insane_alien

it is flash evapouration, it just isn't isenthalpic(you're pumping lots of heat in) so the pressure does not need to drop for the evapouration to occur.the pressure drop is usually a matter of necessity than choice.

bit australian, bit english but i can't place the region.

it was abandoned but IIRC there was a russian one that flew. in principle they can work but due to weight problems and the inherent risks of warplanes being shot down the risks outweigh the benefits even for the military(and crewing it would likely be a suicide mission from the radiation) nuclear reactors on a spacecraftis a much more feasible proposition because once you have it up there there are no weight restrictions because there is no weight so you can have as much shielding as you want. and not only that but you can reduce shielding requirements simply by sticking the reactor out on a long boom and only shielding on the side facing the ship. there are already nuclear powered satellites in space (although using radiothermal geneteratos (RTG's)) and the apollo missions that landed on the moon carried an RTG to provide power for experiments on the moon. so they can be used with manned spaceflight.

granpa, the chemistry for making RNA isn't all that elaborate. amino acids form on their own if you have some nitrates and such in the water along with some dissolved carbon, stick em in with each other and there will be poly peptide formation and so on. its sort of like saying counting is elaborate because there are so many stages to it, first you have to count 1, then you have to count 2, then you have to count 3. all pretty simple there but wait till you get to 100 wow thats elaborate. and whats more, 99% of the 'elaborate' chemistry happens when you recreate the conditions of early earth and leave it alone for a couple of months. the only step we have yet to see is the part we suspect requires a larger volume(like an ocean) to have a reasonable chance of occuring. the actual polymerization to a useful strand of RNA and some proteins.

well there isn't much point sending a billion dollar probe with a 50 cent disposable camera stuck on with chewing gum. not surprising there are some good ones the stuff from outside the visible spectrum looks particularly cool

all that means is that you have over 10 posts.

he didn't edit your post, the auto merger did.

i think you are pushing the analogy to far and in the wrong direction. the point of the analogy is that you do not have to observe one individual to determine how something changes over time as long as it is a similar thing be it a human, star, galaxy, whatever. as long as you can see examples from various stages of its existance. and we have observered the transition form gas cloud to fusing star(or its effects anyway as the star is still masked by the gas cloud at this time) it sounds to me like there are always going to be too many gaps for you to believe it.

Alpha, if you want to take the analogy that far, then do i need to remind you that humans do not alyways look human. we resemble tadpoles when we are still sperm. and we don't look all that human in the early stages of embryonic development. same with stars, but once they start looking like stars, they look like stars till they die. also, the change from a cloud of gas to a star is not a clean cut transition. there are examples of stars partway through the transition from gas cloud to fusing star. we have a pretty good number of snapshots of various stages of star formation. you seems to be asking what about halfway between the stages we have observed, well, there is always going to be a situation halfway between observed stages, but it is not much of a leap to figure out what goes on in there.

no it is not highly theoretical. we are making direct observations. we can look at star at various stages in their lifecycles and piece together the whole process from there. Assume you knew nothing about humans. not how they grow, not how they change and so on. if i lined up a number of humans, from new borns to the elderly, say one from every year( a newborn, a one year old a two year old and so on) you would be able to detail the human aging process even though you are not watching an individual age from cradle to grave. this is basically what astronomy does with stars. there are billions of stars up there at various stages of their life so we have been able to deduce various things about their formation, main sequence life and death. as fopr the looking back in time thing, i have never been completely comfortable with that analogy myself, but i cannot think of anything better. if we look at alpha centauri, it is 4 light years away from earth. this means we see it now as it was 4 years ago. when we look at the sun we see it as it was 8 minutes ago, when we look at the moon we see it as it was 1 second ago. when we look really far away, to other galaxies we see millions of years ago. when we look at the cosmic microwave background radiation we see the very moment when the universe became transparent to photons, about 13billion years ago. perhaps martin will swing by and explain it. he is very good with this stuff and i have only a passing interest in it.

well, when we look really far away we are seeing the way things were billions of years ago since the light has taken that long to reach us. so, by looking at various distances we can see various slices of time. also, there are a lot of stars and galaxies out there, look at any part of the sky and chances are you can find a star and whole galaxies in various stages of formation. it is true that we have never seen the complete formation of a single star but we have seen many stars at various stages of formation and death. this is also how we can predict cosmological events a few billion years in advance(well, major ones that are easy to predict anyway)

a nuclear bomb and the big bang are hardly comparable. a more apt analogy would be the inflation of a balloon than an explosive. this is a common misconception which mass media doesn't help that the big bang was what we'd recognise as an explosion. it wasn't. not even close. you see it wasn't the particles flying away from each other into preexisting space but the space itself expanding. like if you covered the balloon in dots, from the dots perspective all the other dots are moving away but that dot is stationary but infact all the dots are stationary its just the balloon between them is stretching.

