calbiterol

I think he was joking.... Quite funny though, kudos!

The only thing my chem teacher said that seemed to contradict anything - and keep in mind he said this about 3 months ago at the end of school (and hence I have not seen him since) was something about how all transitions were allowed. I took this to mean a transition from any level to any level - I guess one of us (probably I was) wrong.

Can you explain that again? Something my chem teacher said a while ago seems to contradict this. Plus, Tom's example jumps from ground state to E=4 with one photon of energy ~12.75 eV. Or is there a difference between s/p/d/f and E=1,2,3, etc? Sorry if the question seems dumb, but this is something that I haven't been taught in at all, other than what I've taught myself or knowledge I've acquired through very specific questions.

I'm going into engineering when I get to college, prolly Aeronautical or Aerospace. Might double major, or minor, in something else - political science or linguistics are what i'm looking at right now. But engineering is what I always have done, always do, and probably, always will do.

That's being referred to as Augmented Intelligence, and is benefiting greatly from research into artificial intelligence. IIRC, there is an implant/external device currently experimental that augments memory and provides another memory bank.

Well, interestingly enough, I've discovered that my school is in the process of installing wireless hotspots...

Well, you got the first part right. But the rest has nothing to do with the version number. Rather, something that happens when you talk smack to the indians.

And Iron (III) oxide doesn't work for thermite reactions, IIRC.

Seeing it through a mirror is curious indeed. But yes, when trying to take a picture, the lines are due to different refresh rates.

Have fun, and succeed where I always fail - building the things I think up.

Northern Illinois, Chicago area. Not so much a bitch to build, you just have to find the right materials. A lathe would be nice, too. I was just guessing at the complex electronics. After having thought about it (read: made the schematic) I realized I didn't. But I forgot I'd said that complex electronics would be needed. The complex part would be the loading mechanism. It always is - in all of my dealings with designing unbelievably insane paintball guns, the loading mechanism is the issue, especially since paintballs can be crushed. But that's a really, really long story, and one crazy tangent.

No, I don't care. In fact, it would be better if it is transparent above 10 eV.

Yes, but parallel lines can be the same line. The definition of parallel means they have the same slope. Two of the same lines have the same slope. But that's overanalyzing it.

I was actually hit by a rather interesting idea last night. Going with the scitoys example here, so if things are confusing, just ask. Using electromagnets in a halbach array, and using a magnet in place of the last steel ball bearing (before the projectile, that is), and some compex timing circuitry, you could make a fully-auto gauss rifle. I don't have any idea what kind of rate of fire it would have, but it would probably just get better as the speed increased. Heres the setup: The dark green are the halbach electromagnets, and the yellow arrows indicate the original augmented direction. The grey circles are spherical steel ball bearings, the squiggly's denote an ommitted portion (in other words, part of the barrel/firing chamber is missing there), the red circle is a spherical magnet, and the blue thing is a projectile. Note that this thing has no scale whatsoever. So the initial force (hitting the first electromagnet on the left) transfers it's kinetic energy to the first steel ball bearing, which (because it's a halbach array) has very little electromagnet attraction to the cancelled side (there's still a small field there, though, so the ball should stay attached to the electromagnet). This transfer of energy knocks the ball bearing to the next halbach array, and so on, until it gets to the "spherical magnet." This is actually not a plain old magnet, it's a halbach array with a steel hemisphere at each end, held by both glue and magnetic attraction. The augmented field direction is the same as the original direction of the other halbach arrays, if that makes any sense - but it's a fixed magnet array. Anyway, this gets hit forward just like everything beforehand, but then it hits the last halbach array. There, it hits (and flips) a switch (the bright green box). This switch flips the polarity of all the halbach arrays. Magnetic attraction pulls the fixed-magnet array back towards the electromagnet array it originally came from, reversing the cycle. This same process is used before the first electromagnet array on the left to reverse the process again, bringing us back to where we started. If that makes sense, then... you should understand how it becomes self-resetting. If it doesn't make sense, just ask.

