imatfaal

My favourite target for rephrasing: hypo-/hyper- this tends to confuse many patients in doctor's surgeries and hospitals. I have met people with diabetes who never realised what the difference was - or more importantly that there were two different words hypoglycaemic and hyperglycaemic. Until you read these words there is no difference between them and many people just do not have the resources to research their illness and discover these two opposites that sound almost identical.

yes great post, i agree with you most

Toe-dipping into water, first attempts at acceptance by a potential new peer group, tentative assays at a foreign lingo - probably a bit of all three? I suppose a fair amount of the time the content on SFN turns out to be too involved and too serious for many people who just want a place to chat that isn't sports/religion/fiction based; thus they come, they post once or twice, and they leave for pastures new.

Alan - it's an annoying way of doing things but SI units use m (ie lower case m) for milli (10^-3) and capital M for mega (10^6) . There is a nice article on the SI units here on wikipedia - it's pretty essential that you can work with them and understand them.

I suppose it's like a professor teaching Hannah Montana studies going "I can't take it any more! This is pointless!" and quitting. It's not that he disagrees with some of the teaching -- it's that he can't take it seriously.

 

Not to say that philosophy of religion is like studying Hannah Montana. I've taken an introductory course in it myself. Just making an illustrative analogy...

What did you learn on your introductory course to Hannah Montana?

Sorry...

Prof Parson's initial note last year is quite touching and Capn/Ydoaps are right that he can no longer take it seriously enough even to teach its rebuttal:

"I found the arguments so execrably awful and pointless that they bored and disgusted me"

He concludes (in more ways than one)

As for the rest of you who are fighting the good fight against supernaturalism, please do carry on. Somebody needs to oppose this stuff. It just isn't going to be me.

Those institutions charge their users/subscribers very low rates. The institutions do not get very low rates. They get very high rates. Paying for the paper journals that form a big part of a college / technical institution's library and paying for site-wide electronic access to journal articles is a huge portion of those institution's library budgets.

In terms of an absolute cost the price of providing access to an institution's students to the academic literature is high and a large percentage of the budget - but when looked at compared to cover price or even subscription it is low.

The OP mentioned $30 an issue, my nature's copy's cover price is £10, thru sub it is £2.20; for an academic institution requiring 10,000 Full-time equivalent copies - you would pay about £90 per issue. I would call 9 times the cover price of a single issue to provide access for 10,000 students very low and say it is pretty good value. In the law (and I would hope in other areas) many professional databases and literature depositories provide free access to academic institutions; lexis-nexis and westlaw are both provided through Athens to students at almost no cost - whereas the professional/company pays tens of thousands of pounds per user.

As Timo say most institutions (esp educational/academic) get very low rates, sometimes zero for huge swathes of academic literature. You can read them in hard copy at the library or more likely download pdf versions at home/desk.

For individuals the list price for subscription can be very different to the cover price, or charge for a single article - my copy of nature has a cover price of £10, yet I only pay about £2.20 for mine because I am a subscriber (that also gives me archive access). Its not free - but it's pretty cheap for one of the world's most important publications.

Thanks - I will see if I can access to that.

Nope.

-2akh -2mgh DOES NOT equal -4mgkAh

You need to take out the common factors and put the rest in a bracket

Agree with that Marat - and also I wonder how many proselytisers would be happy with me turning up on their doorstep to explain the joys of rationalism, why I think the only sexual prohibition should be lack of true informed consent, how good their proscribed comestibles are to consume, and most importantly the way the hidden manipulations of a dominant ideology is used to reinforce patriarchy, repress the unorthodox, and constrain free-thought.

Jenny Olives book is great for self-study as it includes a serious amount of self test questions with quite a lot of worked answers - once the test is mastered you can be fairly sure you have understood the lesson. I recently ran through it to stop my mind atrophying totally and to remind me of the maths I had forgotten since A levels. I would have thought any science degree would quickly go beyond the level in her book - but for prep before university it would be about right.

But to obtain mass, at least the particles(Dark Matter) are collected in the certain region.

It is not the aggregation of dark matter particles that give them mass. They have mass individually as much as any particle - to go deeper you are talking about the interactions with the higgs field.