we are uncomfortable downloading files from users who have only just appeared. you are a regular so there won't be such issues(doesn't mean it won't be checked out though, but thats just good security practices). no idea what you should read. anything will do. you could even just dictate your reply to this and post it.

it is nothing to do with elctromagnetic attraction. it is graviational. the two are not equivalent.

yep

reacts with the water to form sodium hydroxide which is re-elecrolysed then reacts again to form sodium hydroxide and so on.

there's some of that on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAA_qbiOQ5k the wierd thing is that my brain sort of twigs it as english until i listen a bit more closely and realise that it is gibberish.

put the mp3(or whatever compressed format you use) in a zip file and attach it via the attachment button. if you're like me and usually use the quick reply box then you'll need to click 'go advanced'

1/ your reference says 'often' 9/10 this means 'the common usage of the word is...' 2/ this in no way changes the answer.

the key is not the focusing but transferring enrgy from cold to hot. you can focus the IR light no bother but you can't get it hotter than the temperature of the source momatter how much focusing you do.

all plants contain a massive amount of chemicals with funky names(infact, most chemicals have a funky sounding name to those who are not familiar with chemistry). the only thing special about tobacco is that i contains significant amounts of nicotine(also known as 3-[(2S)-1-methylpyrrolidin-2-yl]pyridine ).

1/ it should be, because that number is multiplied for every person online. and that is a massive error even for the first order approximation we are making here. 2/ and in the future resolutions are only going to increase. 1920x1080 will likely become common sometime next year. 3/ and it is the screen refresh rate that you actually need to supply, the gaming framerate is unimportant. and gaming engines can render faster than that. go ask at a gamer forum. 4/ and? thats way above average for an internet connection and is still not enough.

this is a discussion forum? are you going to start a discussion on any particular topic? this isn't a place to just post random facts.

i don't think thin clients are going to make a significant come back. especially because there are many many computers that do not have access to any significant amount of bandwidth. and also, there is a huge amount of lag existing on the internet today, go play a multiplayer FPS like halflife 2 deathmatch. people will be complaining of lag and all that is being transmitted there is some compressed position and event data that is rendered client side. if everyone is having their desktop streamed to them uncomprssed then: 1/the internet is going to be slow as hell 2/lag will go through the roof the reason for this is the actual physical network of the internet is a bit shoddy. millions of km of fibre and copper would have to be dug up and replaced and expanded. internet hubs would need to be expanded, multi gigabit/s connections need to be prevalent and so on. you mention 1280*720 24-bit 30fps screens. well, who do you know who runs at that? my LCD gets refreshed at 75Hz and is also at 1920X1200. thats about 4.2Gbit/s. a lot of gamers will be running similar or even more bandwidth demanding screens. and then there is your upload speed. what if you want to watch a blu-ray film. well, you're out of luck as a thin client has nowhere near the grunt to decode this so its going to have to be shipped off to the remote server, decoded and then sent back. it's just not going to happen as we have an ever increasing amount of lag critical high bandwidth applications. if the state of our applications was that of 1992 and we had the modern internet then it could probably work but we have progressed. EDIT: My above calculation was merely for my desktop, when we consider the laptops (3 of) we get 4.5Gbit/s so in all we would need a connection capable of providing 8.7Gbit/s and that doesn't include overhead and other things. and all of that needs to be wireless (my desktop uses a wireless connection) as the current maximum wireless connection available is ~300 Mbit/s under favourable conditions then we have a long way to go yet. not to mention current average connection speeds which are around 2Mbit/s where i live(i have 10Mbit/s), also under favourable conditions. The only way to transmit the video information to my computers would be to use heavy video compression. while this is somewhat acceptable for movies and stuff, it is not for general computing. stuff like typing. have you seen text under heavy video compression? it is nearly unreadable if it is readable at all. and anyway, who is going to buy a multi gigabit connection just to do some typing every now and again (or like my parents, play solitaire). oh, and your 1280x720 24-bit 30fps screen ismore like 664Mbit/s rather than 500. thats 32.8% larger than you said. quite a significant error. not to mention most computer displays run at 60fps anyway which gives 1328Mbit/s which is 165.6% error on what you said. seems you are grossly underestimating the bandwidth required.

this is not how quantum computers are special, they are special in that the can run algorithms that are impossible to run on standard computers. the fact that they can do parallel operations is nothing fancy because computers have been capable of doing this since the 50's. and i never said anything about the slaves being sentient, they could be well trained dogs for all it matters, as long as the rules are followed.