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insane_alien

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Everything posted by insane_alien

  1. well, we depend on our sight and hearing much more than smell, and we do tune out certain information from these senses. take billboards for instance, most people ignore these to the point htey don't see them at all. and we tune out background noises as well such as traffic. we simply don't hear and see these things conciously. since we don't rely on smell that much(unlike a lot of the animal kingdom) stuff gets tuned out from that a lot more often.
  2. just to clarify, the link is a stirling engine, not some new invention. only a few centuries old though.
  3. Albert Instein
  4. all farts have a level of toxicity to them, they contain sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide and traces of methane. all three of those ar toxic. however, the sheer volume of farts needed to become toxic is immense even in an enclosed space. even in a small enclosed space, say a closet, you'd need thousands of epicly massive farters to let one rip and pump it in. the smell would become completely unbearable before there was any actual toxic effect. you'd even be unconcious by then. this is not a situation you are likely to find yourself in. unless your one of those guys with a wierd fetish for it maybe. but even then, where are you going to get thousands of champion farters to fart down a pipe leading to a closet.
  5. there is no reason you can't also have this. however, it is unlikely that most individuals will have the means (either financially or simply there isn't enough sunlight where they live) to generate sufficient electricity. and another advantage of battery swaps is that at the charging stations, the batteries that are starting to degrade and reaching their cycle limit can be shipped off for recycling and it won't cost you thousands to get a new battery. what we need to do now is set up global standard voltages and form factors for the battery packs so there isn't any trouble with people buying cars that use 'A batteries' only to find out that the dominant form of car battery becomes 'B'. a format war is fine for betamax and vhs or HDDVD and BluRay but not with cars as they cost a hell of a lot more.
  6. surely the best place to start with is commercial vehicles which don't require high performance and where weight and space isn't so much of a problem. for private cars, getting 300-400 miles to the charge(depending on how efficient your driving style is of course) and taking at most 15 minutes to get recharged(likely by swapping out the battery at the all electric version of a petrol station). there would be effectively no difference from a petrol car then for me. i get 300-400 miles to a tank (depending on how often my dad uses it, if he uses it a lot i get 300miles, if not 400). and once 490 when i decided to try driving as efficiently as possible.
  7. just to note, this may not always be the case. during my childhood i was likely exposed to a whole lot of germs and stuff yet i have developed allergies. everything from eating a few worms to get a bar of chocolate to one rather disgusting event where i was splattered with the rotting sheep brains. still managed to develop a number of allergies. and i've been allergic to penicillin since infancy as apparently i nearly died from that one.
  8. jimmy, fission reactions are rare in the core. it is nuclear deacy(alpha and beta decay) and the outer core is liquid because there is less pressure on it. it also likely has a slightly different composition. the heat itself mainly comes from the formation of earth though. gravitational collapse is pretty good at making heat. just look at all the fireballs made by stuff falling to earth. now imagine a whole earth mass of that over a few million years. not surpirising its still pretty toasty.
  9. in his defence it was working when it was first posted. it was nothing that hasn't been posted a bazillion times before.
  10. they do? mine never done that. and i just tried the modem in my laptop, it doesn't do that either. i thought he just meant when you pick up a phone when it is connected to a modem and listen in.
  11. i'm sure you've noticed that phones are used to transmit sounds. and that faxes and modems use phonelines to communicate. so when you accidentally(or intentionally) dial a modem or fax number, you'll hear all the screeches and tones as the fax or modem tries to identify what type of modem or fax you are and if you'll allow it to connect to you. as humans tend not to conform to the fax and modem communication standards you hear wild screeching. a fax or modem would screech back in a similarly bewildering manner and make a connection. the screeching is the way they send data. it is actually the modem jumping between two tones. a high and a low. the data is encoded in the jumps between frequencies. for example, the jump from low to high could be a one and the jump from high to low would be a zero. as the modem changes about really rapidly to send a practical amount of data per second, you hear a whole low of different tones rather than just high and low.
  12. i know there are many that cannot pass the turing test. some of them have even appearedon this forum. most go to 4 chan though. Note: do not go to 4chan, its full of the not so nice to the downright depraved.
  13. Alan, only if it was a uniform sphere, the earth, i'm sure you will agree is not a uniform sphere. the gravity initially increases because the effect of being closer to most of the mass over powers the effect of the material above you. this is simply because the mass is concentrated towards the center. eventually however, the mass above you will counteract this and your weight will start to decrease as you approach the center.
  14. alan, the 'nuclear heat' is heat generated by nuclear deacay of elements withing the earth. it is not the same as a fission reactor(although there have been at least two natural fission reactors). to not include it means to not consider the earth at all.
  15. nothing powers self replicating molecules, they do not require energy to exist. perhaps you mean where does the energy come from to allow them to replicate? this will come from heat in the surroundings and possibly chemical reactions to form intermediates. self replicating molecules are nothing special, they just happen to catalyse a reaction that generates more catalyst. there isn't any magic to it and the normal rules of chemistry physics and biology apply.
  16. no they core is not degenerate matter, the pressures are nowhere near great enough. even the core of the sun is not degenerate matter. as for the composition stuff, the educated guess has underwent a few experiments at a lab scale by sending seismic(which are really just sound waves in a solid) through various materials and seeing which behaves most like the core of the earth.
  17. in your local frame of reference you are still travelling at one second per second. your rate of travel through time is not constant in all rest frames.
  18. its solid because it is under immense pressure. the equivalent of thousands of millions of atmospheres. this changes the melting and boiling points of materials. you don't usually notice this because the pressures you are used to seeing material at are pretty stable at 1 bar. its just a normal solid. just squashed a bit and very hot.
  19. reaper, the metal plate doesn't cover the whole sky, the blocks that allow for day night cycles are about halfway between the ringworld and the star. it is much more like a solar eclipse than you imply.
  20. nah, its orbital crowbar dispensers. a crowbar to the head at 7km/s will take out even the most robust zombie or evil despot.
  21. hint: protiens are massive, often containing thousands of atoms.
  22. try python, its pretty easy and is similar to C/C++ if you want to progress onto a more 1337 language.
  23. chances are it will only protect you for a few months maybe even as long as a year after that it will have mutated so much you'll get infected again. just like normal flu.
  24. Yt, i think your grasping at straws to put some rationality into what he said. his point seems to be that diseases are caused by not leaving a fraction of crop to rot.
  25. bombus, for lava coming to the surface, get yourself a collander or something with a hole in it, push it down into a basin of water, ther water squirts up from the hole, same thing happening there as it is with volcanoes.
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