Pleiades

Damn YT, how many fields do you dabble in? I know the feeling though.

I didn’t say it because it’s obvious to me; it’s an excuse I’ve heard before “I need some time to think” really means (in my case) “I’ve found someone else, and I’m just trying to end things with you without really having to formally break up”.

I don’t know, I think it’s quite appropriate, relationships can be scientifically studied and analyzed, its just human behavioral science. The bitch is that it’s very difficult to look at your own relationship with someone and scientifically analyze what’s going on.

First of all, I recommend you subscribe to this newsletter http://www.doubleyourdating.com, and try to get a hold of the e-books and if you can the DVD or CD seminars. I know it sounds cheesy, but once you read the book, you will understand this guy knows what he’s taking about. Confessing your love in this situation would probably have scared any girl off, even if she was interested in taking the relationship to the next level. Let me try and explain. When two people enter a relationship, they usually do not ‘love’ each other; rather they feel attracted mutual attraction, love comes later. By confessing your love, you force a girl to make a decision on the spot, you force her to ask herself “Do I really love this guy, or am I just attracted to him?”, and if she admits to herself that she does love you then the relationship is suddenly forced to become a lot more serious. If she isn’t sure about her emotions, then she will freak out and give you the lame excuse that she needs time to think. You certainly can’t expect her be sure about her emotions when you aren’t in a formal relationship. In my opinion, you should never say “I love you” if it feels like you are confessing, you should only be saying it if it is casual, and expected. You can be in a relationship for a long time before you need to actually declare your love. It is also possible that she has never considered you as anything more than a friend, in which case, confessing your love does nothing but unbalance the relationship; it is extremely hard for her to stay friends with you when she knows you love her, but she doesn’t love you the same way. She may feel that it is unfair to you to be your friend when she knows you want something more. You have done damage by confessing love; you can try to heal the damage by denying love, even if it’s a lie. I suggest you tell her that you don’t know what came over you, that you really didn’t mean that you ‘love’ her, you were just confused about what love means, tell her you just want to be friends. Alternatively, if you don’t want to lie, you can do what Phi for All said, and tell her that’s really how you feel, and you aren’t sorry about it, but that you’d rather go back to being friends than strangers. Tell her if she needs a friend you’ll always be there. Either way after you have said your bit, leave it alone, act friendly but disinterested, act like being rejected doesn’t bother you, no, act like you were never rejected. I don’t mean that you should ignore her, or be cold; rather I mean that you should not act needy and dependant, do not act crushed. The chance is slim, but she may eventually come around when she needs a friend. At this point things will take time. I spent about a year not talking to my ex girlfriend in highschool, after that we became friends again, we both got over it and now I would say she is my best female friend. On a different note, here are a few things that you should not do when you are trying to attract a girl: Don’t be needy or dependent, don’t be a wuss, don’t constantly look to her for approval, don’t force her to make all the decisions, most women want you to be a man, take the lead, make the decisions, and don’t make her do everything. Instead of “Where do you want to go to dinner?” you should say “Let’s go to <name of restaurant> for dinner” Well, that’s my opinion, I hope some of it made sense, I could be wrong, especially since I don’t know much about your situation, I’m sure others will disagree with my advice, but oh well. Let me know if you want to talk about it in real time (chat or something).

They ought to bring Mr. Wizard's World back, I loved that show.

Haha, I remember a scene in ‘Alias’ where she is diffusing a plutonium bomb. After breaking away the shell of detonator explosives, she somehow lets the ball of plutonium roll away from her and makes some heroic leap to stop the ball from falling off the edge, like its gonna explode or something if she lets it drop.

Did anyone see Cold Case “Superstar” on Mar/26/2006 on CBS? Anyone feel like joining me for a laugh about how they seem to think you can kill someone by ‘lacing’ their towel with sodium nitrate? Don’t these people have a science advisor? (in case you didn’t see it, it was about a case where a tennis player gets killed by a towel laced with ‘poison’, sodium nitrate.) Oh! But the killer was a chemistry major, she must have known sodium nitrate was ‘deadly’! Sorry this probably isn’t worthy of a post, but I just had to vent about this ignorance.

