insane_alien

well, if your falling from over about 5 km (15000ft) you could very well die before you hit the ground from a mixture of hypoxia and the extreme cold. going higher makes this more likely. eventually you'd get t an altitude where you'd burn up on reentry as well.

i'd go with sisyphus here. more likely to happen with isolated populations than anything as broad and ill fitting as 'races' as it is possible for individuals in the same 'race' to have more genetic differences than with some one in another 'race'

you need to relax. there isn't anything wrong with it. you were drunk, you probably thought it would be a laugh. who gives a damn. sure you can have the wee 'oh god what the hell was i doing?' bit when you wake up in the morning but its nothing to be depressed about. might be a sign to cut down on the drinking though.

i can do some on chemistry if needed. it'll have to be after my exams though

you'd probably have to wait till they were within a kilometer to do it. nad considering the velocities involved, 0.2 seconds later your house would be destroyed by a dud missile hitting your house releasing an energy equivalent to its weight in TNT.

well, if you mentioned that in the first place... n/m the cylinder will not have to withstand the full pressure. it should be fine but i'd test it first before giving it to anyone. also, what is the legality for silencers on air rifles?

no, no its not. thats the maximum amount of stress it can handle. i guarantee if you put 100MPa in that pipe it would explode. also, if that were the way it worked if you had kilometer thick walls the maximum you could put in it would be 400MPa, something dodgy there. thats what i'm thinking too. annyway, copper is not an ideal pressure vessel. you may want to lookup stresses in a cylinder to find a way to calculate it. though i think the caps would give out long before the pipe(depends on the way they are attached i suppose)

Bingo! we have a winner. if you take any complex atribute and apply it to people and other animals you'll see that certain individuals are better at it than others and some aren't realy good at it at all. this is also seen cross species.

well, if you think your results mihgt drop due to a crap teacher then yes it would be worth it. also, if you think you need extra tutoring then it would be worth it. have you considered if self study would help? i done this and it did help but its not for everybody.

only 10% of the neurons are firing at any time. this is an average. sometimes more will be firing, sometimes less. this in no way affects the processing capacity of the brain nor is it ameasure of it. if all the neurons in your brain fired at once you'd probably die quite violently from muscle spasms.

first, it will have recoil, if it fires something forward, it will move the gun back. conservation of momentum this even happens with lasers. if fired in the atmosphre it would have a very short range, if any. in space the plasma would diffuse quickly. the weapons range again would be extremely limited.

The chicken knows the pain signal hurts as well. i'm starting to think your just trolling now.

right okay. just checking. anyway, what i've been trying to get at is that people have being seeing shapes in the clouds long before cloud seeding, aeroplanes and well, most technology and science really. ever played the game as a kid where you and some friends lay down and tried to find shapes in the clouds like rabbits and stuff? your brain WILL find a pattern it recognizes, it might not be perfect(probably not) but it will see the pattern in the randomness, emphasize it and make you ignore the rest. this is what brains do. it comes as no surprise that you all seen a shape in the clouds what does though, is you immediately connect it with cloud seeding.

humans have a remarkable ability to 'see' patterns in randomly formed objects. it is entirely possible the shapes came about naturally. also, cloud seeding isn't performed that often. there usually needs to be some good financial incentive. even then they don't go and make shapes. actually, a thought has struck me. are you talking about clouds as in rain clouds or clouds as in vapour trails left by high altitude jet engines?

darkshade, three hundred years ago WE(humanity) didn't know it was an electrical impulse, heck, before YOU went to school and learned about the nervous system YOU didn't know it was an electrical impulse. why does the fact that pain is an electrical impulse factor into this at all. as said before, our reactions to pain are instinctive as well. only with training can we supress them and you can teach animals to ignore stimuli as well.

okay, if i take a big tank of still water(less convection the better) and some potassium permangante crystals if i drop them in in a big circle shape, i will have a ring of coloured water where the crystals were. this will last until the potasium permanganate has sufficiently diffused for it to lose the shape. if the water is still it could last up to an hour maybe. another example of a shape without a container is a smoke ring. yes, neither of these shapes will last but they will exist none the same. aslo, we know there is no container as they are clouds in the atmosphere, i haven't seen any kilometer scale inflatable baloons anywhere so i'm going to say that the were run of the mill clouds.

darkshade, as conciousness is a convoluted and complex subject, it would make sense that there is not just one state of conciousness. there would be many 'levels'(well, it would really be more like a spectrum where the colours blend into each other with no definite boundary) of it. why wouldn't a chicken have some level of conciousness. it can learn, it can imitate, it can make choices. just because they are not as complex behaviours as we display does not mean that the chicken isn't concious. its just not very concious.

so, why are you arguing it doesn't suffer then?

yes i know, but clouds are not baloons.

there is no jump. you're still thinking of time as an absolute.

don't know how your going to pressurize the atmosphere darkshade, or that it would have an effect at all. you could make big rough shapes i suppose like a circle by seeding in a circle. but nothing very accurate like the shapes or size of the coulds formed. what you say was probably just your brain looking for patterns that didn't exist. its the same phenomenon that causes people to see religious figures on bits of toast made in a dodgy toaster.

most people will also do it when awake as well. you still haven't defined knowing pain in any solid way. i'll submit this definition in the hopes we can move on a bit. 'knowing' pain is the ability to interpret a signal from a pain receptor and take action to stop the pain signal by moving away or another action. pain is the signal sent by certain nerve endings when they detect damage. testing it is easy. do something that would cause pain(doesn't need to be severe, a light pinch would be sufficient) and see if the organism reacts. if the organism reacts the it can feel pain.

wasn't jesus born sometime in june?

sometimes. i certainly am not conciously shocking myself. so? complexity doesn;t mean a chicken doesn't have it. doesn't mean we have it either.

me too. think tree made a whoopsie. EDIT: ninja posted by the tree himself how embarassing.