Carrock

No need to swallow explosives, just absorb the neutrons through your skin. I was referring to your statement Starting from scratch, it would just be a matter of using smaller quantities of conventional explosives to cause a slower precursor implosion, less constraints on initial expansion of fissile material so that it becomes subcritical more quickly etc. There's probably been a few 'failures' where a prototype bomb released 'only' e.g. 2 tons TNT equivalent of energy. Just discovered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_yield The Neutron_bomb, loosely any device with a yield of < 10 kilotons, designed to provide a lethal radiation dose with minimal damage to property, approximates a nuclear grenade for a suicide bomber who would survive to fight another day, but not another week.. Happily in America at least, the last of these seems to have been dismantled in 2006. Overdoing 'tickling the dragon' does not lead in general to an explosion since even slight thermal expansion or at worst melting would quickly make the fissile material non critical. No need. There's still enough for a good few megadeaths (gigadeaths?).

You can have an indefinitely small explosion e.g. accidentally bringing two subcritical hemispheres together. The difficult part is normally maintaining a supercritical mass long enough for significant fission. e.g. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin

I always liked thermionic valves, not least because you could actually see inside them and sometimes diagnose a dodgy valve by visual inspection. So a defence.... Inefficient, certainly. AFAIK, magnetrons are still used in domestic microwave ovens. Producing a few hundred watts at 2.45 GHz from a solid state device is still not cheap and it's hard to protect a solid state device from all the possible loads in a cooker. Producing high power at high frequency, and the CRT, were the last holdouts against solid state devices. However valves are much slower to die when you maltreat them. I used to have an ancient A.M. transmitter with an ex battleship power supply that required four people to carry it. The 50 watt directly heated white hot tungsten cathode in the output valve glowed brightly enough to read a newspaper. If the 1/8" thick carbon anode started glowing red hot I knew to reduce power. I had a mere 2000 volt H.T. supply so I can't be sure the valve would have survived arcing between electrodes... 'New' mains powered radios had a long warm up time. Older battery powered radios had directly heated cathodes which warmed up almost instantly. The same thing happened with transistors. Initially they were 'instant on.' Now somewhere in tv adverts' small print for 'smart' devices there's always a 'sequence shortened' warning. You can instead leave the device "on" all the time and find the battery flat if you've left it too long. I worked on an early British mobile phone which had a (very) quick heat output valve to reduce the size of the optional battery pack for portable use away from a car battery. The police liked it as well since you just had to connect a loudspeaker to a winding on the modulator transformer to have a powerful P.A. system. Happy days...

If the pressure is high, most of the (small number) of free electrons are slowed by collisions and never acquire enough energy to ionise other atoms and create more free electrons. The higher the voltage (i.e. volts/meter) the higher the pressure can be for a discharge. At lower pressure, there are fewer collisions and electrons gain enough energy from the electric field to ionise some of the atoms they do hit. If you slowly increase the voltage, eventually there is a chain reaction with a sudden large increase in conductivity, loosely called a discharge.

Theresa May: From previous attempts, this likely means longer detention without trial, curfews etc. In South Africa during apartheid, there were 90 day detention orders, renewed every 90 days. In Guantanamo Bay, there is lifetime detention for some, although even Trump so far has approved nothing worse than waterboarding. Anyone who criticizes such things will be constantly wondering if their speech qualifies them as terrorist suspects. Detention etc is of course likely to convert wrong thinking people who were not a threat into a threat. Supporters of such policies usually think it will never happen to them; trials are an unnecessary impediment to justice.

Your understanding of climate science is almost as good as Donald Trump's.

Evidence? I've dual/multiple booted linux with windows on at least four different computers using win98 up to win 8 with no windows related problem after installation. I only dual boot because I occasionally want to run an obscure program that hasn't been ported to linux and I am not short of disc space. I've read there is sometimes a problem with windows overwriting the boot menu, but that is easily fixed; if it happens a lot then you could remove windows, or just remove its entry from the boot menu. Standard windows does not understand the linux filesystems; if windows ever infects a linux partition Microsoft would have problems claiming this is an 'accident'. Only running a command like 'format d:' in windows would cause a problem. Stored backups should be kept physically separate from the computer whatever the OS.

Rather a lot of money to spend just not to have to select an OS from the menu. It's just as easy/hard to install linux as sole OS as to dual boot with windows if you start with a windows computer. If you delete windows, you may find UEFI still prevents you installing any other OS. https://forums.linuxmint.com/search.php?keywords=UEFI+boot returned 9815 matches, roughly half about problems with Microsft's UEFI. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface So UEFI can prevent users installing OSs, but allows hackers to install boot viruses...

Or just install linux to dual boot with windows 10. The hardest part is persuading windows 10 that you're not installing a boot virus. Some beginner friendly distros like mint make it almost easy unless the computer has been designed to be very compliant with the windows ethos i.e. thou shalt have no OS but me. Sadly the linux BSOD screensaver is rather pathetic compared to the real thing.

What is your definition of sensation? And which definition of sensation are you referring to as 'too narrow'?

Quick point of order: This is untrue. Galvanic skin response, changes in heartbeat and breathing, digestion activities, and many similar autonomic functions will shift as a result of sensations that themselves often never enter conscious awareness. I suspect this is a definitional issue. There are myriad stimuli which never or rarely enter conscious awareness, many of which never or only sometimes reach the brain. Are you saying these stimuli are experienced as sensations, which implies substantial unnecessary processing, not merely acted upon, by the 'autonomic' nervous system? Evidence that e.g. the spinal cord or the skin experiences sensations? Xposted with KipIngram.

