first paragraph says it all:
我建议你把那份回复完整地看一遍，2a但我相信回复中第一段的最后一句话已经很好地给出答案了：
“Needless to say, this is not a good idea.”
“不用说，这不是一个好主意。”
It makes me happy that an arm of the US government has, in some official capacity, issued an opinion on the subject of firing nuclear missiles at hurricanes.
美国政府的一个部门居然对“向飓风发射核弹”这一问题发表了官方看法，这很是让我开心。
Q. If everyone put little turbine generators on the downspouts of their houses and businesses, how much power would we generate? Would we ever generate enough power to offset the cost of the generators?
Q．如果每个人都在自家和商店的落水管底部装上小型涡轮发电机，这样能够产生多少电力？产生的电力能够赚回安装发电机的钱吗？
-Damien
——达米安
