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swansont

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Posts posted by swansont

  1. --- in North America anyway. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4638582/[/url'] --- check out that site. Anyway it says they come every 17 years, but i am 17 and i have seen two waves of cicada in my lifetime. One when i was young, was very bad. All over. Nasty nasty nasty. But we enjoyed crushing them. Again was two or three years ago, me and my friends organized a battle unit (system consisting of whacking a tree, running, swatting as many as possible of the bugs that fly off (with tennis rackets), checking each other for bugs while they resettle, then repeating) , since there were so many it was more fore summer amusement than a serious undertaking. We are looking forward to this years war. ----- anyway, why did they come twice? Obviously it could be a seperate generation of eggs that were maybe somehow deposited off schedule, nevertheless waiting the seventeen years. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?!(insert invader zim voice here)

     

    This year's group is Brood X, but as the numbering implies, there are many different broods. There are also 13-year cicadas. But brood X is the big one, and in full force in the mid-Atlantic. The chorus sounds like the phasers from the original Star Trek, and the mating call buzzing and clicking has started.

     

    More info here

  2. About Alaska, yeah, they'll probably start drilling there soon as well. They've already got the longest pipeline in the world going from Alaska through Canada to the USA, I believe. I heard somewhere that they think there's about as much oil in those reserves as in the Middle East, though I find that hard to believe.

     

    I think that's a gas pipeline(s) that goes through Canada.

  3. Just out of curiosity... I wonder how things would work if you turned in something that wasn't written by you, but you were the legal copyright holder for all rights with the work?

     

    What circumstance do you envision would lead to that? It would mean either you paid someone for the copyright or the work was created as part of the normal course of their job, with you as the employer (i.e. a work for hire).

     

    I don't see how either gets you around a rule saying you have to do original work.

  4. The thing is' date=' it's not a petrol "blockage" at the ports or anything. All they want you to do is not fill up on gasoline today. Funny though, because you'll end up buying the gas, just a day later. The oil companies will still receive the same amount of money. No other industry is participating. The only way it might have an effect is if all petrol consuming industries halted for a day, which is impossible.

    [/quote']

     

    Right - it's a matter of supply and demand, and it seems that almost nobody "gets" that. In the US there are an awful lot of SUVs and other gas-guzzlers, and instead of just buying more efficient cars and using less gas, people behave as if there's some constitutional right to cheap gas, and it's a failure of the government that gas has hit $2 a gallon. A case study in the general irrationality of the populace.

  5. INo serioulsy probably nuclear plants, which really dosnt help much with pollution.Still this is better than using gas.

     

    We're already using that electricity. You have to build new plants for the hydrogen electrolysis. So, in the US at least, that kinda rules out nuclear for the time being.

  6. Yes but it helps the problem of mass polution.Especially haze.

     

    How is that, if you have to burn fossil fuels in order to get the hydrogen? Your pollution level is the same (or worse, because the efficiency of the processes isn't 100%)

  7. Wouldn't that be awesome if all that came out of the tail pipe of every car was water vaper (I believe that is the byproduct of hydrogen fuel).

     

    That's only true as long as you don't ask where the hydrogen came from. Since the answer to that is "fossil fuels," hydrogen doesn't actually solve any problems of fossil fuel consumption.

  8. So what is it made off this particle ?

    And how theoretically (supposing this particle exists) could it travel faster than lightspeed ? (wouldnt it need mass zero in order to be able to do so ?' date=' but then again what would it be made off)

    [/quote']

     

    If v>c then you have an imaginary solution to the relativity equations for things like mass and momentum. Now, there's nothing inherent in imaginary solutions that means they don't represent legitimate, physical processes or matter - imaginary solutions crop up in various models, and they have a valid interpretation (e.g. absorption vs. reflection for light) But tachyons would necessarily be different than the matter we are used to.

     

    Since the solution has to be imaginary, one implication is that tachyons could never travel slower than c. There is also a matter of whether there would be any way to detect imaginary mass, if it exists.

  9. Have you considered making a "Gauss Rifle?" The principles are the same except you don't have to worry about producing electrical energy. Its fun to build and use' date=' plus it would be easy to use as a model of an electromagnetic system.

     

    Check one out here:

    http://www.scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/magnets/gauss.html[/quote']

     

    Wow. Deja vu.

     

    They even have a section on how you couldn't make a perpetual motion machine out of that device.

  10. antimatter?anyone?hmm antimatter am I wrong heres the definition:

     

    A hypothetical form of matter that is identical to physical matter except that its atoms are composed of antielectrons' date=' antiprotons, and antineutrons.

    [/quote']

     

    It's not hypothetical. Positrons, antiprotons and antineutrons have been demostrated to exist, and scientists at CERN have formed antihydrogen atoms.

  11. "Mars is essentially in the same orbit...Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe." - Governor George W. Bush, Jr., Aug. 11, 1994

     

    I've seen that attributed to Dan Quayle, from Esquire magazine. Given the multitude of copies that have propagated across the net, I wouldn't take anything as authoratative. I've even seen attributions that have Al Gore saying this.

  12. No. It seems that this dynamo is not effective. Even if you have a 200 kg log of wood falling from the height of 500m, you'd get 1 000 000 J. If you could keep it at a rate of 30 seconds per log, then you have 33 333 W. That's only enough to light up thirty-three 100W light bulbs (discounting all other losses). Overall, this setup will not be effective. If we could find something *really* heavy (like an anvil) but which is less dense than water (or perhaps some other liquid) then perhaps this invention would be practical.

