pavelcherepan

So here I was talking with a colleague from Morocco and he was telling me about Argan tree goats that live there and how crazy and vicious creatures they are. Being not familiar with the animal in question I googled some images and then suddenly it was all clear! The great and long-sought after answer was here all along! Goats! Why else would prehistoric ancestors of humans get down from the trees? It's so nice and comfy there, hard for predators to get to you, but no, imagine you're sitting in the tree minding your own business and suddenly you're attacked by a vicious goat! How terrifying! I also had a look at some pictures of ancient human bones with so-called "signs of damage by weapons". But it's much easier than that - it looks exactly like something that goat horns would do! It most definitely was a victim of the fist human-goat war at 2 million B.C. I also found proof that goats were well organised and employed a scorched-Earth tactics as you can see in the image below. They would take control of all the trees they could and utterly obliterate all the rest so that humans would starve and die! How clever of them! At the moment I'm putting all my thoughts on a paper and will send it to Nature magazine and I'm very sure that this will entirely change everything that we knew of human evolution. We're on the brink of great discoveries and I urge you to take part so we can all be famous and maybe get a joint Nobel Prize! I think that international community and the UN should do all in their power to establish communications with the international goat community, because it's obvious now that they are much smarter than we all thought and might even have the answer to the question of life and Universe and everything! GOATS!!!!!

Most of the power usage is during the evening/night hours obviously and the rate at which power companies buy electricity and what they sell it for are two totally different things. Different by an order of magnitude.

Good point. Didn't think about that.

swansont, actually it's more than that. Power Wall also gives 350-450V DC current, so I'd need to buy an AC/DC inverter, plus whatever it'd cost to install it as I'm no electrician and eventually I'd be looking at some $11-12k for the total system cost, which will push braking-even point to 10 years away or more. I was really excited about the whole thing when I first heard the initial announcement, but now it seems like it's still awesome, but not financially awesome

I wonder how much damage does this do to the door itself? You'd probably need to replace a door afterwards, which is a bit pricey. A legislation that makes perfect sense?! No way!

Many of you have probably seen the news about the new Tesla Power Wall, which is basically a lithium-ion battery that's meant to be recharged with solar power (or other renewable source) and keeps you from using any electricity from the grid at all. For those who haven't seen the news, you can watch the presentation by Elon Musk, who is admittedly a great entrepreneur, but in my opinion might need to work a bit on his presentation skills. What do you reckon, is it worth getting one? I've been thinking of one and it seems barely worth it because: - average daily electricity consumption for our house is ~8 kWh (averaged over the last 4 months) - solar panels on the roof with ~3 kW combined power If I get a Power Wall for 10kWh, there's plenty of sunlight and day is long enough here in Victoria even in winter to charge it completely and then feed back to the grid for the remaining day time. Power Wall has been introduced with a price tag of $3500 for 10 kWh system, so in Australia it will probably cost closer to AU$5500, knowing that everything here is ridiculously overpriced. Even so, I'd be saving about $70 a month on electricity bills and getting some $20 more from the power company for feeding into the grid. So at $90/month it would take about 5 years to break even, while Tesla has a 10-year warranty on batteries. So far so good. But if I include $3500 solar panels in the calculation too, now it will take over 8 years to break even, and so, assuming that the battery will go 'boom' straight after the warranty runs out, it's barely worth it to get one. Of course, you'll be saving the planet and all that... Maybe I'm missing something here?

Thanks! If the travel is instantaneous, then travel backwards in time and possible time paradoxes would be a bigger worry than some time dilation Maybe like in the movie Interstellar you can have Planet X orbit a black hole and close enough for the time dilation to be sufficient. Obviously that opens even more holes like why the planet isn't torn apart from tidal forces or why isn't everyone dead from radiation coming from an accretion disk around the hole (assuming it has one).

What is LIC?

I remember Mr. Clarkson made a mention of this in Top Gear a couple seasons back, but anyway - how do you get out of a car with gull-wing doors if it's rolled over and ended on its roof? I haven't found information about it, but I can't really imagine that engineers have disregarded such a glaring safety hazard.

We all know very well that the spaceship will land in NY so US government will do negotiations

Sorry, Spyman, but UN is a joke. It's lost any weight in global decisions, so I doubt it would be able to negotiate terms through the UN.

Hang a rope off the ceiling. Hang rod A on the rope so that it's balanced and not moving. Observe for a bit. If not starting to rotate change orientation by 90 degrees (if you had a pure luck of accidentally orienting it N-S the first time). Moving? Magnet. Not moving? Rod B is the magnet. Repeat the experiment with rod B to confirm that there is in fact a magnet in the room.

