mistermack

There's a clue in the word "Jumbuck". It means "Jumping Buck". In sheep, it's generally little lambs that jump, so maybe the Jumbuck was tiny. And there's not much to them, once you've skinned them. Australia's a big empty place. The swagman seems to have been extremely unlucky, for a squatter and three troopers to come across him like that. I think they must have been hunting him, and maybe they just framed him about the jolly jumbuck in his tucker bag, and the whole story of him drowning seems a bit suspicious to me. Dead men tell no tales. But the fact that his ghost haunts the billabong points to foul play. But they're all dead now, so none of it matters.

A friend of mine, who has done his own maintenance for years, bought an inflatable car jack recently. It's got an electric pump that runs off the battery. He swears it's a game changer, for changing a wheel. I haven't seen it, but he was well impressed. I've got no idea what weight they will lift, I expect there is a range.

Since gods are imaginary beings, they can be anything you like. And have been down the ages. There's a huge range, and everybody creates their own version of their favourite.

No, I wouldn't go by that. It won't include the length of the handle, and I wouldn't be confident that what I can see and measure externally is the true size of the internal pistons. I would just do as I suggested. Fit the handle, decide the point in the handle that your force can be considered act through. Measure the distance a full stroke passes through. Then pump it five, or ten times, and get the ration of movement of the top of the jack, to movement of the handle. I just plucked 40 lbs force out of the air as a typical force you could apply by hand. But you can do the same calculation for 20 or 30 lbs. For most cars, a 2 ton jack is ok. You're only lifting one corner of a normal car, which might weigh 2 tons in total. So one corner probably only weighs about half a ton. Those bottle jacks are not great. You need a very solid flat surface, they are not very stable at all, but they will lift the weight, but slowly. A trolley jack is much better, faster, safer and more stable, but a bit more bulky. Most trolley jacks are rated at two tons for car models, which is plenty for wheel changing. 20 tons is massive overkill for a car.

Following on from my previous post, about a photon becoming trapped between two perfect mirrors, and producing an increase in mass of the system, it should be obvious that such a system could never move at the speed of light. If the system was moving at c, the photon could never travel from mirror to mirror because it would have to travel faster than c to do it. The only way anything can travel at c is in a perfect straight line. Any deviation, and you either are going slower than c overall, or have to exceed c in places to travel at c overall.

I think you could get a fair idea of the lifting force by comparing the movement of the handle to the movement of the piston. Calculate the ratio, then use it in reverse, to calculate what force a forty pound push on the handle would produce from the lifting piston. It would involve some precise measuring of the movement of the piston and handle. Or to improve accuracy, you could measure the rise of the piston for ten measured pumps of the handle.

Maybe there are conditions at times that increase the conditions where denser metals can be separated from less dense. You could have a planet that orbits it's star very closely, making conditions far hotter than we usually observe. Maybe that raises the centrifugal forces within the planet to very high levels, causing more separation. Or you could have a pair of planets close to a star, rotating about each other very rapidly. Or other setups that we don't observe here in the Solar System.

That's really not a subject for psychiatrists or psychologists. You don't have to have a recognised mental illness to vote for Trump or or any of the more extreme candidates. Once mental professionals start pronouncing on normal healthy people, they are really in the realms of bullshit. (which is very popular in both wings). That's how you can have four psychiatrists examine the same offender, and two will say he's sane, and the other two will say he's not. And invariably, it's the ones hired by the prosecution that "think" he's sane. There are plenty of people who can give a more informed and qualified verdict on voting trends. They are political analysts.

Back to the original OP idea of fertilizing sterile desert ocean waters with nutrients from the ocean floor, it seems that Sperm Whales have been doing that for thousands of years. They dive very deep to the floor, hunting for squid, but they only poop at the surface, so they are constantly moving nutrients from the deep to the surface, as I was suggesting we should be doing. And according to the article, their poop nutrients hang around on the surface for very long periods, and cause algal blooms where there would otherwise be clear sterile ocean waters. So maybe by killing most of the deep diving whales, we've been causing the planet to warm somewhat, and by copying the whales by pumping up nutrients, we could do what they've been doing, causing algal blooms which could support a huge new fishery and fix some CO2 at the same time. Anyway, here's the link : Caribbean island creates world’s first area for sperm whales – and their poop could save the planet (msn.com) Saving the planet is a bit overhyped, but it's an interesting story.

I'm not clear on what happens at the core of a planet. The effective pull of gravity must be decreasing as you travel towards the centre, as the mass of material above you increases, and the mass below you decreases. So right at the centre, the pull would be equal in all directions, so I suppose the tendency to separate the higher density metals won't be great at the core. It might happen to some degree, but over a very long time.

I don't know what the accepted theory is regarding dense asteroids, but off the top of my head, the most likely way they would form, is from a collision of two planet-size bodies, like the one that is theorised to have formed the Moon. If the collision was big enough, the material at the very centre of one or both could be spilt into space, so you would get a lot of fairly pure iron, and some materials that are denser still.

Can you get that in the mouth? I'd willingly chew some socks, if I could grow a new set of teeth.

To shorten it all down for me, I think we have a will, but it's certainly not free.