You do as if consciousness for inner states is the same as for objects I observe through the senses, in other words, that the 'awareness of a sensation' is in itself again a sensation. I do not believe that. Try it out. If I look at my computer mouse, I am aware of something black. I am also aware that I am aware of something that is black. But for me it stops there. What you really describe is just a logical construction, that does not occur in the mind. How can you discuss a logical construction which does not occur in the/your mind? Most of what we 'observe' visually is actually a very clever construct in our brains i.e. inner states. If you blink or shut your eyes while looking at your mouse, you no longer observe it through the senses and are only conscious of it in inner states, but I doubt your consciousness significantly changes. Shouldn't "I am also aware that I am aware of something that is black" be "a logical construction, that does not occur in the mind, is also aware that I am aware of something that is black" or "there is an undefined awareness that I am aware of something that is black" I prefer infinite regression. No. You can't experience a sensation without being aware of it. e.g. if someone lightly touches me on the arm to get my attention when I'm busy, I may not notice and may later believe no one touched me. If the person persists, I may become aware/conscious of not only the later touch, but also of earlier touches which were retained for a time in unconscious memory. If I say 'I am aware that you are conscious of pain' I am not reporting that I am in pain. That another person is in pain is not a report of an inner state of mine. But maybe I did not get your point. My error: I missed out some essentials. I've tried updating it but soon realized it wasn't useful. I've only responded to Eise as their are a lot of partial overlaps of concepts in this thread. A very brief summary of my views: consciousness has strong evolutionary advantages for humans and at least some other animals. It's not fully susceptible to scientific or philosophical analysis because they both implicitly regard consciousness as axiomatic.

I don't know of any system ( or person ) which can universally anticipate possible events. Given that incapability, isn't a microprocessor based central heating system which reports internal faults aware and conscious by your definition? Infinite regression is the real problem in trying to analyze consciousness. e.g. if you introspectively analyze your own consciousness, is it possible to include that aspect of your consciousness which is aware of your self analysis? If not, self awareness is not subject to your analysis. If yes, it should be possible to include awareness of self analysis, awareness of awareness of self analysis, awareness of awareness of awareness of self analysis,..... Note the impersonal explanation; implicitly the explanation is for an observer which is assumed to have no consciousness. Otherwise, the observer has the infinite regress problem of explaining how (s)he is aware/conscious of the explanation of consciousness. It is possible in principle to find quite accurate correlations between brain activity etc and consciousness but there is only a qualitative difference between that and sticking a pin in someone and saying 'I am aware that you are conscious of pain.'

I think there's probably something there. However... You seem to be saying that absence of evidence is proof of guilt. Alternatively, if the FBI only looks when it has proof, why does it bother looking?

Don't bother with the laser; connect a heat engine between the inside and outside of the box and you have a perpetual motion machine.

No you can't. You can define a countable infinity of points in this way but between each two points there is a (much larger) uncountable infinity of points which you haven't defined. You can't assume a smooth function when most of the points are undefined. (Near the top top right of Cantor's diagonal argument there is a diagram showing how to generate numbers/points that are not included in your sequence.) You seemed to be talking about cosine waves rather than sine waves and my critical faculties switched off at that point! This is really the claim I can't accept and where I stop. (I've no problem with 'IMO' Even if I was an 'expert' I'd still sometimes get things wrong.)

I was just questioning your definition. It is generally accepted sin x can take any value of y such that -1 <= y <= 1. Your definition excludes e.g. the infinite number of transcendental numbers between -1 and 1. sin x can't be greater than 1. In a proof like this, I stop analysing when I encounter (IMO) an unequivocal error as later reasoning may be based on this error. It's certainly worth looking for a simpler proof of Fermat's last theorem than Andrew Wylie's, but I doubt any such proof will be much simpler.

How about an e, pi, sqrt(e^2 + pi^2) triangle? I.e. all points between -x and +x are points on a sine wave.

I think this was the film Jim Lovell disliked because the commander died. Later, as commander of Apollo 13 he may have wondered if life was going to imitate art...

Another gesture, for U.K. residents who don't want to embarrass the Queen but do want to embarrass the prime minister: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/171928. 1,658,056 signatures so far.

A clarification might help. Was Comey demonstrating his integrity when he announced a few days before the election that evidence he hadn't looked at would incriminate Hillary? Was he demonstrating his corruption when he didn't charge her after trying and failing to find that evidence? Does he not get any credit for being scrupulously careful not to publicly investigate anything which might harm Trump? Comey doesn't bother with subtleties like separation of police and judiciary. If, as you imply, every F.B.I. agent thinks Comey is corrupt, how trustworthy are those agents who are just following orders?

From Donald Trump's plan to build huge wall at Irish golf course scrapped amid concern for rare snail

[irony warning] Not at all. From JOSEPH MCCARTHY - AMERICAN PATRIOT Comey's breaking protocols and politicising the FBI to help prevent wrong thinking people electing un-American Clinton is right thinking McCarthyism. Trump is pro Putin out of expedience, but give him a safe chance with an actual communist like Fidel Castro (deceased) and his vitriol demonstrates he's pro-American. [/irony warning]

The FBI would be better employed investigating whether their own, very public, evidence free fishing expedition for dodgy emails just before the election was enough to get Trump elected. Perhaps FBI head should be an overtly political appointment.

Your post seems to be pure classical physics, except for the mention of superconductivity. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray The idea that matter is not infinitely divisible is surely a classical concept, originated in 5th century B.C.E. by Leucippus and his pupil Democritus, or earlier.