gcol

I presume it is because they are riddled with informers.

Conversation between me and a snake Me: why aren't you hairy , then? Snake: Dunno really, I suppose if I was hairy, I would not be a snake. How about you? Me: I suppose if all humans were hairy, how could you tell the difference between us and apes. But then even some of the bald ones act like apes. Sigh.

The news hit the U.K. papers this morning. My first reaction is unprintable, my second is that it was a barbaric act of state sponsored murder. Those who excuse or condone it probably believe that "might is right", the subject of another recent thread. Scenario: A Chinese drone commits a similar act against a small midwestern town, because a Chinese designated terrorist may, or may not, be hiding there. I can just imagine the outraged squeals of The Guardians Of Democracy and Freedom. What goes around comes around. Do as you would be done by.

You have called their bluff. I dont think a generally accepted one exists, But here's one that suits me: Time is an artificial mathematical construct that is convenient to measure the passage of events. Any dissenters? More suggestions? Many bedrock modern theories make assumptions as to the basic nature of time...... er, did I just suggest some bedrock theories are founded based on the quicksand of unfounded assumption? Oh well, have fun and shoot me down in flames.

Re: propellor Read the rules. The assembly may be home made, but the prop itself must be plastic store bought, of a certain maximum diameter diameter. Discover the power-on duration. Subtract from desired total flight time. Remaining time must rely on glide efficiency. Trim motor run to finish at max. ceiling height, then trim for best glide, ( make sure the prop cn freewheel with minimum friction) paying attention to turning circle to avoid hittng walls. There is much more art than science to this, and if you can do all that within three weeks, you live in a different time scale to me. Good luck.

Rebiu: I take it you are not a creationist. If so, welcome to the club. Have you considered that "scientific" creationists generally like to have their cake and eat it? They profess to believe it, yet they steadily chip away at its tenets with the scientific method. In effect, they are waging a war of managed retreat. The irony is, that if their scientific methods were to win, they would have proven their own belief to be in error. It is a "spoiling" war, one which they dare not win. Creationist belief is a very broad church. If you question it in general terms, they will naturally gang up and fall on you like a ton of bricks. The reaction is pavlovian in its predictability. Consider "divide and conquer" as a strategy. You might identify the different degrees of crationists and devise strategies to get them arguing amongst themselves, then quietly sit back and watch the blood flow. I can see the headline now "Civil war breaks out between creationists as they turn on each other, evolutionists called upon to broker a peace"

Not many of them, then are there? Today's truth is so often tomorrow's busted theory. (sigh) I suppose I'll just take things one day at a time, then.

5614 and Alien Thanks for you considered responses re. sound propagation through vacuum. Does that imply that "Does sound travel through vacuum?" should be answered with "What type of sound, and what degree of vacuum? Would a refinement of the term vacuum be useful? 0 p.s.i.seems rather cumbersome and vague in this context (Sorry, Dog). Perhaps something like zero kelvin, theoretically possible, yet impossible to attain. Then again, perhaps there ought to be more than one type of vacuum....one free of matter, one free of energy, both possible as theoretical limits. Vacuum cleaner in space The earthly vacuum cleaner depends upon the impact of the impeller upon individual molecules (of gas or dust) The lower the gas/dust density, the lower the lower the efficiency. Efficiency will tend towards zero, but in a non-perfect vacuum, can it ever reach absolute zero? For a space "vacuum cleaner", Why not consider an electrostatic "suction device", rather than wallopping dust and molecules with a rotating stick? Come to that, even a solar sail and a radio aeriel have been designed to suck up/collect something specific. You could say they wouldn't work, or be zero efficient in the absence of photons or radio waves. Horses for courses.

I pulled this quote from Science Week. Does this cause any second thoughts about the possibility of certain frequencies/energies of sound to propagate through certain "densities" of vacuum? If I have committed some error of etiquette when quoting, please forgive and explain. I am a newboy to forums. I have underlined and emboldened the part which seemed to have particular significance: 3) The semantic incongruity, however, like the sublimated worries about modern life that give us science fiction nightmares, belies something important -- unfinished business of the 1970s that has been slowly and systematically tearing physics apart. Stripped of their confusing mathematical descriptions, the phases of the vacuum boil down to physical analogies with phases of ordinary matter, natural phenomena observed to exhibit universality. That means that their properties at long length and time scales, where we normally do experiments, do not depend on microscopic details at all, and thus do not constrain them when measured. A simple example of emergent universality would be sound propagation in fluids and solids, an effect perfectly well accounted for as the motion of atoms, but also a generic property of the phases not requiring atoms to make sense. Sound is an especially pertinent example because it has a second identity at low temperatures as an emergent elementary particle with properties identical to those of particles of light. Insensitivity to microscopic detail thus turns the concept of fundamental on its head, in that it makes principles of self-organization the truly important thing, rendering the quantum underpinnings of the Universe, whatever they are, unknowable in the absence of experiments that reach shorter scales and irrelevant to behavior we presently see. Little wonder that physicists remain bitterly divided over full acceptance of the vacuum as a phase. References (abridged): 1. Akira, 124 min, directed by Katsuhiro Otomo (Kodansha Ltd., Japan, 1988) 2. S. Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (Basic Books, New York, 1994) 3. M. Rees, New Perspectives in Astrophysical Cosmology (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2000) 4. A. H. Guth, A. P. Lightman, The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins (Perseus, New York, 1998) 5. M. E. Peskin, D. E Schroeder, An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory (Westview, Boulder, CO, 1995) Science http://www.sciencemag.org

I like that. Space is not homogenous throughout. Surely It is quite possible that in some areas of space, the "vapour density" is high enough that sound might propagate?

Thanks yammers. He was probably quoted out of context. I hope that he really said something like "Look, my theory pertains to the BB itself, it's pointless to ask me about before it in this context, go formulate your own theory". It is a fact of life that we have to go through the educational treadmill of standard textbook theory to pass exams and earn our stripes.The spark of hope on the horizon is that every few generations, when pensioned encumbents have died out, the textbooks are re-written. In the meantime, don't let the b******s grind you down! In the meantime, hack away at that idol, you may be the one to discover it has feet of clay.

Steven Hawking is reported as having said the question "what before the big bang?" is irrelevant. His views are so respected that I dare not disagree, but such an airy dismissal leaves me philosophically discomfitted. Perhaps he epitomises the pure hard-headed scientific approach that if a theory is provable/disprovable it is worth talking about, and if not, don't waste brain cells on it. With the present state of knowledge, it seems to me wise to retain an agnostic viewpoint. But even agnostics have their flights of imagination, and here are two of mine: 1. If time exists only as the result of events, and the pre-big bang phenomenon was inert and eventless, it could have existed for eternity as measured by our present notion of time. That is, we may have to consider pre-bigbang as being without the fourth dimension. Merely one reason why our standard model may be inadequate. 2. The big bang was the result of a catastrophic rearrangement of a previous universe that had become unstable, and we could never know what physical laws then applied.

Creationism vs. Evolution certainly shakes the kooks from the trees, does it not. Some creationists that I know are not as cretinous as a few thousand years of incest would indicate, and some Evolutionists are quite friendly and intelligent sons of monkeys. I am with the smart monkeys.