Chlorine gas is a pale green/yellow but it is usually too pale to notice the color, so it appears colorless. When you electrolyze water with sodium chloride in it, it breaks down and releases chlorine gas; it also produces sodium hydroxide which dissolves in the water. If you don’t want chlorine you have to use a neutral salt that doesn’t take break down under electrolysis, one example is sodium sulfate. You should be using carbon electrodes, not just bare wire; you can get these by taking apart the large 6v lantern batteries, make sure the only thing touching the water is the carbon. Metal electrodes will slowly deteriorate if used for electrolysis. Finally, hydrogen is produced at the cathode (negative electrode) and oxygen is produced at the anode (the positive electrode), if you use AC current the electrodes will switch back and forth from anode to cathode, 60 times per second in the US. What this means is that the gas released at each electrode will be an equal mix of hydrogen and oxygen, you probably want them separate. I should also mention that 120v household electricity from the plug socket has a pretty good chance of killing you, especially when an electrolyte (salty water) is involved. I would not recommend you use 120v house electricity.

Yes it’s in Java, but once you know one language, it’s much easier to learn another.

Well, that clears that up, thanks woelen.

http://led.linear1.org/led.wizis a good page for finding which resistor to use for LEDs. Personally I’d use small halogen lights like these: http://www.pegasusassociates.com/MR16LoVHalogenLamps.jsp but that’s just me.

I took it and got a 4. I didn’t find it that hard, but its dependant on ability. I learned VB the year before, if you have some programming experience it won’t be too hard. I had quite a lot of fun messing around with the fish, I tried to give them some simple AI to get them to swim in a school, it didn’t work very well though; they just sort of clumped together. Lol, good times.

You may have knocked something loose while you had the case open, a partially seated card can cause all sorts of weird problems, I’d re-seat all the connections.

Don’t forget the mercury vapor inside the florescent tubes. I’m not sure about other types of radiation but the coating inside a florescent tube glows under UV light.

I was a bit freaked out when I turned on the lights and realized id been breathing the stuff without noticing it for a few minutes, I promptly opened the window and retreated. I should also mention that I was burning it in a shallow Pyrex cup, and the flames heated the liquid below to the point that it was boiling gently. It looked awesome, but yeah, ill be sure to do it in a well ventilated area next time.

I was browsing woelen’s page and I saw the page on green fire: http://woelen.scheikunde.net/science/chem/exps/borate_ester/index.html having some boric acid and some denatured ethanol around I gave it a try. After burning about 40ml in the dark (you have to see it for yourself, I mean green fire, awesome!), I turned on the lights and found the bathroom filled with a light ‘fog’, I noticed some sort of vapor coming off of the flames earlier too. Could this just be a light smoke? I used Ace Denatured Alcohol, which says it contains “Methanol, Ketones, Ethanol”. Any ideas on what this fog is?

So why don’t we see USB 2.0 flash drives than can use all of the 500 Mbit/s that USB 2.0 has? Or have I been lied to about the speed of USB 2.0? I won’t be free of the IDE legacy until my 3 IDE hard drives and my 3 IDE CD drives all die. My computer has a few years left in it yet.

I’m defiantly doing it outside and I have every intention of wearing a half-face organic vapor respirator; I tend to get a headache from fumes even at fairly low concentrations. I don’t plan on spilling boiling toluene on my self, but I’ll probably wear chemical resistant gloves anyway. Now that I’m thinking about it I should also have a bucket of sand standing by. The boiling point of toluene is 110C, heating the toluene with boiling water like woelen did wouldn’t allow the toluene to boil, but heating it without water like YT did would allow it to boil, perhaps it expands the most between 100C and 110C. I’ll be sure to use a thermometer when I do it. On a side note, wouldn’t adding more sulphur to the solution raise the boiling point, allowing you dissolve more sulphur?

After trying this on a small scale I’d like to do larger batches, before I do I’d like to know which of the following heating methods is unsafe: Immersion element in direct contact with toluene. Immersion element heating water in a double boiler/ water bath Electric stove type element (hot plate) heating a pot of toluene.

If you find the mechanical pencil lead keeps breaking, wrap the wire around a needle first and then slip the coil of wire off of the needle and onto the graphite. A 12v lead acid battery will vaporize these things, I haven’t tried a small 9v battery, or a couple AA 1.5v batteries, but they will probably work too.

