insane_alien

there is NOTHING fun about calculus.

i've always found shooting the crap out of zombie in half life 2 to be quite stress releiving.

the only people i have seen make this statement are people who don't fully understand evolution. sadly the majority of these seem to be on the crazy side so when an innocent comes along people might be a bit hostile to them.

i have no idea. the physics of the thing is more than a bit beyond me i think. i know how photons transfer momentum but i don't know a thing about wave guides. i'm sure if it was something as simple as that then newscientist would have spotted the mistake. the paper is on the site as well so have a read through it. you might be able to make more sense of it than i did.

http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/mg19125681.400;jsessionid=NMGHKBGMCGMM this guys figured out how to create thrust from microwaves in a closed off copper waveguide. I was skeptical at first (equal and opposite reaction and all that) but it looks ok and its in newscientist so i would gues that it has passed more than a few hurdles already. i want the cool jet/hover car that it shows in the picture!

ryans got a good idea there. my webcam can be set up to record only if it detects motion as well. could be good if you don't have oodles of disk space.

you could try getting a program that you have to enter a password to within say 5 mins of starting up other wise it pops up a window saying "caught you! Mwuhahaha!" then hermetically seals all exits and starts spraying sleeping gas into the room.

no the bubble boy would not find it useful the amount of power requires to run even a small plasma window is extremely large. not to mention the weight of the equipment and power source. Also if he were inside a closed plasma windo then he would die quickly because of the heat of the plasma.

i'm going through a bit of a stargate obsession phase just now and i was reading up about wormhole on the web. nearly every site(well, sites that actually correspond to the physics we all know and love) says that a wormhole violates causality because the information arrives before it is sent. now, i've thought about this and done some maths and i must be missing something because i can't figure out how that would happen. lets say we have a colony on some planet around alpha centauri and we've either discovered or made a wormhole. and we'll say c=300000000 ms^-1 to keep the math simple. normal radio communication would require 4 years to reach the colony and another 4 for you to get the reply. now, if you use a wormhole of say 300000000 m then the radio waves would take just over a second to get there (assuming a distance between transmitter and wormhole entrance) so it would be like talking to somebody on the moon(roughly). so, how does this violate causality? the alpha centauri colony doesn't recieve the transmission before earth sent it. if they sent a reply earth wouldn't recieve it before they sent the question. so, what am i missing?

but the magnets would be metal. so the effect would still be present.

nope its lithium sheets the use in lithium batteries. YT is perfectly correct. the sheets are pretty thin though. and you'll want to get it under oil ASAP.

well the warp travel is theoretically possible. we just need to figure out a way to manipulate space-time. wormholes would probably be easier though.

a sample size of 2000 might be good enough for a small town but its no where near large enough to draw conclusions from for a whole country.even 2 million would be a bit on the small side imo for a country the size of the USA but would be a lot more accurate than this one.

results may improve with liberal application of mind altering drugs.

aahh star trek communicator badge disease. she'll be fine in a few days but might not be able to contact the enterprise if the is an ion flux in the atmosphere.

enclosed in a tube. looked damn cool never the less. i seen them in reallife so i don't have a link

opening wormholes to the zen universe and allowing a hole bunch of nasty aliens through.

nope. ~22.4 litre/mol for any given gas at STP.

/me awaits word of a meltdown at sea.

i've seen holograms that look a hell of a lot better than the starwars holograms. then again the ones i seen hadn't just been beamed across the galaxy in a few seconds.

Yar! It be a fine day indeed to talk like a pirate! Pass me a tankard o that rum matey!

heretic, there are many many other applications than weapons and military. since this is a first gen force field, we don't know if it can be built without a frame. it could not be used in military applications because a field of sufficient size to be useful would require gigawatts of power. the army doesn't want to be carting around a nuclear powerstation everywhere they go.

hmm... most recent one is probably trying to fix a TV when its still on. it was going fine until the screwdriver went a tad too close to the higher voltage parts of the innards. wakes you up quite well though. a suggestion for the fridge: use a lot less ice in the fridge than the freezer. you can stick as much in the freezer as you like because stuff in there is meant to be frozen but just a sprinkle for the fridge.

centripetal force is what keeps you orbiting. its around 7.8 kilometers per second for the surface of earth. escape velocity(11.2km/s) you would also be weightless since your in an orbit. if you are held to the earth by, say a rope attached to a sled on a rail round the earth then it woul be like your trying to fall away from earth.

yes. i just said the effect happened. its basic orbital mechanics.