     

    The invention will never be practical. As I implied and Aman stated, you have to do work at some point in getting the log into the high-pressure end (i.e. bottom) of the device. Ignoring losses, that will be exactly the amount of energy you would recover from dropping it after it reached the top. With losses, it becomes a net work/energy sink. You heat the water up a little, and it makes noises. Whoopee.

  13. Put your hand on a wall where there's a corner. Then move your hand to the opposite wall. (I'm assuming that the corner is a right corner.) The hand of your shadow can move faster than the actual hand. (I'm assuming this because it took your hand's shadow the same time to travel a greater distance than your hand in that same amount of time.) If you did this in a plane perpendicular to the source of light' date=' then we can draw a right triangle ABC. c is the the distance your hand traveled. a + b is the distance the shadow of the hand traveled. a+b>c.

     

    suppose that someone constructed this on a grander scale. c is a light-second. my hand travels at the speed of light (or very close to it). Will the shadow surpass the speed of light?[/quote']

     

    Yes. And no laws of physics would have been broken.

  14. how do things freeze so fast in space? even the excess water from the air purifiers on the shuttle freeze almost instantly when flushed into space :)

    my esstimation is that it isn`t as inefficient as one may think :)

     

    It wouldn't freeze solid upon ejection. Do you have a link for that?

     

    You get a lot of surface area, and the presence of a decent vacuum means that much of the liquid will vaporize - essentially a lot of evaporation. That takes the high-energy particles away. Anything left over is going to be significantly colder. That part might freeze pretty quickly.

  15. Well' date=' if you're right (which I am now thinking you are) that gravitational potential disappears when water evaporates into gas, then you have simplified my atomic fusion example and have still shown that the Law of Conseravation of Energy is wrong.

     

    Infact, you have given me an idea which can be used to convert gravity's force into electrical energy:

     

    First, start with a tank of water which is not that wide but is tall, around 500 meters tall. Now, outside of the tank is a contraption which converts the gravitational's energy of a falling log of wood into electrical energy. When the log has fallen and has reached the ground, then it will be put into the tank of water (from the ground) and since the log is less dense than water, the log will resurface at the top of the tank, 500 meters above the ground. And then the log of wood can be dropped into the contraption to generate electricity again. Obviously, it may be hard to use a log of wood. So something other than a log and water can be used. But the method still stands; that something less dense can be moved upward due to it being immersed in something more dense. (I will have to add this bit to my paper).

     

    This example truly demonstrates that gravity creates instantaneous forces which the can create/destroy energy.[/quote']

     

    How do you get the log into the bottom of the tank?

  16. Q: Before signing the death certificate had you taken the man's pulse? -- A: No.

    Q: Did you listen for a heart beat? -- A: No.

    Q: Did you check for breathing? -- A: No.

    Q: So when you signed the death certificate you hadn't taken any steps to make sure the man was dead, had you?

    A: Well, let me put it this way. The man's brain was sitting in a jar on my desk, but for all I know he could be out there practicing law somewhere.

  17. Well the bulb in a flashlight is enclosed anyway so evan on earth convection won't cool it down.

     

    If you have electronics in the vacum surley the fact that it's only 3 degrees above absolute zero helps cool it down a bit? Unless you have a heated vacuum' date=' which seems a little silly, and tbh how the fuck would you heat a vacuum in the first place?[/quote']

     

    Any enclosed electronics would not "see" a 3 K reservoir into which it could radiate. Only surfaces that are actually exposes to space would do that. This is the reason that cars tend to frost overnight under clear skies when the temperature is around 0 C, but not under cloudy skies or if they are covered by a tree or car port, etc.

  18. ..evolution is still merely a theory...

     

    So is gravity and quantum physics' date=' but they're still powerful models. Nothing is a "law" anymore.

    [/quote']

     

    Theories don't "grow up" to become laws anyway. Laws are simple mathematical relationships that have been observed to hold true. Nothing more than that.

  19. I`m just guessing here and maybe perfectly wrong, but I would imagine that the "Boiling" per se due to the vavor pressure on the water created by the vacuum, would be equaly tempered with the freezing cold temps and would more than likely freeze as a fine mist at 1`st and then deeper tissues would just freeze as normal as the corpse developed a crust? :)

     

    But you have only radiation to transfer heat and at ~310 K that's fairly inefficient.

  20. Heat loads are a concern, but really only when you are dissipating several Watts. Radiation heat transfer goes as the difference of T4, so small amounts of power, like a flashlight, shouldn't be much of a problem. (It's also possible to use flashlights that don't rely on a blackbody source, e.g. LEDs, but I have no idea if there are space-qualified versions of these)

     

    Ventilation fans don't do you any good in a vacuum. For larger loads you do liquid cooling, but generally a lot of your engineering is getting the total power consumption down. The limited power available to you drives that at least as much as heat dissipation does.

  21. i wasn't aware of anybody who did that. care to cite your sources?

     

    The cosmonauts of Soyuz 11 died after a valve inadvertently vented their capsule. They were not wearing spacesuits, and died of asphyxiation. They did not explode.

     

    Also a NASA employee was accidentally exposed to very low pressure. He felt the water on his tongue boil as he lost consciousness. Here is what NASA has to say on the subject.

  22. The latent heat is how much energy you need to add, per unit mass, to melt the ice at 0 C. The specific heat is the energy required, per unit mass, to change the temperature. You know the final mass and temperature and that energy is conserved.

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