Yes. I personally don’t think devoting 0.69% of our land to gathering energy is a big deal, since we already use 1% for growing crops. But the fact that there is only so much renewable energy available on earth still remains. If the global energy needs increase to the point where the demand for energy exceeds the supply, the system will just undergo a self correction. Eventually the system will reach equilibrium.

Ok, I might have messed up on the math here, but the numbers seem right. Watts per sq m (average over 24hr period over whole earth): 164 kWh / sq m / day: 3.94 kWh / sq km / day: 3,936,000 Earth’s landmass (sq km): 148,300,000 Daily total solar energy (kWh): 583,708,800,000,000 Yearly solar energy over land (kWh): 213,053,712,000,000,000 10% of yearly solar energy (kWh): 21,305,371,200,000,000 Yearly energy use (kWh): 146,535,535,000,000 Landmass needed (%): 0.69% Landmass needed (sq km) 1,019,988 That’s an area slightly bigger than Egypt. About 1% of the Earth’s landmass is devoted to growing crops. This estimate might actually be more than it needs to be because most solar cells are more than 10% efficient. The fact that out energy needs are growing at a rapid rate complicates things somewhat, I’m still working on that one.

We are waiting for solar to become cheaper that fossil fuels. More solar energy falls on the earth each day than all of humanity uses in a year. Solar energy can be used to create hydrogen for hydrogen powered cars, it could also be used to charge the batteries of battery powered cars. These systems may not be feasible for racecars and the like, but for the rest of us, these cars are a viable alternative, as soon as they become economically attractive. Ultimately all of the energy on the earth comes from the sun, using biodiesel and ethanol are just ways of using plants to collect the solar energy for us. As technology improves, it will become much easier to gather resources from space. Some people theorize there are large reserves of frozen hydrogen on the moon. The reason we went to the moon was just to beat Russia, you can’t expect to find gold if that’s not the reason you are going to the moon in the first place. (Why would you expect to find gold on the moon anyway?) Cement isn’t that hard to make, it doesn’t require very much processing at all. You may not have much sand where you are, but I guarantee it’s going to be a very long time before the world runs out of sand. Concrete doesn’t even need sand, any inert filler (aggregate) will do, silicon dioxide is usually used (quartz sand), be here we use calcium carbonate (coral sand), both work fine. You could also just use the dust from demolished buildings instead of sand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_cement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete

You don’t need solar panels to get electricity from the sun, mirrors can be used to boil water and drive turbines, and this is probably even within reach of a DIY enthusiast. As far as we are concerned, the sun is an infinite source of energy, as long as it shines on the Earth, there will always be ways to harness it. Our natural resources on earth won’t just runt out, its not like once you throw something away it just disappears, the materials are still there, and they can be reclaimed (mining of landfills etc). The reason recycling isn’t as widespread as it could be is simply because it’s cheaper to get the materials out of the Earth than it is to recycle them. It’s the same thing with alternatives to fossil fuels: they are the cheapest form of energy at the moment, once they become too expensive, we’ll just switch to the next cheapest energy source. There are many people who go around removing copper pipes and wires from abandoned buildings and sell them to be recycled. Just because a country is in darkness for half a year doesn’t mean they can’t buy energy from another country that has a surplus Existing petrol and diesel engines require little to no modification to burn biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel. Besides, there’s a whole solar system of resources just waiting to be exploited! I will admit that society is entirely unbalanced: as a species humans are technological masters, but spiritual infants. Following the golden rule is a good place to start: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

It doesn’t take any huge infrastructure changes, you can buy cheap simple adapters that allow you to plug a CompactFlash card directly into an IDE cable and use it as a hard drive, and you can even boot an OS from them. As far as I’m aware, flash memory is worn only when data is erased or written, you should be able to read data from a flash card an indefinite number of times, as long as there is no writing or erasing. How is flash any faster than a hard drive? Even the fastest flash cards say160x (24 megabytes per second), are slower than most hard drives. Flash is good in a high shock or high vibration environment, and it uses a lot less energy but apart from that, I don’t see any advantages to putting flash in computers. As far as I’m aware, the large iPods (20GB+) still use hard drives, the 4 GB ones might use flash and I’m pretty sure the Nano does. Currently a 4GB CompactFlash card costs about 180 USD, for the same price you could buy a 400BG hard drive, admittedly the hard drive is physically much larger, but come one, that’s a big price difference per GB.