Greg H.

Have you never done something while tired and forgot that you did it? Let's leave the topic there shall we.

Of course I have, and my first response was not a) miracles or b) malfeasance by the forum admins. It's usually "Why the hell did I do/say that?"

 

You need context, not just the moment of shooting. A lot can happen, or not happen, before an officer draws a weapon.

 

I don't disagree. I'm in favor of both body cams and gun cams, in additional to the dashboard cameras most departments already have.

The really sad part of the whole thing, is I find the BBC's reporting of incident in America to be more accurate (or at least more journalistic and less sensationalist) than many of the American news outlets.

 

Absolutely. Unless they went along with the police everywhere (which means ~10-20x as many crews and cost), or, HEY! you just attach the cameras to the police officers. Gosh, why has no one thought of this before? (he asked, sarcastically directed at the OP)

Or, if what you really care about is the discharge of firearms, you attach them to the actual firearms. (he said, for the third time)

Strangely enough a glimmer of recollection did return once I had to focus that it was myself as being the source.

I'm not entirely sure why your consideration of the event didn't start there.

The evidence only worked in this case because the police did not know they were being filmed. With body cameras there maybe ways of standing side-on when firing so the film still doesn't capture the scene.

Thus the gun cameras.

Or you could just make it mandatory for police to have body and gun cams. Unless you have one homeless person per cop, you'd still miss some incidents.

Here's a hint.

If your idea to produce energy includes the phrase "over 100% return" then it violates the laws of physics and you can assume it will not work.

Leo more or less sums it up:

Oh ye seekers after perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you pursued? Go and take your place with the alchemists.— Leonardo da Vinci

Geology.com has an article about it, including a handy chart.

http://geology.com/articles/near-earth-asteroids.shtml

They list Global Catastrophe at 2km. In comparison, they estimate the Chicxulub asteroid at roughly 9km.

 

Can't wait to find out, so do tell when you know.

 

PS I can recommend a good shelter for the homeless if she throws you out.

 

To your point, I see what you mean about the "cake" now. I think. It wouldn't end up so much a rectangle as a trapezoid because each layer gets longer as you move outwards.

Right?

I'm now curious enough to know if it matters enough to be significant. I wonder if my wife would yell at me if I bought a digital caliper and started cutting up rolls of toilet paper.

Because if part of it is stretched, or more difficult- compressed, then its volume and surface area changes.

Then to get an accurate value for the actual thickness of each sheet, we have to eliminate the roll - otherwise we risk corrupting our result.

Also, you would have to compress the sheets before you do your thickness measure anyway - toilet tissue is manufactured to be fluffly, not flat.

Unfortunately you cannot roll the paper round a cylinder without distortion if it has any thickness whatsoever.

In order to force it to lie 'flat' (contiguous) one side must be longer than the other.

You could also simplypull the sheets apart one at a time and stack them up. Each sheet is a standard size (according to the packaging), so you end up with a rectangular solid, and the volume of each sheet becomes

[latex]

V_{sheet} = \frac{V_{solid}}{sheetcount}

[/latex]

The problem is one of economics. Right now, it would probably cost more to go up and fetch the material than the material would be worth once you had it - and most of that cost is down to how much it costs to put someone (or something, if we use robots) in space, then bring the whole lot back to earth for processing.

Let's say (for the sake of argument) it costs you $100 to recycle a ton of aluminum. That includes only the actual recycling process from old aluminum to shiny new aluminum. You still have to pay to recover the aluminum, and a ground based system can do that much (think orders of magnitude) cheaper per ton than your space recovery can - which means you can't afford to sell your products at a price that's competitive.

The real rub, is that you have to bring it back to the surface for processing - if you had a way of collecting it and processing it in space that didn't involve a round trip to and from the surface, you could could probably do it and make money - especially if you could turn around and use the material in orbit, meaning you never have to fight Earth's gravity well. The initial investment would be high, but once you got up and running, you could probably recycle materials at a profit, and for less than comparable materials shipped up from the surface.

Now, if powered space flight reachews a point where putting something in orbit is (relatively) cheap, you may have something.

However, you seem not to understand that the Earth doesn't have "an emissivity" any more than it has "a colour".

Tch. It's so obvious. The Earth is blue (except where it isn't).

 

How did you come up with this value? Are there any materials which have emissivity this low?

