insane_alien

relative to what? there is no universal frame. relative to ourselves, we aren't moving.

4135648.89014674 that definitely isn't planck's constant you say you've taken note, why not show that and stop firing out what are essentially random number combinations which are completely useless.

there hasn't been a new editorial on the events because the investigation hasn't been completed yet. it takes time to collate the evidence and work backwards to find the root causes of the event. there isn't any conspiracy, just a massive cock-up.

yes, but the day getting longer does not add weight to the theory that the earth is shrinking. if the earth was shrinking then the day would get shorter. or at least get longer from tidal forces slower than it would un impeded.

ahem... whoops. you are of course correct.

in all likelihood it was an accident, BUT chemical plants(and an oil rig is one) have a whole load of safety features and protocols that are supposed to prevent any one mistake causing a catastrophic result(this being one of them). it's called defence in depth. the basic idea is that you have multiple layers of security because every layer is going to have holes in it where an accident can progress in to something worse. the idea being that the different layers have different holes so anything that gets through one layer gets caught by the next layer and at the very least prevented from escalating further. however, it can and will fail from time to time but these situations are quite rare(and unfortunately tend to have catastrophic results) usually as a result of multiple things going wrong and accumulating over time. the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster in the north sea is a prime example of a failure of defence in depth. There was a whole series of events over the past couple of months that lead to the disaster, if any of them had been fixed earlier than they were then it would not have occured or not been as bad. unfortunately humans are prone to errors, our base error rate is quite high too, 1 in 100 things will be wrong in some fashion. it is possible that for certain things our error rate will be lower or higher but it is typically 1 in 100.

pi in base pi is 1

I need to find a 2d barcode reader for my phone but most of the sites i go to keep trying to dump a load of viruses on my computer(luckily i'm on linux so i'm not worried). my phone is capable of java its a samsung GT-S5600 although it appears to be equivalent to a sanyo 5600. anyway, the requirements: it MUST be capable of reading datamatrix barcodes at the very least it must be capable of running on my phone prefferable but not strictly necessary: be capable of reading other kinds of barcodes, QR, standard 1D, etc. more the merrier. free as in beer and/or speech. i'm going to keep looking but my time has been severely limited by a job and the pub.

because they bought the rights to drill there and it was deemed profitable. 5000ft isn't actually that exceptional for offshore when things go wrong, they can go very wrong very fast. can't save people if they don't have time to get off. BP should have had the proper safety mechanisms in place and tested to deal with this. they should know oil drilling can cause a lot of problems.

951.4439 isn't plancks constant either you also make no mention of units. do you even check your own work with the real value at all? also how are you 'deriving' these?

actually, research has been done. its even gotten to the point of working devices being created. there is a section on it on the wikipedia page previously refferenced and it has external refferences. they still say its crap and they point out the horrendous inefficiency of converting such a high voltage into a low voltage for storage.

you are still talking fantastically expensive capacitors and devices for miniscule amounts of energy. with the cheap energy produced by nuclear, hydroelectric, even solar it is NEVER going to be competitive and its NEVER going to be able to provide enough power to be considered worthy. if you are making the thing mobile its not even going to be able to cover its own energy expenditure. you'll notice i'm not saying we don't have the technology, i know we do, its just that its not worth it. you're not going to be able to generate the energy required to construct the plant and cover the running costs. even at 100% efficiency which its not going to be. you're probably looking at 5% for the prototype plant and if you continue stubbornly on to build a second generation maybe 20% efficiency.

eh? pangloss is floridian. and the UK had more colonies than austrailia. Also, the forum has a quote button or you can use quote tags [ quote] [ /quote] (without the spaces) to quote someone. it looks better and it is more obvious where one persons comments end and anothers begin.

you forgot the most important one. DRUNK!

no, i work for evil biotech corporations, not evil computer corporations. Note incase my employer realises who i am: I do not believe the company is evil, this statement was made in jest, please don't fire me.

5000 ft under water is not exactly the ideal place to be sawing things in case you hadn't noticed.

then we know something more about the nature of our universe. nobody would really profit unless you count a better understanding of our universe as profit, in which case everyone profits.

yes, most people can learn to do that, i can do it do instance.

