Neil9327

Good point. I suppose time is only something if you can measure it. And to measure it you need something with moving points (if only at the subatomic level).

If you just want to know what it is, to the nearest million decimal places, go to: http://3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.com/index1.html The last 10 of the million are: 5779458151 (sorry did I spoil the ending for you?)

Well I didn't describe homosexuality as "normal" but I implied that it was in my earlier post because this is what society thinks these days. Maybe this is a question for the politics sub-forum, but I think this raises an ethical issue: If homosexuals are going to justify their lifestyle as "normal" just because around 3% of the population is gay then there is, as you have said, a risk that other "fringe" groups might claim their lifestyle is normal too, based on, say, a 1% prevelance in society. Surely when we as a society are deciding who to "persecute or marginalise" we should be making judgements on the effect that a certain lifestyle is having on our society, good or bad, rather than saying "lots of people are like this, so it must be normal", hence no persecution/marginalisation.

I meant someone who has never shown any interest in or had any sexual attraction to, another person. I agree the definitions need a careful definition. I've thought of another sexual "orientation" Someone who is sexually attracted to themselves. I.e. they spend more time than they ought to in front of a mirror. Has anyone heard of this idea? What would they be called? An "Autosexual"?

That's going to be a difficult one to answer. I suppose the only way to identify a true asexual is someone who has never shown any interest in the subject even though they are mentally normal, with good physical and mental health. Like so many things in science, it is difficult to prove a negative. And scientists still don't have a good understanding of what drives the differences between the sexualities (hetero, homo), and the sexual deviancies (paedophilia, Gerontophelia, zoophelia etc)

Your question implies that there are some things that happen in this way - i.e. the result occurs before the action causing it. I do not know of any scenario where this happens, and I expect other folks won't, so am unable to answer this question. Do you know of any such scenario?

My view is that the evolutionary changes that allowed us to change from uncivilised animals to civilised technically able humans actually occurred slowly hundreds of thousands of years ago. But that when this change occurred, it put in place a scheme where mankind would evolve, with each generation's improvements in technological achievement being proportional to the total degree of improvement that has happened to date. So for example in the stone age 15000 years ago whenever it was man (with a small m) had just the same level of "brain power" as it has now, but that it was only capable of crafting items from stone, which is a "simple" skill. And this "simple" level of technological achievement gave little inspiration for the children to try to achieve more. Then as time went on, the level of achievement increased with the invention of the wheel, hence transport, and more integration between tribes (and wars) and an improved quality of live and living longer. So people had more resources and motivation to improve their lives still further. So this improvement continued at a faster rate than before. This led, IMHO, to an exponential (in the true mathematical sense) growth in the achievement of successive generations, to the level today, where the world is improving at a rate higher than has ever occurred in the past. I think biological evolution is part of this, but only a small part, in the last 2000 years or so. One question to ask, to challenge the above, is if you put a modern baby, with a modern age brain, born to an averagely intelligent family, in a bronze age tribe in isolation from the rest of society, how would it develop? I think it would grow up as a bronze age person, throwing spears etc. I don't think they would invent the wheel (literally). The other question is if we took a bronze age baby and brought it up in today's western society, how would it perform? I think it would do OK, but a little below average.

A glib answer is that the new inner triangle is half the size in each linear direction of the outer one, is the same shape, so must be quarter the area.

Who said it would work? If it was anyone other than a scientist who works on the bomb itself and therefore has access to top secret information I referred to earlier I would doubt their view. Is your article online? Although I have to sayafter reading it I expect I would not be able to "disprove" that it could work because I am not that type of scientist.

I think you have some good points. I haven't seen the film, nor any reviews, and have no intention of doing so. I just think the whole thing was very sad.

There is another factor I believe, which is that the ball bearing will be forced to the side of the tube as it falls (unless it is pole to pole tube) by the rotation of the earth.

Exactly. If you exploded one piece of Uranium onto the other using military grade explosive, the uranium would indeed go supercritical for under a microsecond, cause the uranium to deform into a sausage shape because the engineering has small defects you were not aware of, and the nuclear reaction would stop. At most, and this is a guess, you might double the explosive yield of the TNT.

To echo the previous response from Genacks it is very very difficult to produce a nuclear bomb that will explode in a nuclear fashion. I had a long conversation about this with an ex-nuclear weapon scientist who spent his entire career on the UK nuclear and thermonuclear bomb programmes, and his points can be summed up as follows: 1. To create the first "Trinity" bomb in 1945, the Americans had to spend billions of dollars, and have access to brilliant scientific minds such as Robert Oppenheimer. The average Al-Qaeda terrorist network does not have access to either of these. 2. It is extremely difficult to engineer precision high explosives (RDX, TNT) to keep the uranium from deforming in shape while it is being compressed to the "critical mass" required for the neutron chain reaction to proceed. 3. Although there are a number of web sites that purport to show you how to make a nuclear bomb, these always miss a number of subtle but vital instructions - these are not in the public domain.

Or alternatively you could use a redirect, which Google.com/ig appears to accept. To do this, the ScienceForums webmaster should upload a file named: external.php to the scienceforums root directory This should contain the following contents (use notepad. Save. Rename from .txt to .php): <?php header("Location: http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/external.php?type=RSS"); ?> Then the google.com/ig browser will open this file, and redirect to the correct RSS feed URL. Note that the type=RSS is ignored. I know it will work because I've tried it on my own web site. In Google.com/ig click to enter your own RSS feed, and enter: http://dohat.com/external.php?type=RSS And the ScienceForums RSS feed will appear. It looks good

No we should not change the definition. What would be the benefit? That some scientists, surveyors, and engineers will then be able to enter 300,000,000 into their calculations, rather than 299,792,458 That would save them less time and hassle than it has taken me to write this message. This type of change only makes sense where these types of conversion are done all the time every day such as yards to miles, or meters to kilometers

Well OK sorry I agree YT. I was actually trying to be diplomatic with that statement. I know that the inevitable reponse of a non-scientist is a "wash the shirt you smelly da da da". The purpose of this post was to get specific answers from those who know about these things (or claim to) to CONFRONT those who come out with those general comments. So in other words if it turns out that from a scientific point of view a Gym shirt hung up will get as smelly/unhygenic as a non-Gym shirtworn during the whole

OK mum will do. I do wash the shirts, but I recon they are good for three sessions of 45 minutes each across one week. I haven't noticed any yellowing or stiffness or crinklyness. Gross - well that's such a subjective term - a matter of opinion

Well of course you're right. But of course any self respecting scientist will then forget to replenish the spare shirt, so when he/she subsequently forgets his main shirt he is stuffed. But this is scienceforums.net, so I'm interested in the answer from a scientific rather than practical perspective.

In addition alcohol has a depressant effect that lasts for, in my experience, 24 hours after you take it. Interestingly this only shows itself to me AFTER around 2 hours when the main drunkenness wears off. Indeed I think that one of the factors that makes a hangover unpleasant may be the depression from the alcohol. I have a theory that also might be wrong, which is that part of the cause of binge drinking, in the UK at least, is that after drinking two pints of beer in a short period of time drinkers start feeling the effects of depression fairly quickly. And almost subconciously they order a third pint, then a fourth, to mask these effects. any thoughts?