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ewmon

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Everything posted by ewmon

  1. Telephone numbers, time of day, who does most of the talking, organizational structure (see below), approximate cell phone location and road/highway being traveled (from cell phone tower(s) used to relay calls). By organizational structure, I mean something like — Person A calls Persons B, C, D and E. Person B then immediately calls, F, G, and H; Person C calls I, J, K and L; Person D calls M and N; Person F calls ... . These people could be part of a terrorist cell, or Little League, or a Scrabble Club, etc. No reasonable expectation of privacy AFAIK. When cell phones were analog and FM, my roommate and I easily intercepted cell phone calls with an old analog TV set that could receive UHF into the high ranges (~channel 83 etc).
  2. ...yes, especially with Peukert's Law complicating theoretical estimates. You may want to monitor the battery's voltage to ensure that it stays within the manufacturer's specs so as to avoid ruining it. You might be able to use Peukert's Law to compute the battery's average current drain, and then, using that value, to use it again to compute how long other batteries would last.
  3. Yet each of the billions of bacteria on one of us is an individual, one instance where a mutation could occur, compared to one of us, which is one instance of a mutation. This vastly increases the odds against us. It is known that virulent viruses (and bacteria?) are known to eventually mutate to less virulent forms (eg, the "Spanish Flu" circa 1918) apparently all by themselves. As highly social beings, humans are very compassionate. It wasn't as though people began shunning Spanish Flu patients; people remained compassionate and provided care to them ... and some caught the flu. Is anyone here meaning that our symbiotic bacteria/viruses are policing our bodies?? This would make sense, but I've never heard of it before.
  4. The entry point experiences the bullet at its most aerodynamic quality, which enters with the least resistance. Under some circumstances, the entry wound may not look much more than a dimple and may not bleed (especially if death occurs quickly). Bullets mushroom as they plow through tissue. The transfer of energy produces secondary projectiles (bone fragments, as moreinput mentioned), disrupting more tissue that tends to be cone-shaped, spreading outward from the bullet's trajectory. I don't recall spinning having much effect, except that an unstabilized bullet (perhaps not enough spin) might tumble and "keyhole" the body (ie, hit it pretty much sideways), which makes a nastier entry wound (that is, more energy transfer — and damage — than usual). A bullet does lose a lot of energy, which transfers to the tissues and sets them in motion.
  5. I think it's pretty obvious that, biologically, humans are meat-eaters, and I don't see people circumventing growing/slaughtering animals until researchers make in vitro (lab-grown) meat a viable (no pun intended) commodity. I'm not a slave to meat, and I also couldn't work in a slaughterhouse, but I would gladly eat in vitro meat. "Soylent steaks", here we come!
  6. What kind of water and gases? (Asking about the water might seem weird, but impure water may contain substances that interfere with the tests. For example, water out of the faucet may contain chlorine, fluorine, etc.)
  7. When you google such things, the word "mnemonic" is the more technical word for "tricks" and may help to produce better results. For example, mnemonic activity series elements. Here's a list of chemistry mnemonics. mnemonic ( "neh-MON-ik") n. A device, such as a formula or rhyme, used as an aid in remembering.
  8. Indeed. Unfortunately, marketing bombards our conscious with these picture-perfect images of physical beauty. Begin with people whose only job is to look beautiful (ie, starve themselves thin, work out hours every day, etc), add outrageously huge amounts of expensive cosmetics, beauty treatments, plastic surgery, clothing, photoshoot locations, etc, then capture hundreds or thousands of images from which to select the best one, then technically redact any imperfection, and finally faithfully reproduce it in images for store's cosmetic aisles, ads on webpages, SI "swimsuit" editions, etc. What you get is a ridiculously high (and prohibitively expensive) standard of beauty that looks very real, but never actually existed and never will. Let's not forget that these quite expensive images are meant to make us feel substandard so that we go out and by the eyeliner, or the clothing, or the shampoo, or whatever. And it convinces us to believe that beauty is all about looks.
  9. If we put students in the ground before the tornado, we won't need to put them in the ground afterwards. Funerals for the tornado victims will begin soon, with ten elementary school students among the dead. It boggles my mind and infuriates me that officials say that adding a storm cellar to a school greatly increases it's cost. We're not talking about a long-term executive-type nuclear bomb shelter, just something simple where a couple hundred students can stand up (or even sit on the floor) for a half hour at most. Each person needs about a 2×2-foot space. A 20×20-foot room for 100 people. A 40×40-foot room for 400 people. One entrance inside the school and another entrance outside. How expensive could that be? Compared to ten child-sized coffins.
  10. I'm okay in biochemistry but not great, so I need someone more knowledgeable to help here. Both gasoline/hydrocarbons and animal/vegetable fats contain mostly long strings of hydrocarbons, although fats also contain a glycerol or other molecule. Cells even have walls composed of a lipid bilayer. So, as the title states, what is it about gasoline/hydrocarbons that make them poisonous while animal/vegetable fats are not? First glance shows that they differ due to a glycerol or other non-hydrocarbon molecule, yet if that's the reason, how does the presence of this type of molecule cause fats to be non-poisonous?
