insane_alien

a good one would be when shopping, try and add up a total price as you go along and see if you can get it right when you go to pay for it(i used to bug the hell out of my mum doing that when i was wee, i hadn't discovered my 'inside voice') bonus points if you work out how much change you should get before the guy at the till tells you. while you're getting started, using pen and paper is acceptable but you should aim to not need that eventually. this, along with normal practice should help you get a good feel for addition and subtraction. also, a bookshop like borders or waterstones probably has childrens math workbooks which you could work through, if it can teach children(and you can put up withthe completely unrealistic scenarios i remember them giving you) then they can teach adults. i have no idea if they produce an adult version of those but you could maybe ask. i admire you for your persistance, i know a few people in a similar situation but they keep giving up when they can't seem to get some part. keep at it and you'll get there.

very, hypervelocity impacts on flesh leave a conical shaped hole due to shockwave formation within your flesh. typically occurs from 600m/s and up.

yes, well i was talking more of a direct hit. but it is possible for it just to graze but that is less likely than a more direct hit.

your sense of ownership must not exceed the level of a two year old. you cannot simply point at something and yell 'MINE' and make it yours. this is not the way the world works.

there are hundreds of thousands of stars in the sky. finding a simple pattern like that is easy. i could look at any part of the sky and pick out at least three formations like that.

just because you call it something different than everybody else does not mean you own it.

perhaps a link to an example would be helpful?

M&M star system? wtf are you on about.

yes, good old liquid plutonium replaced it just fine.

i think my irony meter just exploded

unless those ideas are tested to see if they conform with reality then those ideas are meaningless in a scientific context.

lookwhathappenswhenidothisium either that or Frank. that would make for some interesting chemical names. and confuse chemistry students called frank. its win-win.

only on the hot bits. the airframe of the shuttle is primarily aluminium. its heat shield is made of silica fibres and there are various high temperature high strength components in the engines. this is unlikley to changed much in the future because they already work so well.

sodium chloride will do nothing in solid form, it is not conductive. while one of the elements comprising it is a metal, it is not in metalic form. even just looking at the compound shows that it has pretty much zero metallic properties. graphite would heat up although it could depend on orientation as graphite conducts along the layers rather than across the layers.

you might want to go check out http://orbiter-forum.com/ its a forum much more suited to spacecraft design(and you can even use the program the forum is primarily about to fly your craft as well, unfortunately interstellar travel is a bit of an issue still but interplanetary is excellent). i'm assuming your ship is designed to run at some significant fraction of the speed of light, this means that you are missing a pretty important component. a shield. i'm not talking star trek type shield, just a big block of something(an asteroid or ice block has been suggested by experts) that you stick on the front. this is because at those speeds stuff that is normall harmless will start eroding your hull. things such as intersterllar gasses and micrometeorites become deadly or deadlier. if you get fast enough hitting a micrometeorite would be like having a nuclear bomb detonate at the front of your ship(although i doubt you'd be going quite that fast.

Trans, you'd really just be left with a nice neat conical hole in you, a little tiny hole for the entry would and a gaping chasm as an exit wound.

this makes it sound like you want to deliver ocean water to the ocean. now, if that's the case, why would you want to deliver something that is already in abundance?

is it just me or did that post make no sense at all? use what like phone lines? do you mean pipes? we've had plumbing for a few millenia more than phones you know.

the ISS wouldn't even last 20 years without regular boosts. however, if you bumped it up into a higher orbit, somewhere nearer GEO then it could last. but i think erosion from it being sandblasted by high energy particles and dust would be a problem.

cost. there a lot of families who can barely afford the running costs of 1 car never mind two. and i'm not talking merely about the fuel, the insurance and tax and MOT and servicing.

ah but a metal cylinder can hold more air and at a much higher pressure without leaking/deforming. quite probably more than enough to compensate for the larger balloon required. if plastic really was a viable option then it would be used in spacecraft gas storage tanks, this is not the case and high tensile metals are used.

both are correct. if you have ever opened a dictionary(and i'm pretty sure you have) you will see that a lot of words have a number of different and distinct definitions. in the world of science we don't like having multiple definitions to a word as it can lead to confusion so we have our own subset of the english language where everything has a precise and exact meaning. if we apply this subset to the common usage of english a lot of stuff doesn't make sense as definitions are missing and common usage isn't even considered at all in science. so, if we are talking about scientific english, you are correct and the commentator is wrong. if we are talking about standard english then both are correct(due to there being multiple definitions on words) as the commentator is not speaking to only scientists and engineers it is safe to assume he is communicating using the standard english and therefore revolve is an acceptable word to use and rotate is also perfectly acceptable.

its more likely that he got hit by debris from the crater. as it supposedly left a decent sized crater(though i haven't seen any pictures of this) then there was obviously something going pretty fast and with a fair mass behind it. at the speeds considered, it would be impossible(for a human) to tell which happend first, the cratering even or the debris striking hand event. i also think the 30000mph think is complete bunk. someone on orbiter forum done a rough calculation to show the heating power on the meteorite at that speed would be 300 odd mega watts. it would have been vapourized almost instantly.

it depends if they are succeptible to vertigo in the first place. you could use mirrors to make it look like they are standing on the edge of a really deep hole which should be enough.

cameron, you can use only one of them and have the other side passively cooled or heated. it'll still work, just not as well.