Neil9327

IF I invert a test tube' date=' with it fully filled in with water, and put it above a beaker of water, just like the process of electrolysis.

What is the pressure at the bottom and at the mouth of the test tube?

I guess the pressure at the mouth is 1 atm, but where supports this relatively large value apart from the little weight of the water held?[/quote']

 

The closed end of the test tube is not a vacuum - the water is pushing up against the glass, and vice versa, at slightly less than 1 atm

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?)

As far as I know' date=' "autosexual" is the correct term in that usage, Neil9327.

[/quote']

Is it really?

I thought of that word years ago as a student.

BTW just for the record, I don't have any large shiny mirrors in my house...

If you want to describe homosexuality as normal, as normal as hetero- sexuality, you are beginning to describe a range[/i'] of activities which fallinto an acceptable norm. Once there is a range, and no absolute, the pressure to extend the range grows from those on the fringe to be classified as normal so as not to be persecuted or marginalised. This will mean that the word normal in this context rapidly becomes vacuous and meaningless and has no use inthis topic.

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.

When you say "someone who has never shown any interest in the subject' date='" what precisely are you referring to? I only mean if you mean a lack of interest in the subject of sex itself, the subject of [i']attraction[/i], or the subject of attraction (i.e. the person).

 

Any discussion is going to have a problem with definitions (complicated by the definitions themselves not being official), as asexuality itself is only just emerging as a concept of sexuality in humans, whether or not it is legitimate. Bogaert talks about "sexual attraction", but this needs to be separated from sexual desire and sexual drive, which are different things.

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)

on the one side' date=' how could you not be morally wrong for creating something that is designed to kill millions?

[/quote']

 

This is a difficult point to prove. In the first and second world wars millions of people died. Since nuclear weapons were first made available in 1945 deaths in the west from wars have dropped hugely.

So paradoxically perhaps making something that was designed to kill millions actually saved millions.

 

The advantage of this weapon' date=' is it only kills life, and leaves everything else alone, and requires very, very little resources to operate.

[/quote']

 

Could it be used on and by suicide bombers? Maybe we could give the technology to Osama Bin Laden, and set up an effective MAD (mutually assured destruction) scenario between us, to stop Al Qaeda in its tracks.

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.

"Exactly. If you exploded one piece of Uranium onto the other using military grade explosive' date=' 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."[/i']

 

Actually my recipe for a bomb will work. This is not a secret. It was published in Scientific American. The big problem is getting hold of 40% U235, which is almost impossible unless you have enormous resources. The WWII bombs used against Japan were enormous because of the lack of purity in the Uranium.

 

50kg U235 + 50 kg U235 = Big Bang!

 

However, the big bang will still be a lot less than, say, Hiroshima, since this is a pretty unsophisticated bomb. It would still take out a number of city blocks.

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.

2. Victor Hanson's central thesis is correct. ...' date=' able to dissent, use initiative and subject to audit after the conclusion of a battle, are far more effective than conscripts, unable to bring new ideas to their leaders, use initiative and whose leaders are immune to consequences of failure.

 

Leaders emerged, information was gathered, possibilities were discussed, and a decision was made.

.[/quote']

 

These points are the key reasons why the western democratic system was successful over the communist "command economy" of the old soviet union, and other similar regimes. It is simply not the case that the best ideas for any enterprise come from the top of the organisational/society's structure - they often come from the most unexpected people. So an organisation benefits by allowing people to listen to others.

 

Another point: The people on the plane were most likely well above the average in society in terms of smartness, cunning, intelligence, because the rest of society can't afford to travel by air.

So I wonder whether if it had happened on, say, a bus carrying a lower "class" of passenger the passenger revolt might not have been as effective.

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.

That description will get you a fizzle, I think. The engineering of "Little Boy" was a tad more involved than that.

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.

The gadget is trying to go to http://www.scienceforums.net/external.php?type=RSS when it should be http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/external.php?type=RSS

 

It seems the main-page link to the feed (in the <head> tag) has the wrong URL. We'll have to get an admin to fix that and wait for Google to refresh the gadgets list.

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

not AS smelly no' date=' QUOTE']

 

YES!

 

Thank you YT

 

I'll report this fact back to my manager.

 

 

But at the same time I feel it necessary to reassure those visitors to this forum that I have taken steps to ensure that I won't have a smelly shirt hanging under my desk any more. I might meet them in real life (stranger things have happened): I've bought 20 white t-shirts of them for 20 UK pounds off Ebay.

 

I've turned into a Meson. How did that happen?

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 I see Science as BEING "Practical", however not withstanding that, then Yes your shirt Will still get smelly even with O2 involved.

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

it will also turn yellow and get all stiff and crinkly...

 

gross.

 

wash your clothes you lazy so and so!

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

It would be interesting to study the functions of the hairs themselves.

 

1. To cause immediate and direct physical discomfort.

2. To carry and release the chemical irritant irritants.

3. To break the surface of the target skin to increase contact and penetration.

4. To physically(nervous senses) as well as chemically stimulate an earlier anti-histamine response

which leads ultimately to a more enhanced but still directly associative learning response.

 

I find the last one very interesting' date=' almost erotic, in a strictly academic sense of course.

.[/quote']

 

I wonder whether it might be possible (in the near future)to genetic engineer a nettle plant to inject chemicals into our skins that make us feel good or do us good, rather than cause us pain.

Then we could use nettles to, for example, apply immunisations/anaesthetics for those who are scared of injections.

couldn`t you leave a clean Spare shirt there in a bag in a drawer somewhere in case you DID forget to bring it back with you next day?

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.

Why would you bring your smelly cloths to work? If you can avoid it' date=' put them somewhere else. By unhygenic, maybe he meant that he didn't like the smell.

 

Just because the anaerobes aren't in control doesn't mean it smells good, though it'll probably smell better.[/quote']

 

I bring my "smelly clothes" to work because there is a Gym at work. The only alternative to keeping the clothes at work is taking them home every day. But if I do this there is a risk that I will forget to take them in one day and horror of horrors I might be forced to miss a gym session. My view is that one has to be 100 percent disciplined to keep up an effective exercise regime.

 

Although i could put "them somewhere else" that would have to be a cupboard. And this would cause exactly the loss of exposure to oxygen that I think would cause an exponential increase in smell-creating bacteria that my manager appears to be concerned about.

 

 

I asked him whether he could actually smell anything, and he said he couldn't

 

Good question: Can you get "bad smells" from purely aerobic bacterial action?

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?