I have a Geiger Counter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geiger_counter) that measures beta, gamma, and X-ray radiation in counts per minute.

I dont have any strong radioactive sources in my home that I know of, so I assume the Geiger counter is measuring only the natural background radiation in the local environment of the counter. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation)

Some of the background radiation measured comes from the decay of radioactive isotopes in the earth. Another component of the background radiation comes from cosmic rays, originating in outer space.

Average background radiation counts per minute varies somewhat by geographic location. (you can find a map on the internet if you are interested)

However, our atmosphere helps shield us from the cosmic ray component of the background. The Wikipedia article above notes that the city of Denver, Colorado (5200 feet elevation) receives approximately twice the amount of radiation from cosmic rays as a city at sea level.

The raw data file logged by the counter is formatted as a .csv file produced by Microsoft Excel.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values)

The file looks like the following when displayed using the vi text editor. (it may display quite differently in other text editors or in Excel):

GQ Electronics LLC, GMC Data Viewer,Version 2.40

Date Time,uSv/h,CPM,#1,#2,#3,#4,#5,#6,#7,#8,#9,#10,#11,#12,#13,#14,#15,#16,#17,#18,#19,#20,#21,#22,#23,#24,#25,#26,#27,#28,#29,#30,#31,#32,#33,#34,#35,#36,#37,#38,#39,#40,#41,#42,#43,#44,#45,#46,#47,#48,#49,#50,#51,#52,#53,#54,#55,#56,#57,#58,#59,#60,

FEDERAL-WAY,,,

2018-04-06 17:13,Every Minute,16,

2018-04-06 17:14,Every Minute,18,

2018-04-06 17:15,Every Minute,15,

2018-04-06 17:16,Every Minute,15,

There is an option on the Geiger counter to log location data those are the lines in the file that contain the string Federal Way.

After I inspected the log file, I found that every time the location was written to the log file, the Geiger counter skipped logging one or two minutes of data. I turned off the location logging around the end of April in the file, and never turned it back on. I am fairly sure that after the last occurrence in the file of the string Federal Way, every minute of data was correctly written to the log file.

For this project, you are only interested in lines that look like the last few above: The time and date the data was taken, and the number of counts per minute (the integer at the end of the line).

Your program will read a file with the above format named 7_04_18.csv. A link to the file is located under the Resources block in WAMAP.

The file consists of around 3 months of background radiation measurements, one measurement per minute. The first data line in the file shows that at time 17:13 on April 6^th, 2018, 16 radiation events were counted.

For this programming project:

1. Find the maximum number of counts per minute in the file and write all of the data lines to the console that are within 5 counts of the maximum number of counts per minute.

You may print each line to the console exactly as it appears in the file, or write just the date and counts per minute:

Date Counts per minute

5-06-18 35

6-17-18 33

. .

2. For some extra credit print out a histogram graph of the data using ascii characters with System.out.println(). This is a tiny bit more difficult.