Some materials which resemble parts of the Earth's surface:

• Asphalt: 0.88
• Concrete: 0.91
• Ice: 0.97
• Snow: 0.8 to 0.9
• Water: 0.96

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissivity#Emissivities_of_common_surfaces

 

The lowest value there is polished silver (0.02). So you are saying that the Earth's average emissivity is 10 times less than that. Sounds implausble.

I looked at this list(pdf), and the lowest values they list are also .02, for polished silver, polished gold, cadmium, and unoxidized aluminum.

could you not also use a cross sectional area calc

 

CSArea = Length * thickness

 

Also

 

CSArea = Area outer circle - Area inner circle

 

ie

 

Length * thickness = Area Outer Circle - Area Inner Circle

 

[latex](500*3)*thickness= \pi \cdot r^2_{outer} - \pi \cdot r^2_{inner}[/latex]

 

edit

 

just noticed I have 250 for number of sheets - it should be 500 from OP

Building on imatfaal's work, we can rewrite the equation in terms of thickness:

[latex](500*3)*thickness= \pi \cdot r^2_{outer} - \pi \cdot r^2_{inner}[/latex]

[latex](1500)*thickness= \pi \cdot (r^2_{outer} - r^2_{inner})[/latex]

[latex]thickness= \frac {\pi \cdot (r^2_{outer} - r^2_{inner})}{1500}[/latex]

I think.

Edit - plugging my formula in terms of thickness into wolfram, gives a similar answer to imfataal's.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=t%3D((pi*(2.5^2+-+1.5^2))%2F1500)

As a side note, this is reasonably close to the thickness this guy got on his roll.

I can even say for sure that the magnetic repulsion of each particle within the black hole would easily prevent the infinite speck from occurring to such an extent that the object would most likely stay the size of the star that caused it to occur in the first place.

I will refer you now to a snippet from the Wikipedia article on black holes, which addresses this objection.

In 1931, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated, using special relativity, that a non-rotating body of electron-degenerate matter above a certain limiting mass (now called the Chandrasekhar limit at 1.4 M_☉) has no stable solutions.^[13] His arguments were opposed by many of his contemporaries like Eddington and Lev Landau, who argued that some yet unknown mechanism would stop the collapse.^[14] They were partly correct: a white dwarf slightly more massive than the Chandrasekhar limit will collapse into a neutron star,^[15] which is itself stable because of the Pauli exclusion principle. But in 1939, Robert Oppenheimer and others predicted that neutron stars above approximately 3 M_☉ (the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit) would collapse into black holes for the reasons presented by Chandrasekhar, and concluded that no law of physics was likely to intervene and stop at least some stars from collapsing to black holes.^[16]

Once an object reaches suitable density to overcome the Pauli exclusion principle, simple chemical processes are not going to be powerful enough to stop it collapsing - the gravity is literally crushing the disparate parts of the atoms into the nucleus itself. In fact, the only reason neutron stars exist is because it takes so much more energy to break the TOV limit, that there is a discernable mass difference between that and the C limit before it.

Keep in mind that Neutron Stars are already collapsed stellar objects much smaller than their masses would suggest, so your argument that these masses should remain the same size as the star that created them is a non-starter.

I once heard a radio dj compare the presidential election in the US to a game of pick your favorite serial murderer.

When none of the choices are good choices, you try and choose the option that can do the least damage.

Infinity is also not a defined value, so the answer undefined is more precise, since it could also be negative infinity, or 2(infinity) or any other "value" that includes an infinity.

 

Where was it specified that the solution has to be a real number?

My argument wasn't based on the solution, my argument was based on the fact that a value x cannot be equal to itself plus a constant. It literally isn't an equation; those two things cannot be set equal for any value of x.

 

But there it is...

 

The fact that you can write an equation does not make it a valid equation.

And if it's invalid equation, the answer is meaningless to begin with.

To approach this from another tack - if we found life on a planet so unlike the Earth that humans couldn't survive there, it would be a final indicator that we're really not that special in the grand scheme of things. It might also help give us more insights into how life originates, and the conditions that are required to kick start living organisms on a newly formed planet.

My question is, though, if we're using operators, aren't we now dealing with expressions, not numbers?

I mean I can express 81 as 9⁹, but 81 is the numeric representation of that expression.

Edit: Wrote this before I saw dejmar's post, above.

I'm not sure I agree with the gist of the idea, but I can't fault the logic. If you look at numbers in that fashion, then a certain amount of operations would be permissable to write a "number".

[math]A = \frac{(3.45 * 1200000)}{1,000,000} = 4.14 [/math]