insane_alien

yes a lot of the energy would be dumped into the resistor but you can get useful work out of the rest. and there are other ways which iirc are much more efficient than a simple variable resistor in series with the equipment.

yep. the technology to do this is called a resistor(variable resistor optional). EDIT: i should probably point out that this would be the simplest and crudest method of regulating power output from a capacitor and that there are other ways of doing it but i don't know any of the details.

i have no idea how you are supposed to submit it. why not send an email to the person running thequiz and ask them about answer format.

have you tried google?

i hope you programming syntax is better than you english syntax.

my dad(in a rare moment of genius) came up with the perfect way to describe this. "its as silly as holding a trial about whether being shot in the head will kill you. if a court decided it doesn't, would you be willing to hold a gun to your head and pull the trigger?" btw, the quote is edited to remove profanity and inherent scottish accent that would render it unintelligble to anyone outside of scotland.

humans. we have vestigial tailbones(that sometimes still form tails). we have pretty wierd looking toes as well. but really the list of organisms that exhibit 'transitional' traits is a list of every living organism.

gareth. you can take the - sign as being -1. as he is multiplying the inside by -1 he must divide the outside by -1. -1/-1 is 1 which dosn't have to be shown as a multiplication by 1 is trivial.

0-godwinsons law in less than an hour. congratulations.

g is a common factor. you can take common factors outside the brackets. it means that if you wish to expand the equation you multiply the terms inside by g which returns you to where you started.

look, we can't see the waves directly because they are merely ocillations in the electric and magnetic fields. when you power up a van de graff generator it creates a massive distortion in the electric field yet we cannot see it. similarly for large magnets like an MRI machine. they do not reflect light and so are not visible by this method. the only way we can detect a photon directly is with out eyes. photons of different wavelengths are detected by different cells in our eyes and are interpreted as colours. i'm not sure what your problem with this is. perhaps if you expans on what 'seeing the waves of visible light' means.

if we can't spot a dyson ring at just over 4 AU then we have problems.

butta, i have a feeling you missed the thread you intended to post in

well, 1/ they're far to small 2/ its not a wave of matter like a water wave. it doesn't reflect light so it's 'invisible'. 3/ our eyes interpret the waves as colours(obviously).

i'm not sure i understand the question? do you mean why doesn't a beam of light seem to ripple like the surface of water?

capn, if your counting pluto as a planet then we're up to plant XVI or so already. infact, thanks to ceres it makes pluto planet X

need to find planet IX first.

different wavelengths get difracted by a different amount which means they'll come out at different angles. and thus seperate.

i'd say a hint

bob, its an analogy, push it too far and it breaks.

23 seconds by my logs.

all photons have the same spin. and its not only a prediction, but an observation.

the universe is very absurd. and it doesn't care if you think it shouldn't be absurd, its going to do what it wants either way. it is also not up for debate as it has been observed.

So, i've had this idea of a live debate between members of this forum. not on the forum or IRC but on skype or teamspeak. seeing as we haven't had many decent debates in a long while. the debate would have to have a science angle at the very least(purely scientific would be prefferable) and should try to avoid political debate as much as possible(a debate about some governments policies on science would be boring as hell to people not from that country). we'd have to appoint a moderator and a panel of judges to decide on the victor. the debate would be open for everyone to listen in on(and ask questions if we have a section allowing questions from the floor). we should probably put a time limit on the length of each round otherwise we could be there forever, although this should be flexible. if we have a really interesting one then having it go on a bit longer is definitely a good thing. so i guess it comes down to, does anyone have a good topic to debate and do you think this is a good idea?

well wo should probably keep the last bit