oreally, do you have a source saying that a single strike lasted half an hour? because that would be so extraordinary it would have recieved global press coverage. look, the fact is that lightning bolts simply don't have enough energy and don't occur often enough to power much of anything continuously. or even be worth capturing the energy for utilisation. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedwell, cause i'm bored, i'll do a quick capital cost estimation of such a plant. you're average lightning strike is typically 30 coloumbs(there is a different type of lightning that carries a lot more but we will consider them out of spec for the plant as they are much much rarer). I can't find a source of the average voltage of a normal lightning bolt but i don't think 1 million volts would be far off the mark. so what sort of size of capacitor are we looking for? luckily capcitance equations are simple. C=Q/V so we have 30 Columbs (Q=30) and EDLC(the biggest types of capacitor) are usually around 2.7V (V=2.7) so we need a capacitor bank that has a capacitance of 30/2.7=11.1F http://www.nesscap.com/products_lineup.htm sells a 25F capacitor but it can only handle 20.1A. so how many of them do we need in parallel? again easy. we take the current of lightning (30000A) and divide it by the maximum current the capacitors can take(20.1A) which gives us 1492.57 capacitors. http://www.newark.com/illinois-capacitor/256dcn2r7q/supercap-alum-elect-25f-2-7v-radial/dp/02P4416 will sell them for $2.99 so for the capacitors alone we're looking at $4464 your big metal tower to collect the lightning will probably set you back at least 2 grand. so we stand at ~$6500 per station. while this may sound good, you only get 500MJ per strike. thats 138.9kWh. at 10c per kWh thats $13.89 per strike. so to break even you need to fully capture, store and distribute 468 strikes. in the US you're likely to get 15 strikes per year. so thats 31.2 years to break even. BUT the lifetime of your capacitors isn't that high, you'll have to replace them every 10 years as they decay. each 10 years you need an extra 321 strikes to cover your capacitor costs. so in 10 years you made $2083.5 but you lost $4464 to equipment costs. not a sound investment if you ask me. also, $208.35 per year isn't enough to live on. now do you see why this is a fruitless endeavour? and if further proof were needed for the infeasability of this, i have just noticed i dodn't account for the fact that you're putting a million or so volts across the capacitors on charging. you can't really do that. so you'd have to series them up. quick calculation, 1,000,000V/2.7V = 370371(rounded up cause you can't get .37 of a capacitor) in series, but wait, we have many capacitors in parallel as well, that means 370371*1493 =55,293,903 capacitors. so that would cost, 55293903*$2.99 = $1,653,362,070 EVERY TEN YEARS and thats just for one little station. Sleep deprivation make you do funny things eh?

pangloss, first off, its a USA versus ENGLAND game. not the whole UK. as a Scot and seeing as our team didn't make it, i'm obliged to support Anyone But England. what seems to be happening is obama is trying to direct the anger over this incident from the american populace to the proper target, BP the company and not Britain the country. and seeing as BP is a big multinational corporation essentially tied to the UK only by name and location of its headquarters. Some of the stuff i'm seeing coming out of the states does seem to be a bit ridiculous though. i mean, its not as if BP WANTED to do this. its a cockup of epic proportions and bad for their business. And there is animosity to BP from here in the UK as well. I'm angry at them, not for the accident itself, because it was first and foremost an accident. but for the seemingly lax standards the kept aboard the rig. if it was in the north sea it would even have been allowed to start drilling until some additional safety measures had been put in place. I'm angry at them for not holding to their own internal safety standards more than anything else.

yes air can and does enter the oesophagus. we don't burp all the time because you have a sphincter on the top of your stomach that can hold some pressure(otherwise you'd vomit if you were upside down, or even lying on your back). also, there isn't much of a pressure difference inspiring flow into the oesophagus. so mass transfer will be quite limited.

well, speculations are not accepted scientific fact(otherwise they would not be speculations) which is what we discuss in the specific subforums. speculations need to have something solid for discussion, an observation a proposed mechanism, something. but most posts we get in there is stuff like 'the earth is shrinking' thats great, but evidence? proposed mechanism? observation? without these things its just blurting out essentially a random string of words. i mean, ideal scenario and what we'd WANT to see from the speculations forum is someone coming along and saying 'hey, i noticed X happens, but i cannot find an explanation for it. i think Y, but it could be Z' from this we would be able to enter a discussion on what could cause X, tests that would reveal whether it was Y,Z or something else entirely. experiments cound be performed, knowledge gained, interesting discussion had by all. if this actually happened its likely that it would be elevated to another subforum in due course. but that may just be wishful thinking on my part. most of it is just sheer unbounded craziness.

i've never seen a strike last 10 seconds, its after image in my eyes sure, but never the actual bolt. some do last longer than a few microseconds though, but it is still a value much smaller than a second, a 100 milliseconds tops. but the power of a lightning bolt is not a constant. it will start very high, and as the potential difference between cloud and ground drops(a rapid process) the power will drastically reduce. wikipedia says that your going to average about 500MJ a strike. thats all. this may seem a lot of energy but its really not that impressive at all for utility power.

you do realise that the planck length is derived from physical constants right? and that your 'approximation' is no where near the actual value and is hence useless? also the lower formula you posted is actually 0.0053915156 and not 5.391*10^-44 seriously, have you ever done maths before?

any theory of gravity by gravitons must necessarily approximate general relativity in the circumstances where general relativity is accurate. if it does not then it does not reflect reality as general relativity has been proven time and time again to be accurate in a vast variety of circumstances only deviating under the most extreme of conditions, this is where a gravitonic theory of gravity must provide different answers from GR and also reflect reality.