imatfaal

Staff have decided that Vampare's mixture of trolling, nonsense, personal attacks and hijacking was just not acceptable; having already been suspended for these actions it was decided to ban permanently .

I believe IP Board is the software rather than the host. I have not spent any real time looking into regulations and laws applicable to online fora - but the initial impression is that nothing is certain. Various jurisdictions are trying to carve out areas of control whilst simultaneously refusing to accept responsibility (no change there then); the discourse is very catastrophe led - by that I mean that public outrage rather than sound planning is dominating the legislative agenda - remember that hard cases make bad law; and that no country wants to hamper their own (ie paying tax to their exchequer) internet businesses but they are all in favour of making foreign internet business accountable and well-regulated. My basic maxim would be to be most aware as a poster of the laws of the country that you are sitting in - they are the guys who can knock on your door.

yahya515 Has been suspended for 7 days due to repeated, numerous and various rule breaches including hijacking, preaching, abusing the PM system, and proselytizing.

Mais oui. Et L’Étranger

I guessed - but I should have made it clear I was working on that assumptionl; I meant I could not see where on my avatar Tar was seeing a square. My avatar is indeed 5 interlocking tetrahedra. It is made from 30 pieces of origami paper (well ten squares cut into 3 strips each) - it's a construction for the modular origami masochist. I really cannot describe how the interlacing of the origami version works in practice - that one photo'd took about 3 hours of a very boring teleconference to assemble! I once made a very expensive one with Benjamin Franklins face on each strip - I was my boss's 3 grand unfortunately - I still have the Greenback version I made as proof of concept. Mathematically I believe it is an inscribed tetrahedron in each of the cubes that can be inscribed in an dodecahedron - as each cube could have two tetrahedron inscribed that is where you get the enantiamorphism (one set of inscriptions is left handed the other right handed) How it fits together - well If Janus still has his modelling gloves on he could probably whip one up on his cad programme. Take a dodecahedron with a vertex straight at your eye - draw a straight line through the shape to another vertex, you should miss two on the way (one to the left and one to the right - or vice versa). Do this another two times always going away from you and missing two other vertices to reach almost the "other side" of the dodecahedron (it isn't quite the other side). You should be able to join the far ends of the three lines you have made into an equilateral triangle. There is the first tetrahedron. Rinse Repeat four times. I quite like the idea of the TaRadian;; pretty sure it wont catch on tho. There is another interesting thing about the rhombic dodeca - it fills space; unlike the standard dodeca, you can pack the rhombic so that it leaves no spaces

Not sure what you are looking at Tar. The points are in exactly the same places as the vertices of a dodecahedron. I don't have the model in front of me but I don't think there are any instances of 4 way symmetry. It is enantiamorphic though - which means it has a flipped mirror version!

Ratio of long diagonal to short is sqrt(2) (this is for the flat edged polyhedron not for the spheroid). If the short diagonal is 2 units long, the long diagonal is 2.sqrt(2), and very happily the length of the side is sqrt(3). The small angle is 70.53 degrees. The rhombic dodecahedron is the dual of the cubic octahedron (a nice mixture of equitriangles and squares). The rhombic dodecah can be formed in a really neat way; if you arrange 7 cubes with one in the centre and one each of each of its six faces you get a sort of cross in 3d. Draw a set of lines linking the centre of each of the 6 outer cubes and you have the edges of a rhombic dodecah. If you draw lines along all the short diagonals of a rhombic dodecah you get a cube and along the long diagonals you get an octahedron (the cube and the octahedron being duals of each other) Great shape!

Tar Janus Those two shapes are connected as duals. If you take the one made of triangles (20 of them thus called an icosahedron) and cut the vertices off you will be able to visualise that you will get a little pentagon emerging as the cut face. As you carry on shaving off the vertex the pentagon gets bigger, then starts overlapping its neighbour, and finally you are left with the figure on the right made from 12 pentagons (the dodecahedron). Similarly with the dodecahedron will become the icosahedron when the vertices are shaved off. dodecahedron - pentagons - 12 faces - 20 vertices - 30 edges icosahedron - triangles - 20 faces - 12 vertices - 30 edges

Or is there some name for the curvature being 1/12th of a sphere? The steradian is the SI unit of solid angle - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steradian

Through the laying on of hands I have fixed this lower case and no single quotes works for me cartman works without the eric Screw this software I'm going home

Further to spyman's excellent protip - the forum software will even automate it for you (and it is one of the things it rarely manages to get wrong) 1 Copy image location 2 Start your post 3 Click on image button 4 Paste your url 5 Hey presto!

