insane_alien

i suppose, but i still cannot come away from the impression that it is saying that you should be punished merely for the ability to differentiate between good and evil. If anything having that knowledge should be encouraged as those people observed without it are usually deemed sociopaths and not good at all.

but surely, without the knowledge of good and evil(ie, before the apple was muched upon) adam and eve may have commited evil acts(lets say drop kicking kittens) yet been un-aware of there evilness. then, by gaining knowledge of good and evil, could have utilized that knowledge to stop evil acts. infact, before eating the apple, they would be unaware that eating the apple was a wrong thing to do despite god specifically telling them to as they had no knowledge of right and wrong. really, the only conclusion i can come to from this is that god was being evil by punishing people who were deliberately kept unaware of the wrongness of their actions. a hypothetical case removing the religious components. you have a true random number generator(to simualte free will) and a button. if the RNG returns a 1 the button is pressed and a punishment is doled out the the random number generator(deletion) if zero then nothing happens. this is an inherently biased situation as the random number generator is always goign to get to the point where it pushes the button and is punished. so, being all knowing god would have known that sooner or later the fruit would be eaten. ultimate conclusion, god is a douche

yes, re-reading the OP it isn't clear whether there is a large number of interactions or merely a few. he seems to be taking a constant timestep and having a single interaction at each time step. it might help if he considers the bean machine (no, i'm not kidding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bean_machine). i think that might be closer to what he's looking for.

a hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. hardly as classy as dracula or a portrait of dorian grey but it is a good book and provides a humurously accurate reflection of the mind of humans. on a do not read list, i'd have to include war and peace. it's crap. i'm currently forcing myself to read it and i'm not enjoying it at all. i don't care for any of the characters, the plot is quite frankly boring and things happen so slowly its just like watching the hour hand of a clock going round. i keep waiting for something worth it to appear but it never does.

as carbon based organisms, we are evolving. we are currently homo sapiens, in the future(if we haven't been killed off by some other event) we will have to change the sapiens part. going even further down the line we will have to drop the homo part as well. humans as we exist now maybe only have another 100k years before we aren't human any more. hell in 5 billion years we probably won't even be humanoid.

well see, even in the stockmarket there are discrete events(company announcements, individual sales and purchases of stock etc) to treat either as continuous would be wrong to some extent. i can't really think of an example where it would be a continuous movement as there is always a discrete event at some point. sure its possible to do it theoretically for a simulation but then you have to ask whether it accurately represents the system you are trying to simulate.

have we not yet learned that getting something useful out of farsight is like getting a stone to produce chocolate icecream?

okay, let6s take it as a mouse thats never going to die of old age. If, and its a big if, Genecks were able to create a mouse that reached adulthood and then appeared not to age at all and lives long after it should have died, lets say 10 times its natural life span and still wasn't showing any signs of popping its clogs due to old age then you could probably say it was immortal. sure, it could still die of disease or injury, but its clear that death due to old age isn't going to be a big concern. whether this means a human could be made to be immortal, well, I'm not qualified to say but it would be my opinion that it is at least a very promising indication that yes it is possible.

well, brownian motion(in the physical world at least) isn't a continuous thing. its made up of discrete events(collisions) however the time between impacts and the distance travelled could be thought of as continuous random variables unless you want to bring quantum mechanics into this. is usppose the best way to make it continuous would be to have the particle travel for a random time before there is a collision that adds a random momentum vector(random direction and magnitude) to it. i don't think it is possible to have continuous collisions.

i have to give a presentation on wednesday that needs to be security checked. the person who does this is in the states and non-responsive to emails. also my laptop is shafted. stress levels are medium-high.

natural phenonomenon misinterpreted by humans as having some sort of intelligence behind it. we do it all the time. we used to think lightning had intelligence beghhind it for fsm's sake. the question itself is flawed i believe. you say assume that ufo's are real but then try to classify them to a very specific sort but then try to argue that its a broad sort and get angry when people treat it as such. if you wanted to say that asssume alien spacecraft are real and visiting earth then you should say that, not just ufo's. ufo's defy most bounds on classification because they are unidentified. that means you don't get to put restrictions on it.

