insane_alien

I disagree. In your scenario you are having to destroy the material by separation to achieve melting. so you aren't melting wood, you're melting components of wood individually. its like taking a brick from a wall, destroying it and saying you've destroyed the wall. if you can't melt the substance as a whole then it isn't melting.

yeah, the prefix artificial really just describes that the intelligence(which would be real intelligence) arises through constructed means rather than being an emergent property of life. fake intelligence could be applied to the artificial 'intelligence' present in modern computer games. where the intelligence is not actually very high. It is however designed to look intelligent while actually being pretty minimalist and mechanical. basically, the AI opponents in games like Modern Warfare 2 are faking being smart by having lots of scripted actions with a relatively(compared to true intelligence) simple decision tree to choose which to perform and when to perform it. of course, if you go far enough down that route to the point where you can fake true intelligence in every aspect then you have created true artificial intelligence. Current best guess is that it is easier to approach the problem by attempting to create a true artifical intelligence from the start rather than a limited system.

or your explanations fail to explain.

Last I heard he was busy with teething issues in his radiation hardened chillies. If you think teething problems are difficult with babies try it out with some 7 foot radioactive mutant naga jolokias.

crystallisation can be a fast process. and those things are definitely crystals of something. so some component of your media is crystallising out of solution. are you using a highly supplemented media? is there a potential that you could have added too much of a concentrated supplement?

the garbage path isn't really visible even if you are in the middle of it. it is mostly small particles of plastic and other waste materials that are found there in high concnentrations. there are no photos because it would be no different to your average looking patch of ocean.

still best to have some form of extinguisher handy when playing with hot things though. handy if(when) you drop something thats at around 1000*C

gravity has been measured as moving at c (fair enough the error on the experiment was vast but it definitely discounts anything faster than 2c with the most probable value being c)

not really, coal can be formed inorganicly from carbon containing compounds. methane is a common gas in the universe, a few trapped pockets that get taken down near the mantle could conceivably form coal. titan could have coal deposits, it has many hydrocarbon ices and oceans. in its formative years some of this could have been subducted and formed coal, no life needed. it is unlikely to be coal however as it is measured as being blacker than coal. it could be aerosolized carbon black but how this would form i'm not too sure. the atmosphere would likely have to be quite reducing in nature.

absolutely impossible.

well, we don't know. would they remain travelling faster than the speed of light? the result hasn't been repeated yet so we don't even know if it was an error yet let alone the precise behaviour of neutrinos at super luminal speeds. who'd to say they don't become subluminal after a few hours due to some hitherto unknown effect.

this will not mean a rewrite of physics. it means there will need to be a theory to replace relativity(both special and general) but it will replace relativity in the same way general relativity replaced newtonian gravity. In most cases, the new theory would reduce to relativity.

no, because it is not ever expanding. there are interstellar winds that limit the size and its size can grow and shrink (it has passed over both of voyager proves several times IIRC)

no

There is probably some confusion here, engines can produce more than their native torque by gearing down to a slower angular velocity, going in reverse means you'd need a huge amount of torque to turn your generator. this would add quite a bit of friction losses. Why not have it going a bit faster so that it turns more freely and there is less mass on the system so that it does not need to be as sturdy. If you can tell us how much rock is being moved down then we can tell you the theoretical maximum power output you can get (you can't set both power and mass flowrate to arbitrary values as they will be related variables. Please stop using ALLCAPS it is difficult to read.

click on add reply and there will be a whole section for attachments. its fairly simple to use and has its own help.

we don't have access to your harddrive. you'll need to attach it to your post.

one would still assume a finite space inside. maybe 50 times the capacity of the shaft which would give maybe 17 hours of power. which of course begs the question, why not just take the fuel from the trucks and burn it in a gas turbine generator?

eh? for 6666kg/sec its only 1 25 ton truck every 3.75 seconds still over 100000 trucks an eight hour day. your shaft is going to get filled pretty damn quick. lets assume it's 5mx5mx30m thats 750m^3 of rock. but lets go ahead and assume best case scenario, a single solid block of lead thats fits perfectly. thats 8505 metric tonnes. dropping this in would yield 2.502*10^9 J (using 9.81 as g) and at a consumption of 2MW you get a grand total of 1251seconds of power. so your shaft gets filled (under best case scenario) in under 21 minutes. so you'll need just over 69 similar shafts a day to maintain power output. and this isn't accounting for inefficiencies or the fact that as the shaft fills, the energy per kilogram will drop off proportionally.

Islam isn't a disease let alone a deadly one. Most muslims do not blow them selves up, most musilms are like everybody else. normal people.

90psi isn't a quantity of air, it is a pressure. it will give you 620.5J per litre of air. the number of strokes you get out of your engine will depend on how much air you use, not the pressure.

kepler can indeed detect gas giants. and has. only, its not really looking for gas giants and it has an easier time of detecting smaller plants if it looks at relatively close stars. in this region, the majority of the gas giants in existance have already been discovered so the chances of detecting a NEW gas giant are slim(not to say it won't happen however). So there will be some bias in the results because of the simple fact that it isn't looking for them. think of the first people looking for viruses, they probably detected a crap load of bacteria too but those bacteria were already known, it was only the viruses they cared about.

most scientific theories are easily explained by their creators however, this logically valid and grammatically correct can be difficult to understand to the layman to lack of vocabulary, and knowledge in physical concepts that the new theory depends on. This is what makes the stuff at the forefront difficult to understand, to get what the physicist is saying, you need to understand all the prerequisites. For instance, lets say we zap mr ugg from 20000BC and try to explain the wheel to him. Us: It is a round object than can be moved easily by rotating it. (a perfectly good explanation) Ugg: mrh? Oh dear, ugg doesn't understand our language, a prerequisite of understanding our explanation. we spend a few years teaching him grammar and a basic vocabulary Us:It is a round object than can be moved easily by rotating it. Ugg: What is round? What is object? What is rotating? Oh dear, seems we need to expand Ugg's vocabulary some more and maybe introduce the whole concept of rotation. and so on. so our explanation which was so simple to those who have the prerequisite knowledge to understand it can be hugely time consuming to explain to someone without the prerequisite knowledge. And it would be the same the other way round, us, as the explainer would need to learn Uggs language and would probably still have to introduce new words and concepts to fully describe a wheel especially if he came from an area where round objects and rotating objects were rare. Much like the tribes with little mathematical vocabulary (1,2,many etc.). If your entire thought process has been trained to treat quantities as 1,2 or many then you will struggle to understand concepts such as 3 or 100 and how they are different from 'many'. and thats only counting. then when we say there are things like calculus and polynomial equations! whew, overload. any truely complete explanation would have to teach all preceding knowledge which would take almost literaly forever.

I imagine that you'd likely want to have the engine flooded by matter thats good at absorbing gamma rays to then be heat up and expelled from the reaction chamber at high speed. the amount of shielding required would be prohibitive however.

the reason the quantum world is regarded as mindbogglingly different from the classical world is not because of the theories (as those are a direct result of the observations) but of the observations themselves. what you are proposing is to take a duck, and call it an elephant and then hope that it does actually become an elephant. or if your in an aircraft experiencing engine failure if someone says "Don't Panic! I call luggage an engine so we can just strap some bags to the wing and we'll be fine!" it doesn't change the fact that you'll still be powerless.