bascule

Aeternus has it For a has and belongs to many (HABTM) relationship, you want to use a join table

Opera lets you cycle tabs by holding down the right mouse button and using the scroll wheel... quite handy.

In Firefox, if you want to open a link in a new tab, middle click it. Tabbed browsing was a concept pioneered largely by Opera. In Opera, you simply perform the new window gesture (click and drag down) on a link to open it in a new tab. Gesture extensions for Firefox let you do the same thing. IE7 also supports tabs.

So I found this article on New Scientist: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19125645.800.html Talking about spacetime braiding and a form of loop quantum gravity where the universe is just an enormous quantum computer. And well, obviously, the idea struck a chord with me. Here's their paper: http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0603022

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/04/the_quantum_shortcut.php *gasp*

On the Hellbound Alleee show (a Podcast, yay!) Ray Comfort admitted that the banana is the product of selective breeding, and not God's creation: http://www.strongatheism.net/shows/hashow/show103.mp3

Furthermore, using permanent magnets for generating electricity has been defunct since the mid-19th century, when it was shown that the output power of a dynamo could be substantially improved by using an electromagnet in place of a permanent magnet. Of course, in that scheme, you need some rotational power source to turn the dynamo... and there's lots of "free" ways to do that... a water wheel, for example.

I saw "Singularity" open for Spock's Beard. What would I name a band? Visible Light I'd be the insturmentless front man/singer (maybe I'd bust out the bass occasionally), and our gimmick would be a Burning Man-like adorn your entire body with lights type of thing, with fiber optic wigs. We'd play good old fashioned prog rock. Oh yeah.

Those two sentences are setting off quite a few alarm bells.

I can hear upwards of 19 kHz, thanks. The norm is: FM radio is subject to interference, and without an immensely powerful transmitter with lots of elevation, that interference is going to rear its ugly head. FM also comes nowhere close to a CD's 90dB of dynamic range, not that most people are listening to music which even comes close to using that, instead opting to listen to overcompressed pop shit. Compare the signal paths: CD -> DAC -> amplifier -> speakers to: CD -> DAC -> amplifier -> compressor -> FM transmitter -> antenna -> electromagnetic radiation -> antenna -> FM receiver -> amplifier -> speakers FM has a lower frequency response, lower dynamic range, and introduces distortion. I think it's fair to say it sounds "worse than a CD" I guess this is all moot considering I don't listen to the radio anymore. It sucks, but more for programming and ads than audio quality.

Anyone remember last year when an Australian hunter shot what DNA tests revealed to be a giant feral cat?

I'm surprised the FCC doesn't try to deprecate AM radio and reclaim the frequency space for technologies that aren't such horrible bandwidth hogs, especially in the lower kilohertz bands which propagate so well and would be so useful for other purposes if just used with a different modulation technique.

Is the reason that humans are so much weaker than chimpanzees due, in part, to our enhanced precision of movement? Are our muscles specialized not for strength, but to work in tandem with our highly complex brains to execute precision movements? I've just read that no chimpanzee has ever been trained to thread a needle. Is this simply a deficiency of the chimp brain, or do its muscles also prevent it from executing such precise movements?

Please let me buy into your perpetual motion scheme! Though all of the others I've invested in have nearly bled me dry, I have recovered, and am now convinced that yours may be the real deal!

*boggle*

Bingo: the Big Bang was not an explosion in space, it is an explosion of space Well, according to GR, the universe consists of four-dimensional spacetime. According to string theory, Kaluza-Klein theory, and others, there are higher dimensions beyond four dimensional space time, wrapped up so small that they are apparently nonexistent to us. There's no experimental evidence that any of these higher dimensions exist, however I recently read about experiments underway to test for their possible existence.

I recycle glass and aluminum but not paper. What does that make me?

Yes, it is a most awesome book, however it has maths that are over my head. I bought it after having read another of Penrose's books, Shadows of the Mind, which was, to put it bluntly, completely absurd. Penrose may be an awesome physicist, but when it comes to consciousness, he's completely lost.

As is our wisdom teeth (and how poorly they fit) serve as evidence of the compactification of our jaw. Clearly there were selection pressures at work which trumped the need for straight teeth that all fit in the available space.

We don't have to "fully understand the climate system" to know the extent of the Earth's radiative imbalance and whether or not the forcings primarily responsible for climate change are anthropogenic or natural. Yes. However the warming trend in the past 50 years is primarily anthropogenically forced No http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/05/current-volcanic-activity-and-climate/ Beyond that, volcanoes emit sulfate aerosols which actually contribute to global dimming. A decrease in volcanic activity is partly responsible for the warming trend at the beginning of the 20th century, because fewer eruptions means less reflective aerosols in the air. RETURNING TO THE TOPIC AT HAND herpguy: riding my bike rather than driving. Of course, around here, bikes are actually faster than cars, considering our awesome system of bike paths

I've also read that it helps with speech

And didn't mean to derail the entire thread here.. Well, in such a case, Gaia is no better than a vengeful God flooding the Earth because man has been noddy. The apes that are jacking with the climate system will just sweat it out and use increasingly advanced technology to survive, and in the meantime, havoc will be wreaked upon thouands and thousands of animal and plant species who can't use the benefits of technology to adapt to a changing climate.

I really like the whole fecund universes idea. If I were to try to reconcile that with Biocosm, my idea would be that life is, somehow, responsible for the system as a whole (i.e. the common ancestor of all fecund universes) rather than just creating baby universes from our own. For our own, biofriendly universe, it seems like you could just apply the weak anthropic principle to the fecund universes idea and claim that there are innumerable other non-biofriendly universes out there and ours just happened to be a biofriendly one. Hmm, so you're saying that when/if black holes took off as a power source, we'd eventually produce more of them than are produced naturally, and vicariously give birth to tons of biofriendly fecund universes?

You've pointed me to some great papers, but unfortunately I have trouble getting anywhere much deeper than the abstracts. My favorite paper is still that one I found where they derive Lorentz transforms from a CA. That was damn cool!

Why stop at earth? Why not extend the idea to the entire universe? http://biocosm.org/