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insane_alien

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About insane_alien

  • Birthday 12/17/1987

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  • Location
    Scotland
  • Interests
    oh just about anything. except maths. that is an unspeakable evil.
  • College Major/Degree
    Chemical Engineering (MEng)
  • Favorite Area of Science
    Chemistry
  • Biography
    A few details about me eh? well, i'm bad at writing details about myself for one :P
  • Occupation
    Operations Support Engineer

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  1. Just the person to give me the chemistry story of Pre Cambrian ROCKS

  2. find an empty can, put some grinding media in it an rotate by hand would be the cheapest way.
  3. but linux computers tend to be jucier targets for hacking. servers and such while windows tends to be low value targets such as home computers.
  4. It seems like TYT is objecting more to the hypocrisy of being pro-vietnam when it was going on but not actually doing anything about it than the fact he dodged the draft. There are plenty of legitimate reasons why people would dodge the draft that don't make them bad people. But his reasons are a bit weak. He's saying 'Oh I wanted to go, but my hands were tied' Basically, he's lying about what he really thought about the war. I think if he'd just said 'yeah, i didn't want to go to war' then TYT wouldn't have attacked him on it because it's the truth. Of course, that would be political suicide among the voters. but anyway, from looking at the news from the US, there seems to be plenty of reasons not to vote republican other than romney didn't want to go to vietnam. republicans seem crazy and almost clownish from here.
  5. it doesn't look like the background is moving. it looks to me like we have a small, rounded high altitude cloud (hence the brightness) with some low altitude fast moving clouds much much closer to the camera. It also looks like there is hefty zoom going on. UFO? no. cloud? yes.
  6. the sensation is the patterns of signals from the tastebuds. If it is the first time then there won't be any memory associated but a memory will be created. just a simple association 'when i eat this fruit, this is the sensation i get' which would be reinforced by further tasting.
  7. basically, when you smell an orange, somechemical receptors in your nose activate and start sending electrical signals to your brain. your brain interprets the signature of the impulses as that of the smell of oranges (or rather it interprets it as a sensation which has memory links to the smell of an orange). if you sent the same signals directly into the olfactory nerves then you would smell orange without there being any orange present. all sensory organs work the same way. some receptors either activate or deactivate and the pattern of activation is interpreted by the brain to produce sensation and usually calls up memories associated with them to allow identification.
  8. The only way we can make a wise decision about anything is if it is an INFORMED decision. That means we need to understand what actually happens in the universe and the relationships involved. With the advent of petascale super computing I think we'll see a lot of advancement on the relationship side of things. Forecast simulations of the effects of introducing a new law etc. that will lead to more informed decisions.
  9. nope. a molecule has no memory, so as long as the atoms are in the right configuration it is impossible to tell whether the molecule came from a biological or synthetic source. of course, if we are considering bought chemical then it IS often possible to tell. The biological origin stuff tends to have a lot more contamination than the synthetic stuff. Please note, contaminant in this case means 'anything other than the desired substance', not necessarily harmful'
  10. its probably just that below the waterline (baseline? ) the sodium hydroxide had ate through enough of the aluminium that it could no longer support its own weight.
  11. woo the wild number of hypotheses about the universe has been drastically reduced. still loads of them left. now we can concentrate on finding out the properties of this particle and the consequences it has for theory.
  12. This is a common misconception. It will only get hotter if it is constantly moved to a greater state of compression. if you stop the compression, say by the core material being as squashed as possible by the mass above it, then there is no more energy going into the system to make it hotter. if the system is not thermally isolated (the core of the earth isn't) then the thermal energy will dissipate away.
  13. It depends on exactly how close you want the earth to get to equilibrium. and if effects such as proton decay exist. well, the longest known halflife is Tellurium-128 with 2.2septillion years (2.2*1024 years) so to get rid of all of it your looking at something like 70 septillion years before all heat sources disappear although proton decay is estimated to be ~1030 years and could keep the earth at around 1K you could be looking at something truely massive like ~1035 because with proton decay, you'll get beta decays of the excess neutrons. the earth would just evaporate away in a cloud of gamma rays and then it wouldn't have a temperature. but really, it all depends on how close to absolute zero is 'close enough'
  14. Only for the surface, but I think it'd take a whole lot longer than that. Temperatures would plunge fastest over continents with freezing conditions in only a few days temps at the coast would be fairly stable until the oceans froze over. This could take a month or so but once a thin layer of ice has formed, the process will accelerate again as the oceans heat reservoir is cut off. As the earth cools down and all water and CO2 precipitates out of the atmosphere, the rate of cooling will again slow down. Not only because the radiative losses depend on T4 but because the major source of heat will be deep geological heat. simple conduction through the crust. It will be enough to stop the atmosphere precipitating as it is sufficient to maintain a ~90K surface temperature (although the atmosphere may be able to keep it warmer than this.) The geological heat is primarily from radioactivity K-40 is an important isotope. it has a half life of 1.25 Ga (billion years) so complete cooling is going to take longer than that. After about a billion years, then you might see the atmosphere start precipitating leaving only trace quantities of hydrogen and helium as a tenuous atmosphere (it won't escape like it currently does as it will be too cold) Infact, the longer we go on the thicker the atmosphere is likely to become again. as more and more isotopes decay, the helium will eventually diffuse to the surface. even if we leave it long enough that everything has decayed and all geological temperatures have reached <1K we will still have a thin helium atmosphere and helium oceans. not likely to be rivers though as everything will be at a standstill.
  15. no it wouldn't. Anyway, the H4O2+ ion is less stable than the H3O+ ion. you could concievably get it to form but it would require an abundance of H3O+ ions likely, nothing but. but to keep the thing electrically neutral you'll need negative ions. basically, it'll decompose to a whole lot of water first.
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