Nice. You didn't, by chance, do the thing with the dummy lock? Alternatively, you could get it to call / take a picture when they touch the handle. There's any number of possibilities. Out of curiosity, are you building the solenoid bolt yourself or did you buy it?

Yt, heres an idea - you said they used bolt cutters. What about a lock that has no bolts? You said your shed is steel reinforced; I'm assuming you did this yourself. There's any number of ways you could rig up a boltless lock - you could place a magnetic bolt within the door that could only be moved with a magnetic key, or you could get a keypad (you could even take the one off the cellphone) and have the bolt electrically / magnetically open with some circuitry. Add a dummy lock, and put a sensor in it - a simple wire would work - so that as soon as it's cut, your phone dials. Then you get the best of both worlds - no break in, and caught vandals.

I like the idea of hooking up a hidden camera on the same circuit. If you wanted to get really, really stealthy with it, you could either use a night-vision camera or one with an uber-high film number - 1600 plus could do the trick - and they'd never know that any picture was taken. Sorry 'bout having your shed broken into, but congrats about catching the guy! As they say, there's no honor among theives - perhaps he'll turn in his 2 buddies for a reduced sentence.

Same here. I highly recommend FireFox. I don't know how I got by with IE before. I hate IE now, especially for it's lack of PNG support and it's substandard capabilities.

I just found the rate of fire statistic, on the promotional video. http://defensereview.com/dad/dread.mov . "the DREAD offers an extraordinary rate of fire - up to 120 000 rounds per minute in controlled bursts" While this is absolutely INSANE, (wicked!!!), the controlled bursts part is key.

Speed is often inversely proportional to precision (in shooting, this is known as a pattern). Being a taget shooter myself, 8mm apart is pretty bad, but I guess your link will have to divulge the information. As for an effective gauss rifle - they don't require any power to fire at all - gravity could do it, if the engineering was done correctly. Resetting the firing mechanism requires the power, and in this case, if the sear (the thing that catches bolt) is non-magnetic, you only have to have enough power to move a ball bearing. With magnetic levitation of bullets, extreme accuracy can be achieved. Needless to say, I've thought the system out. [Edit: I'm reading the site now. So far, I'm not incredibly impressed by the technology - it's stealth possibilities are not that impressive, and overall, it doesn't look that much better than a gauss rifle, if not worse. The speed - 300 meters per second, or roughly 975 feet per second - isn't that impressive. It's actually not that much faster than a paintball gun - some legal-to-own-without-a-permit air rifles (in the US) fall only 25 feet per second short of that. Weapons with similar rates of fire are hitting about 3000 feet per second. Sorry about not having metric/SI numbers, but I'm mostly talking US guns and ratings, because that's what I'm used to. The article you gave says that it's placing the rounds 8.5 millimeters behind each other. I misinterpreted what you said, sorry. While this is impressive, it's not as impressive as one would think - a Vulcan minigun can spit out over 10 000 rounds a minute. Converting between the two is a pain, though. However, 8.5 millimeters is impressive nonetheless - it's just been done before, IIRC. It says nothing about accuracy. This is quite possibly the deciding factor - I don't care if you can shoot a million rounds a second, if you shoot for five minutes and can't hit a target fifty meters away, it won't do you any good. But it seems viable. I think power consumption would be a large concern, though - as well as the fact that spherical rounds have been tried and proven to be inferior to bullet-shaped projectiles. Interesting, though.]

Yep. I can't say it takes much to turn it into a rifle, though! Those things can pack such a punch... I'm really rather surprised that the military hasn't done something with the idea... You'd think, with the fact that you don't need any dangerous explosives. But then again, what is logical these days?

Incredibly fun. If it doesn't work, you should make a gauss rifle. Those are really fun.

This page has a bunch of more technical information on Halbach arrays. If you let us know your idea, we could tell you if it would work or not, and/or help you out with it. I understand not wanting to divulge your ideas, but it would be much easier for us to help you. Either way, good luck.