insane_alien

what does plate thickness have to do with solubility of lead sulphate?

oh deep cycle batteries still experience precipitation of lead sulphate. they don't stop that. what is different about deep cycle batteries is that the lead plates are thicker and sturdier. if you deep cycle a car battery you run the risk of degrading the plates to the point where they break up and the broken offareas are no longer functional as an electrode. a deep cycle battery will never get to the point where it breaks up. sulfation on the other hand is just due to the insoluble nature of lead sulphate which is present in exactly the same concentrations in both batteries.

i would assume that the bikes batteries are deep cycle batteries as only a moron would put starter batteries in such a design. anyway, sulfation is the precipitation of lead sulphate within the battery and occurs when the batter is cole to being fully discharged as there is more lead sulphate around. there isn't really any way to combat this as its an intrinsic property of a lead acid battery. next time you buy a kit, go for a lithium battery as they perform better over deep cycle discharges. really its just that lead acid batteries are pretty poor. cheap to make but not that great.

Ophiolite is from the UK. I can confirm, that in proper English, it is indeed "capitalisation" and that "capitalization" is a corruption of the origional word as is common in "US English"

you have much much more memory available with the TI-83. instead of just one memory location you have lots. you have to store the number in a variable. the store function is the on that looks like a right pointing arrow. you can then use the variable in any equation you enter into the calculator. ie. A=3.14159 B=2 C=2*A*B^2 then by calling C you could see the answer. although you could choose to display directly to the screen by not storing the result in variable C

did you read wht moontan said? the elements themselves are NOT rare. They're quite common. HOWEVER they don't form nice seams of concentrated ores like iron, copper and other minerals. this means that they are rarely(and this is the part where the 'rare' comes from) found in such concentrations that it is economicaly feasible to extract them. as the demand grows and prices rise, the number of deposits where it is feasible to extract the metals will increase. thats all this 'crisis' is about, the current profitable deposits are getting low and nobody wants to mine the rest because they know it won't be able to compete until the profitable deposits are depleted.

i suppose that makes sense as the photon is always travelling at uniform speed and space-time is probably quantised. ach well, not all my ideas can be brilliant.

High Torque means high acceleration. This is simply because more torque means more force available for acceleration and by applying a=F/m increasing the force means higher acceleration. of course this is potentially countered by using different sized wheels, nbut assuming all other parameters are the same does indeed mean more acceleration. High power can mean a higher top speed (as you can counter more drag) however top speed also depends on the torque. having all the power you need to counter drag at 800mph is useless if you do not have the torque to counter the drag force. this is why it's hard to get wheel driven cars to go really really fast, your torque is limited by the friction of the tyres(if the torque applied is greater you get wheel spin) so you have a limited amount of force to counter drag with. aero dynamics can come into play here and force you can into the ground more but this both increases drag and ncreases the power required to keep going. eventually this would fall below the breakeven point and you'd be unable to deliver the required force to keep acceleraing(although you'd run into material engineering issues long before then)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_sphere < this seems to contradict that. and is where my idea came from

right, so i got some terminology mixed up, i though geodesic was actually the shape of spacetime or soemthing. theres a reason i didn't study relativity.

So, i was reading up some article about black holes the other day and a thought struck me. according to relativity, light being bent by gravity is following a straight line on the geodesic(if i'm wrong here then the rest is gibberish) . so, if we havea case where the gravity is strong enough to curve light into a circle, this surface would in effect, be flat. So, black holes are flat from a space-time perspective. so if we then extrapolate this out to the earth, this means the earth is slightly more flat than it would be if it didn't have mass. This effect would of course be tiny for the earth and over-powered by oblateness, terrain and the population density of chiuauas. nothing particularly profound here, just want to know if my random tangent thought was right.

by that logic, ships coming over the horizon rise up out of the water after having been submerged before and ships going away from you convieniently spring a leak when the get to the horizon. its a matter of realising that the earth is far from flat.

well, if you use solenoids for the control surface actuators and a normal electric motor for power then the presence of the nonconductive fluid will not hinder them and the solid bits are uniformly solid so the pressure won't affect them. if owever you want to stick something complex on it such as a camera or even a computer, then that is going to have to be in a pressure vessel otherwise your capacitors will implode

remote control for that depth means a tether with some signalling wires attached. radio to that depth is not really feasible. i suppose some sort of sonic communication system could be utilised but the lag would be quite large.

as long as it's nothing complex(just some batteries, a motor and i suppose a few actuators) then it should be fine.

not helpful in any way. especially as an array contains multiple datum of which the plural is 'data'. Game Wizard, what programming language are you trying to create an array in?

yep, this is the principle of concentrating solar power plants (also known as solar towers, but there's a flat version as well). some of them use the concentrated light to heat up a molten salt so it can be used as thermal resevoir(essentially a big battery) before heating the water into steam.

the helium will only exist in trace quantities as it is typically extracted for other uses as it is valuable. that and it doesn't exist in massive concentrations in the source methane either.

i think you've been reading to many newspaper verions of what scientists say. especially on the mobile phone one.

neither is extermination as some will slip through the net. its also infinitely more palatable than extermination.

nope. not when prevention of the spread of HIV can be achieved by much more agreeable means. condoms over elimination.

we do use computational fluid dynamics to predict what the weather is going to do. its a major part of weather forcasting and climate prediction. however, due to the huge computational load of simulating a planetary scale fluid(largely due to achieving sufficient resolution to be accurate over such a large area) the simulations start diverging from reality after a few days and a few years down the line they will be completely inaccurate in terms of weather. in terms of climate we can look a few decades down the line before the there is too much divergence. That said, a lot of weather forecasting can be done by rules of thumb if you don't mind slightly lower success rates. me, i use the 'look out the window' approach.

you'll see varying numbers of ribs in humans long before mobile phones existed(not that mobile phones would cause such a thing). you could probably go as far back as to the point where our ancestors first developed something that could be descripbed as a rib. its just the usual genetic variation in people. the same way some people have extra digits, different colours of hair, skin, eyes and so on.

yeah, we're already close to getting implantable phones(we probably could do it now if we decided to do away with regulations and testing.) yet time travel is probably centuries away if it will ever be possible.

not by electrolysis no. you can do so by ionization though.