A common planetary government is unlikely to be established (at least peacefully) until nationalism is more or less eradicated, because failing to do so, such a government will be inherently unstable and collapse shortly. I see two possible ways of eradication of nationalism (can be combined) - assimilation on a global scale is one (that would take a long time) and the other one is to establish self-sufficient colonies on other planets. In the case of the latter nationalism on a country-wide scale will get converted into planet-wide nationalism, where people of the Earth would think of themselves as a separate nation compared to otherworlders. Anyway, these both will take a long time. Just out of curiosity - when did Russia invade the EU?

Thanks Mike, that was an interesting talk, very enjoyable. As far as your question in the OP is concerned - I don't think crystallisation is responsible, because (as also been said in the video) crystallisation of iron and increase of the size of the inner core occurs pretty much constantly at a rate of fractions of a millimeter a year as a result of general cooling of the planet. If crystallisation was responsible, geomagnetic field should either be reversing constantly or not reversing at all, but that's not something that we're observing. There are some simulations that show that magnetic field is quite unstable and will randomly revert after some time. Also, some points of nit as per BBC4 talk: the notion voiced by one of the guests that rotation of water in a sink is affected by the Coriolis' force is wrong AFAIK. It's mostly due to the shape of sinkhole and whatever residual angular momentum water has from being poured into the sink. When Arwen Deuss was talking about shorter travel times of seismic waves between N-S compared to opposite sides of the equator, no mention was made of different radii in these directions. And in the end when they were talking of how magnetic field is important for habitability of planets and said that planets with no magnetic fields have their atmospheres stripped of by solar wind, for some reason Venus had been forgotten, while it has next to no magnetic field, is closer to the Sun and yet its atmosphere is 90 times larger than Earth's.

Acme, I smell some misunderstanding here. I wasn't trying to argue against your point that most of human-induced earthquakes are caused by waste water injection rather than fracking. I only linked that Appendix to show Robittybob1 that there are plenty of studies linking waste water injections with quakes. Obviously, you're forgetting about the 2011 Christchurch quake.

Spyman, I think it's been identified that a good deal of Neanderthal DNA has survived in modern human populations of non-African descent, so maybe there was some violence and competition, but also a good deal of interbreeding too. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v507/n7492/full/nature12961.html http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/anthropology/science-neanderthal-genes-modern-human-dna-01734.html http://www.livescience.com/42933-humans-carry-20-percent-neanderthal-genes.html Also, there are some authors that consider Neanderthals as a subspecies of Homo Sapiens: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14745010/

But if we're talking science we can't speak of some future evidence than may or may not come about, only what we can observe now. Should such conflicting evidence appear in the future, theories will be amended as required but at the moment these two mentioned don't seem to be valid.

Did you have any question you wanted to ask or any discussion point, because so far you've just explained (rather poorly) the big crunch and big bounce theories? Also, since the current observations show accelerated expansion of the universe, both these theories are not supported by evidence. If by this you mean that there are many theories as to how the universe will eventually come to an end then indeed there are a few - <Ultimate fate of the Universe>

The reason why multiverse discussions belong to science fiction rather than science proper is that if those universes are entirely separate from our Universe and can't possibly be observed then there's as much point in discussing it as trying to scientifically prove that God exists/doesn't exist. On the other hand, if these Universes can be observed then these are in fact a part of our own Universe, since Universe includes everything that can possibly be observed, felt and experienced.

He's made a claim and provided a link. Do you really need to be spoon fed? It took me two minutes to find the information, it's not so hard if you try.

Read Appendix C of the report. There's like 8 pages of reports of induced seismicity with references to papers with a more detailed descriptions. Feel free to browse through those.

Lazy-lazy-lazy. The first link that iNow had provided (http://the-earth-story.com/post/85042553008/earthquake-advisory-issued-for-oklahoma-its-time). Just 4 paragraphs down the page it says: The report that Acme linked says at the very start (page 7):

Thanks, umatfaal, great explanation. Quick question though - I take it that quarks and antiquarks don't annihilate like other particle-antiparticle pairs do? Is there a different meaning of matter-antimatter when you're dealing with quarks?

Only try and improve predictions but still there will be a pretty major uncertainty in both time and place of an earthquake. Science can also develop new materials to construct better dwellings that are quake-resistant, but this very much depends on economical level of the country. Obviously Nepal is a pretty poor country and they can't afford to construct seismic-resistant buildings.

OK, if you want to bring up Tunguska event here. It was a bolide that exploded in the upper atmosphere and part of its mass was vaporized and added to Earth's atmosphere and small metallic granules from the remnant of the explosion got scattered on an area of tens of square kilometers and so essentially pretty much all of Tunguska bolide did become a part of the Earth in one way or another. Same would happen in a similar situation with the Sun. From your own link. Try to argue this: