insane_alien

okay, thats just magnetic suspension although its done a lot differently than that and the chevvy volt doesn't have a generator at all. it just has lots of big batteries. engines in cars do actually provide a lot of power some provide ridiculous amounts. the veyron runs at over 750kW mechanical which means it produces something on the order of 1.5MW of waste heat.

the amount of the earth experiencing warming is tiny really really tiny. like less that 1% by mass.

he wants to pwer a steam engine with explosions. doing this externally is going to be incredibly inefficient to the point of uselessness.

what you're describing there is an internal combustion engine(like you'd find in your car), nothing like the steam engines which were external combustion.

well, you could replace the water with a more volatile chemical but thats going to create other problem as well, especially if you get a leak(which is likely). the only problem with this is thatyour fire will still need to be much much hotter than your working fluid in order to achieve the same vapour production, so in reality the heating cost won't be that much different asthe tempeature difference of the fires willbe negligble if not non-existant. and then you have a condensation problem, as you have a lower temperature difference between external conditions and what you are condensing, you'll need a larger area to keep a good heat transfer rate. using another fluid would likely throw up a host of other problems. watter is conveinient. you might want to look more into the heating method and try and get a more efficient way of creating the steam, or perhaps a method that can change loads quickly(with ordinary steam engines you had to plan a fair bit ahead so you were creating the right amount of steam later on. if you kept shovelling full pelt and stopped at a station then you'd either need to vent steam profusely or there'd be a boiler explosion.

no, there is a limit to resolution achievable by a lense of reasonable dimensions, but it isn't technological, it is physical. the sound 'barrier' was a technological limit. the speed of light is not.

it's not a technological limit

you can't be bothered explaining the basics? ha. i do know what a quantum is and so do most of the other people on this board many of us use some degree of quantum mechanics in our jobs(i don't, but what i'm involved in does involve quanta as its a discrete system rather than a continuous). if i didn't know what a quanta was then i'd probably have been fired by now. i suggest that you go look up the mathematical definitions of both quanta and infinity.

a quanta does not need to equal 1. all it is is a discrete value, in a range of quanta no values exist between the quanta, only the quanta themselves thats all it means. say the governement abolished the 1p and 2p coins, that would mean that the smallest quanta currency came in would be 5p and all values must be multiples of 5p as that is the size of the quanta. of course this analogy discounts electronic trading where no such limitations exist and you can even have divisions of a penny traded, but that lies outside the bounds of the analogy.

i'm not trying to split quanta at all nor do i pull 1000 quanta out of anywhere. if one quatna equals 1000/999 then it will only take 999 of them to reach 1000 as 1000/999*999 = 1000 a quanta does not have to equal unity. and a googolplex can be counted to, just not very quickly if you count each number.

yep. try it and see. ah so you are changing the definition of infinity to fit some befudled theory of yours. you can't count to a googolplex in the tim e the universe has been around(even if you count to a trillion in a planck second) yet this number is not equal to infinity.

why would infinity-1 equal time? how is the above equation derived? the value of inifinity doesn't actually change. mainly because it doesn't have a value. its not something you can sit on the number line. EDIT: also, if i count from zero in quanta of 1000/999 (1.001001001...) then it is perfectly possible to count to 1000 in 999 quanta. counting to 3 in two quanta is also easy, just make the quanta 3/2(1.5)

this is one of the problems green xenon had in his last thread about haphazard genetic modifications. he doesn't seem to understandthat just because a substance can be bad in excess quantities doesn't mean that it is bad in all quantities greater than zero.

mmm, i agree that they would be better off spending the money lengthening some platforms and increasing the amount of rolling stock. as it stands, trains are kinda terrible just now, particularly for the price of a ticket. even with the UK's extortionate petrol prices(what i wouldn't give to only have to pay what the US pays AND complains about) it can be cheaper to drive. and not just on short journeys either. if i were to drive from glasgow to london it would be cheaper than by train and it wouldn't take much longer either. and then there's the overcrowding. the last thing you need at 8am is to be sardined in a scottish train with a bunch of people that may have heard of soap, but are skeptical of its existance.

i'm not for the banning of salt, especially in restaurants. like most things, if used responsibly, salt is perfectly harmless and can go a long way to enhancing the quality of the food you are eating both in terms of taste and nutritional value. the problem comes with irresponsible uses of salt. restaurants already need to pass regular health inspections, why not add a section to that for responsible usage of salt surely that falls under the realms of health. the US it seems, needs to learn the meaning of the word 'moderation' and not in the sense of forum moderation.

feed in the mcrosoft windows EULA and see what pops out.

the intestines wouldn't need to withstand any pressure. there is already a system in place to deal with excess gas, its called farting(flatulence if you want to be proper). and no, you don't want to absorb the gasses. none of them are particularly useful. here's a much much better idea: put the fork down tubby, step away from the plate. have some fruit instead, maybe go for a run.

step 1: go buy a pair of tights/nick them off your girlfriend/wife or whatever, get tights is the main point of this step. step 2: cut them up so they fit over the air inlets of your computer(don't need to worry about the exhaust) step 3: attach with tape/rubber bands/whatever.

making it spin fast will only decrease the compressive stresses it needs to withstand. it will not make it any more stable with regard to perturbations. in the perfectly ideal universe where there is only a perfectly spherical uniformly dense earth and a perfectly circular perfectly uniform ring, then it'd work. but only until you introduce some non-uniformity. even quantum fluctuations would be enough to throw this thing off eventually. it may take thousands of years for the perturbation to grow large enough to be measurable but it'd happen.

i suspect that one is the smell of the container rather than the chemicals. last time i handled a large quantity of potassium nitrate(2kg) there wasn't a smell at all

no material known has the compressive strength to withstand the forces involved. but even if you invent some unobtanium that can then it still won't work as it is an inherently unstable construction. even the minor perturbations from external gravity sources(moon, sun, jupiter, even people walking around) would destabilize it and contact with the ground would be made.

npts, given the nature of this tunnel, pumping water out will not be an issue. in order for the tunnel to function, the vacuum needs to be relatively hard. well below the vapour pressure of any water leaking in. the vacuum pumps that are necessary for maintaining the vacuum would be able to handle it.

despite the fact that the LHC is already online

he meant over exposed for the moons surface. for taking a photograph of stars it would be perfectly exposed. the same as changing exposure settings for indoor and outdoor lighting etc.

or we could go to the fluctuations in the size of the sun which are big enough for a small change in the time taken. Then there is the orbit of the earth around the barycenter of the moon,