The gravitational attraction between dark matter and luminous matter is practically the only thing we know about dark matter.

Light does not interact with dark matter - or does so incredibly weakly - that's one of the reasons we cannot observe it directly.

Alan - are you confusing MW and mW? Unless I have the wrong end of the stick a 300 MEGAwatt laser is required to exert 1 newton (3*10^8 watts/3*10^8M/s = 1 newton) or 2 newtons with perfect reflection. The way you write makes me think you believe this is a normal laser that you can get on the internet - they would be 200 MILLIwatt a factor of 10^9 smaller. BTW I am not saying that 200mW lasers are weak - they can still blind and burn; whereas I think a 300 MW laser would go straight through you)

If you want to solve for h - which I seem to remember you do - I wouldn't divide by h You want a zero at one side of a quadratic in order to solve it - and the obvious way of doing that is to subtract 2mgh from both sides. You will end up with a very complicated h term - but then that was always gonna happen.

Although I am an atheist; from a philosophical point of view, I think I prefer the concept that a child is born pure and unadulterated and is thereafter susceptible to corruption rather than a version that says a child is born already damaged and tainted with an original sin and all human failings.

Penrose wrote a book on these lines as well

Echoing the Captain above - all the best to JohnB and all those in the area.

Not sure what quite what you mean by aggregate property.

Dark Matter has mass - its existence was inferred by the gravitational effect it has. It is thought that the majority of dark matter is non-baryonic and does not interact with other matter except through gravity - all that we can be reasonably certain of is that it interacts gravitationally and thus we believe it has mass.

they aren't true klein bottles. a true klein bottle does not intersect itself

I thought it must be something like that - thanks for setting me straight.

I believe in the universe - but not the Universe.

Even though there is much we don't know and may never know about the universe; I believe that nothing in the universe transcends scientific enquiry, nothing requires mystical knowledge or spiritual enlightenment to comprehend, and nothing that depends upon an individual's feelings towards the universe. To define the universe, as I see it, as a god renders one, either, or both of the terms as nonsense.

Not sure if it is the cause - it is an effect. The dark matter has mass that contributes to the gravitational lensing effect.

Gravitational lensing means that light from a very distant object is 'lensed' ie bent by the mass of the intervening matter - this can be shown with our own sun and follows from general relativity. We can note from the amount of lensing, that the mass of galaxies is greater than we would expect if we used only the amount of luminous matter to calculate the mass of the intervening galaxy - if we include the dark matter postulated for the intervening galaxy then the lensing effect is correct.

Dark matter was originally posited to explain the fact that rotating galaxies and galaxies orbiting in clusters do not seem to have enough mass for their speed of rotation. The evidence for Dark Matter was boosted by the lensing effect above. More evidence was provided by the bullet cluster. The jury is still out; because we do not know what makes up the dark matter - but we are pretty sure it is there.

Interesting question. Klein bottles are not physically possible in 3-D; I suspect the charge distribution you'd along the surface wouldn't be uniform. But one would have to come up with the 4-D equations to show that.

Swanson - could you elaborate on this bit "Klein bottles are not physically possible in 3-D"? You can't be saying that we cannot have a Klein bottle in our lumpen reality - cos I have one, you can get them on the internet . Are we talking about different Klein Bottles, or are you not referring to the same "in 3-D" as me. I think of a Klein Bottle as a two dimensional surface that has no recognizable inside and outside and looks like a bottle with a handle and a dimple (until you notice that handle and dimple are linked.

How much does k vary with x or ln(k) with v ?

Alien Leader "Do we really want to talk to these people? I mean look at them! Once we show our faces we have got to take some responsibility for setting them straight, we couldn't just leave them like that. Let some other species 'discover' them - and then those dumb schmucks will be the one's landed with the job of teaching humanity how to behave. Come on, just look at how they treat each other; do you really want to get involved with them? "

Alien 2-in-C "When you put it like that I can understand. Remain fully cloaked and move out of the Sol System?"

And in the entirely opposite direction; IIRC, a small jurisdiction attempted to remove the entire tortious jurisdiction and replace it with a ramped-up public prosecution of formally private acts of tort and delict combined with guaranteed social provision for the victim. I vaguely seem to remember that it did fairly well till dismembered by opposite political party.