  11. Use the contour lines for another purpose — a non-parametric purpose (which means forget about the altitude they represent). Their closeness to each other show the steepness of the banks on either side of the river. It makes more sense that a steep bank would steer the river than a low bank. If the river flows north in the diagram, you can see where only steep banks steer the river. If the river flows south, you can see northeast of the number "30" where a rather shallow bank would supposedly steer the river. The same would supposedly occur in the lower left corner of the map. Besides, there's an intermittent tributary (shown by ∙∙∙—∙∙∙—∙∙∙) near the map's lower right corner that travels westward and then turns north to join the river northeast of the number "30". Plus, there's another intermittent tributary between the "30" and the "L" that flows downhill/north, apparently to join with the river. Thus, the river most likely flows north.
  12. Shift + click on Scroll Wheel (or middle mouse button).
  13. As I have told others here, the increase in the normal force must be considered. Thus, the braking force remains directly proportional to the mass and the deceleration (a=F/m) remains constant, and the car stops in the same distance as long as the brakes are powerful enough to almost lockup. If the car is heavily weighed down and the driver stands on the brakes but cannot bring them to the verge of locking up, then braking distance will increase. Once the tires begin slipping at all, then µdynamic < µstatic, and deceleration is reduced, thus braking distance is increased.
  14. You should get x = %/(1-%), where % needs to be changed into a number, for example, 2.75% becomes 0.0275. For your case, x = 0.0275/0.9725 = 0.028277635. So, for a $20 price, add 0.028277635×$20 = $0.5655527 or just $0.57. Then, 2.75% of $20.57 = $0.565675 or simply $0.57. If the % was 25%, then x = 0.25/0.75 = 0.33333333. For a $30 price, add 0.33333333×$30 = $9.9999999 or simply $10. Then, 25% of $40 = $10.
  15. Try thinking in "pseudo-algrebraic" English as follows — You want to add a portion (x) to the original price (1), and from this sum (1+x) you want to subtract a percentage (2.75%) of this sum from it, which give you the original price (1). Once you start talking like this, you'll see that this description "translates" into algebra as (1+x) – 2.75%×(1+x) = 1 Then you need to "solve for x", as mathematicians love to say, because x is the portion of the original price that you need to add (as I defined above). If you have any troubles "solving for x", get back to us and I'll help you through it.
  16. ... and so, a machine instruction might be to "branch always" to a specified address (that is, continue executing code at the address given after the instruction). Other instructions (shown here in assembly language) may include BRN (branch if accumulator is negative), INC (increment accumulator, ie A=A+1), DEC (decrement accumulator, ie A=A–1), STO (store accumulator, ie in the address that follows), STP (stop, ie stop program execution), etc. The "branch always" instruction is the only machine code I remember from programming in machine code many years ago. For this computer, its "branch always" instruction was 57178 in machine code (and BRA in its assembly language). It was a 24-bit octal machine, where each octal digit was represented by three bits, of course, and 57178 meant "branch always". It would appear as the first half of the machine's 24-bit byte/word, and the address to branch to was contained in the second half of the byte/word. Wikipedia's article on machine code says that programming in machine code is tedious, and it certainly is. Not only that, but we programmed the computer using a bank of 24 toggle switches, one for each bit in the byte/word, and another bank of 24 toggle switches to designate the address where to store each byte/word. So, we would input 57178 as 101,111,001,1112 (a "1" was toggle switch up, and a "0" was toggle switch down) followed by the 12-bit address to branch to, also in binary. Tedious indeed.
  17. Could you give an example, because I'm thinking there's more to it than what you described. I would think that animal antibodies would cause an attack on human antibodies, and vice versa. Antibodies bond to foreign molecules.
  18. Spider DNA → Humans The only place humans can use DNA is in the nucleus. So, you'd have two sets of genomes ending up creating two different kinds of proteins, which would recognize each other as foreign and attack them. So, I think, the resulting organism would not get very far in its development. Just adding extra human genetic material (XYY, Down, etc) typical causes serious developmental problems; they do not create a "superhuman" as one might expect. More is not necessarily better.
  19. John, you're answer's right. I think mathmari would have a better grasp if he followed your suggestion to play a few games and find the pattern/progression of the expected value from game to game (and use it as the answer) because it greatly simplifies the entire matter. The key, which mathmari stated (although he may not have known its significance), is that each game is independent of the others. Mathmari, do you see how your current method (and trust me, I also played out a few games as you did — I did it in Excel) shows all possibilities, where each game's results depend on the previous? All this work is correct mathematically, but unnecessarily complicated (except for revealing the pattern/progression). Once you see what John is hinting at, you'll appreciate it big time.
  20. i'm not sure what you are asking . Because the thread that you linked to has varying opinions and you posted it for a reason. It's like answering a question "Yes and no", so I'm asking about the point you were trying to make. Which opinion in that thread do you agree with and why? That's all.
  21. Copyright concern well noted. Project Gutenberg Harvard OASIS Internet Archive Google Books and Library of Congress's guide to finding ebooks
  22. If you describe some similarities and differences, we can help you from there.
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