no, you're the one who has made some fundemental misunderstandings. you see, the calculations we do today, with the method you say is wrong, work. not only that, bthey work extremely well infact, i did a design calculation for a heat exchanger of a mixed air/steam saturated mixture and the temperature was correct to 3 decimal places.(the instrument i was using for temperature measurement did not measure any more accurately than that. using your method, the calculation would be wrong by 2 orders of magnitude. daltons law is fine. it is discussing the fraction of the pressure provided by one particular component of the gas. it works. we know it works. there is over a century of data proving it works. you also mis understand the term saturated. saturated doesn't mean its 100% steam. it means that if you added any more steam and kept the temperature the same the steam would start to condense. if you actually managed to get a patent on this thenthe patent office are even more retarded than i thought. especially as they shouldn't be patenting stuff like this. try submitting your idea to a journal. a chemical engineering journal or physical chemistry journal would be the most appropriate. i guarantee that it will not be published as it is bumf. also, have you done any experiments to test this idea? do you have any data at all? EDIT: i jsut looked up that patent http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7588074.html it has bugger all to do with what you're talking about. its to do with pin finned heat sinks, nothing at all about an air-steam mixtures thermodynamic properties. lies just dig the hole deeper. you're not going to manage to dig yourself out by going that way.

i doubt it. it's not the first time an oil rig has blown up and accidents are all to common on them(just as with anything involving humans). a good example to compare this to(until the proper reports start coming out, which i'll read and analyse if anyone else is still interested by then) is piper alpha. clearly not terrorism just an accident. a couple of simple common mistakes were made at the wrong places and times by a number of people. i wouldn't be surprised if this was a similar story.

best proof of time travel ever.

yep, methane by itself doesn't smell and never mind like farts. farts smell due to sulphur dioxide and a couple of other compounds. gas that gets piped to your housecontains trace(parts per trillion) amounts of methyl mercaptan (could be ethyl, not quite sure) and it is essentially the smelliest substance known to man. This has no effect on condensation forming on the outside of the pot. you'll get condensation from any burning hydrocarbon, even if you put a big pot petrol under there and lit it.

well, the surface layermelts slightly when exposed to air above 0*C when the ice is pressed together, the melted surface layer refreezes as heat is unable to reach it and is drawn away by the cooler layers of ice deper into the cube. to prevent it, just make sure the temperatures the ice is exposed to are less than 0*C

this is covered pretty well in game theory.

my polling station ran fine as well but i am still pretty pissed that people were turned away. even more so that students were segrgated and treated as less important in some cases thus skewing the demographics. The result in my area actually went sort of towards what i wanted anyway(not the party i wanted but second choice at anyrate). BUT i'd be happy to go for a complete re-election simply because this one was crap in its execution. i mean really, how do you not set it up to be prepared to deal with the full constituency? they know exactly the maximum number of eligble voters so why not prepare for 100% turnout(even though it's never going to be 100%).

quasars are active galactic nuclei. lots more than 1 star. a super massive black hole thrown in to boot.

you're not going to be making one in your garage if thats what you mean.

any particular reason you want to remove it?

no its not, due to capillary action.# trust us when we say its not going to work. you said it yourself that your no chemist or that. well, we are(and i'm assuming thats why you asked us). and we are telling you that it won't work

its been horrible. personally, i think that there's going to be a lot of contested votes as people were turned back from polling booths(in some because they ran out of ballot papers). particularly in swing seats(seats that could go either way). we could let this turn into our florida, or, in the seats where this happened we could have a rerun and do it right. also, something about it just feels wrong. i mean, when channel 4 provides the least biased coverage then you know somethings up. after the ballots closed a number of news sources just assumed the tories had won(to the point of telling a labour MP that 'but you haven't won' when a grand total of zero results were in. and asking a tory how it felt to have won the election). somethings stinks about this election, and its worse than my feet.

his point was that trees don't depend purely on capillary action. if they did then there would be no tree taller than 10meters. you couldn't stack towers either. not how it works. if this was in any way viable then it would already be used. going back to the tree part, trees actually have to expend energy to get 4 tonnes of water per day. that doesn't come for free. in fact, aside from growth an maintenance i'd suspect thats actually the trees biggest energy usage. it eneeds to set up chemical potential gradients in order to pump the water up and this takes energy. if these didn't exist then trees would not get to the size they are.

they don't get sick from raw meat because of a little thing called hygiene. you know, washing your hands with antibacterial soaps or even gloves in some cases. the smell of the meat doesn't really have anything to do with it other than as an indication of decay. and yes, bees botanists and kitchen workers do getsick. just as often as any other person. and medicines don't work by 'burning cells' and neither do spices.