To have a choice, you have to have a brain that is capable of making that choice. It's false to argue that another bear could make a different choice. With ther brain and life experience of the bear, there is no choice. You have to ignore the brain of the bear, and the overpowering craving for food, to theorise that there is a choice available. In other words, ignore the reality. Like so many other things, I think choice is shades of grey, not black or white. The starving bear example makes it a bit clearer. Maybe one starving bear in a million might be able to resist the natural impulse to eat the fawn. One way to argue is to say that they all therefore have a choice. The other way to look at it is that none of them have a choice, given the way their brains are. 999,999 are compelled to kill it. The other one, for whatever reason, is compelled to leave it, again, because of the way that it's brain is at the time. Of course, five minutes later, your brain might be compelled to make the opposite choice. But do you have a choice, given the state of your brain at the instant you make a decision?

I really don't see how you can say that. Take the example of a Grizzly Bear, starving hungry, that comes across an unprotected fawn. Can it choose to kill or leave the fawn, anything physically possible? Of course not. The freedom is there in theory. But to do anything other than kill and eat the fawn is not possible, for a starving Grizzly Bear. The same applies to a human. Can you choose to do anything physically possible? No. Not with the brain you've ended up with, and the experiences stored in it. While there is some bit of choice available, it's limited by your hardware and what's been uploaded.

Luxury. We had it tough. We had just one pair of socks amongst 12 kids. My mum knitted them from used wire wool scouring pads. How we fought over who's turn it was for the socks. I've still got the scars. No and no. Ethics is for the individual and the state legislature. (elected not appointed) We've had our ethics dictated to us by unelected panels of popes and bishops for centuries, and it has a bad history. The principle of regular elections puts a brake on ethics being decided for us. It's not perfect but it's better than before, and slowly nudging in the right direction.

Tell that to all the paedophile priests. Raping altar boys is pretty immoral. It's funny that the people who constantly preached against immorality turned out to be some of the most immoral, on the quiet. Or not funny, but tragic. Anyway, nobody knows what Jesus said. Or if he existed. But his father was pretty scathing about Sodomy.

Well firstly, it's highly unlikely that a low gravity world could retain an atmosphere as thick as that on Earth, with the same pressure, so it's just an academic question. Yes, you could fly with flapping flight in this theoretical situation. But it would be pretty clumsy and pointless. Flapping flight is highly evolved, and the human body is nothing like what's ideal. But, if you were much lighter, then you could wear wings that were much bigger than a man could handle here on Earth, because the wings would be lighter too. So gliding would be much easier, and a bit of flapping would propel you along in some fashion.

It could be a problem, but it might be a bit overstated. Most viruses are closely matched to their host, and there is a sort of arms race going on, with the host immune system evolving to fight, and the virus evolving to counteract it. When a virus from a hundred thousand years ago emerges, it will need to rapidly reproduce, being no longer frozen. But the animals that are about now might have immune capabilities that it hasn't evolved to match. Or their main host might now be extinct. I realise it could work the other way too though.

Does anybody have any info on whether antibiotics are safe, long after the use-by date? I'm talking about tablets or capsules that are stored at room temperature in comfortable dry conditions. Last night I had a horrendous toothache, I was nearly hopping round the room, I was downing Ibuprofen but it hardly touched the pain. In desperation, I dug out some old drugs that never got used, and I found a bottle of antibiotics that looked brand new, and I had written " for toothache" on the label. I would have used them, I was that desperate, but I looked at the date, and it was 2002 !! Even so, I was in so much pain, I was hovering on the verge of taking them, but I resisted in the end. Amazingly, I eventually passed out and got some sleep at about five O'Clock, and when the alarm went off at 8:30, pain gone !! And it hasn't returned. So I've been counting my blessings all day. But if I had taken the expired antibiotic, and woke up with no pain, I would of course have put it down to rapid action from the antibiotic. How could you not ?? So the moral of that story is that if you try a treatment, and get miraculously better, be very wary about concluding that the treatment worked. But I'm left wondering about expired antibiotics. Does anyone have any info about whether it's safe?

No, the photon doesn't have a rest frame. But the system as a whole does. And it's the system as a whole that has an increase in mass equivalent to the energy of the photon. And of course, if the system captures the photon, then the system as a whole gains the momentum that the photon would have, if it wasn't captured. I personally view particles with mass as being similar to the theoretical photon between mirrors that I posted about above, where the photon is constrained and produces an increase in effective mass of the system as a whole. I think of massive particles as massless particles that would normally be travelling in a straight line at c, that are somehow self-constrained, orbiting a centre, instead of straight-lining at c. If that were to happen, then the overall system would gain mass, like the mirror system.

As far as the OP is concerned, I still think it's a bit of both. Gay people can be homophobic, and can even be phobic about their own gayness. The good news is that gays can be cured with the help of god. Conversion therapy has been getting state and charity funding for years in the UK on the quiet. This christian psychiatrist has been doing very nicely, converting gays. Now he's a highly paid consultant for the Northern Ireland police force. Those Northern Ireland christians look after one another jobs-wise. Major police force hired psychiatrist who was exposed for practising conversion therapy (msn.com)

That's what I thought. A photon isn't a photon, if it was at rest. And if a particle that has mass could be accelerated to the speed of light, it would have infinite kinetic energy. The nearest thing I've heard of, of a photon at rest, is the theoretical case where the photon is trapped between two perfect mirrors, endlessly reflecting back and forth. In that case, the overall system gains mass, equivalent to the energy of the photon. So you can have mass, or a photon, but you can't have a photon with mass.

You could just kit it out with an Alexa, and train it to stop on the word "stop". The hard part would be to train the staff to never say stop within earshot.

Zawoooooosh !! Gotham City's newest superhero " Pedantic Man " zooms in to save the metropolis from the careless use of a word. Thanks, Pedantic Man !!!!! I meant often, compared to never, but you sure nailed me down with your pedant superpowers !!