Corrected the title. Seems that the plane might have got close to Perth in Australia - the coast of East Africa might not be as far out of range as we might guess (I think the Southern ports of Somalia would be about 1,000 km too far)

alphimega and mensamemberandproud have been banned as sockpuppets of Iwikefactz

Almost certainly not - my experience with sea emergencies is that grand words are spoken but petty policies enacted. Even better - we have five or six agencies in charge; that has to be better doesn't it? My hope lies in military personnel, merchant seamen, individual employees of a myriad of govt agencies, and a mass of volunteers doing that bit extra, searching the seas outside your watch-time, spending time checking the unlikely - all performing that most thankless and soul-destroying of tasks searching the wide wide sea for the tiniest sign of the passing of 239 human lives. It seems from the latest BBC reports that they are now looking in the Indian Ocean which is one or two land crossings away from original search area.

Like in an essay - make it clear you are paraphrasing. It is rather external to this thread as a section of prose that is paraphrasing another's ideas never ever goes in quotation marks. As Stringjunky says below it might be seen as deceptive if a paraphrase is made to appear as if it were a direct quote and it is good posting practice to overtly mention that you are re-wording another persons text (see what I did there - metaparaphrasing) The behaviour of the cursor and the software doing "its own thing" is one of the reasons we decided a thread was necessary. I tried to list things that (nearly) always work - but if there are problems with any of the methods let me know and I will attempt a workaround.

The quote function - a brief tutorial; although I expect/hope that this might grow into a thread as other members explain techniques and tricks that I don't know about. 1. Plain Quote Box The simplest form of quotation is used to make it clear that some text is copied from elsewhere and isn't yours - a link or source is expected as well. From Wikipedia page on Plagiarism - here a. Copy text from source b. Paste - you can just right-click / ctrl-v or you can use the paste plain text button if you want to remove formatting and hyperlinks c. Highlight the text - click the quote button d. Go back to source and copy webpage address e. Paste this into your post normally f. If you want to customise your link (as above) investigate the link button 2. Quoting a Post We also have a system that allows us to quote another post from the forum - the software will automatically add in the name, time, and date of the post quoted as well as putting a link to the source. Within one thread this is a one click job - a. click the quote button at the bottom right of the post you wish to quote. Hit "return/enter" or use your mouse to move the cursor outside of the quote box, and then start typing your response. You can see the link button that appears on a post quote - clicking this little curved arrow will take you directly to the quoted post. Note you can do this at any point of your post - the quote will be inserted at the point you leave the cursor. 2a. Quoting from another thread If you wish to quote a post from a different thread - it is basically the same process a. Hit quote button at the the bottom of the post you wish to quote. b. Copy entire contents of text entry box. c. Paste this in thread where you wish quote to appear. d. It would be best if you also provide a notice that this quoted post is from another thread. e. I would copy the post in BBcode mode - see 5 below - as it is easier to see what must be copied. 3. Editing a Quote You can also delete partial content of the quoted post to make it clear which part of a post your are responding to - ALWAYS make sure that this is done obviously to avoid misrepresenting another member a. Quote as above in 2. b. Click and select section(s) to be deleted (do not select first character of post this will break things) - and delete. Replace with ellipsis, with [deleted] or \snipped. c. You can quote and delete multiple times to reply to different sections of a post. Or quoting different posters. 4. MultiQuote If you wish to quote multiple posts in full there is an easy short cut using the multiquote button 1. Hit the multiquote button on each post you wish to quote - it will turn green 2. When you have selected all the posts you wish to quote hit the newly appeared floating button You can edit these posts as above but again ALWAYS make sure that this is done obviously to avoid misrepresenting another member 5. BBCode (thanks to HyperV - I had forgotten this bit) Splitting quotes may also done by clicking the light-switch button on the top left of the reply box. a. Hit the lightswitch styled button b. This will show any hidden BBCode tags in the post c. This view and the use of tags will allow you to break up quotes using the begin quote tags around the sections of text you wish to separate (without the space). d. Please note that you must have the same number of tags. You may edit a quote to show who authored it using, as an example, This is very handy if you are quoting multiple sections of quotes from different members.

Yes and Yes - Moon. But because we are not aging stick-in-the-muds I will post this Cos I have a feeling these guys will be spoken about in many years time

No No No. There is only one Zimmerman and he aint it. I know this isn't a music criticism thread - but get hold of some good ole chicago house from the late 80s early 90s. Music has its period and then it moves on. House was when I was a teenager - it has been and gone.

Your Hayabusa will do a mile in about 27 seconds and continue to accelerate for a bit more and given a nice empty road continue at damn close to 200 miles per hour. The fastest horses in the world take around 95 seconds to do a mile. Those speed gains are not linear - double the power does not double the speed.

Yep - IIRC James Watt wanted to be certain that any engine/device that he denoted as x horsepower would not possibly be less powerful than x horses so he over estimated the power of one horse to be certain

Not guaranteed to go down well when playing to an audience of scientists

sheever has been banned upon his own request.

Maddy Sharma as well.

Jay Sharma has been banned as a sockpuppet of Rajnish Kaushik

RK the Boss has been banned as a sockpuppet of Rajnish Kaushik