StringJunky

This Hubble Space Telescope image contains three main features. The outer white area is the core or centre of the galaxy NGC4261. Inside the core there is a brown spiral-shaped disk. It weighs on hundred thousand times as much as our sun. Because it is rotating we can measure the radii and speed of its constituents, and hence weigh the object at its centre. This object is about as large as our solar system, but weighs 1,200,000,000 times as much as our sun. This means that gravity is about one million times as strong as on the sun. Almost certainly this object is a black hole. http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/research/gr/public/bh_obsv.html A couple, without trying: In the 1800s, Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier used mathematical equations to calculate the existence of Neptune. He gave his calculations to astronomer Johann Gottried Galle at the Berlin Observatory. Using Le Verrier's calculations, Galle was able to observe the planet within one hour of starting. Le Verrier expected to be declared the sole discoverer of Neptune, but months prior to his calculations being completed John Couch Adams, an English mathematician, had accomplished the same feat. As a consequence, Le Verrier and Adams share the honor as Neptune's discoverers. http://space.about.com/od/astronomydictionary/g/mathastronomy.htm May 4, 2011: Einstein was right again. There is a space-time vortex around Earth, and its shape precisely matches the predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity. Researchers confirmed these points at a press conference today at NASA headquarters where they announced the long-awaited results of Gravity Probe B (GP-B). "The space-time around Earth appears to be distorted just as general relativity predicts," says Stanford University physicist Francis Everitt, principal investigator of the Gravity Probe B mission. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/04may_epic/ The whole point about a Theory, of which the it's language is mathematics, is to describe and make predictions. If the mathematics didn't make predictions that actually reflect reality, science would be useless. Note; A 'Theory' is the the highest and most trusted standard in science, with much observational and experimental confirmation behind it.

LOL! Noooo! Scroll down to Licensing and Legislation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_the_United_Kingdom Subject to meeting standard criteria, I think it's straightforward to own shotguns but you have to meet stringent rules to own a firearm: .To obtain a firearm certificate, the police must be convinced that a person has "good reason" to own each firearm, and that they can be trusted with it "without danger to the public safety or to the peace". Under Home Office guidelines, firearms licences are only issued if a person has legitimate sporting, collecting, or work-related reasons for ownership. Since 1968, self-defencehas not been considered a valid reason to own a firearm. The current licensing procedure involves: positive verification of identity, two referees of verifiable good character who have known the applicant for at least two years (and who may themselves be interviewed and/or investigated as part of the certification), approval of the application by the applicant's own family doctor, an inspection of the premises and cabinet where firearms will be kept and a face-to-face interview by a Firearms Enquiry Officer (FEO) also known as a Firearms Liaison Officer (FLO). A thorough background check of the applicant is then made by Special Branch on behalf of the firearms licensing department. Only when all these stages have been satisfactorily completed will a license be issued, which must be renewed every 5 years. I wonder how much of this could be applied in the US?

Farmers and ranchers are easily justifiable owners of guns imo. I would hazard that most farmers in the UK own at least one...it's an integral part of that life.

Can you give us more detail about your restrictions and why?

The company 3M make non-metallic foil for that silvery bit on your credit/bank cards,and even all over them but I'll be damned if I can find where you can get it from. You probably need to buy a lot to acquire it. I don't know if that's the dielectric stuff Swansont and Klaynos mention. If you tap on the credit card designs at the top they rotate in sequence: http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/PCB/non-metallic-foil/ .

Has it been decided not to make our repping open for a while to see how it fares? I think it's worth a test and addresses Anikumar's concerns about accountibility...it's not shot from the dark. There maybe bigger over-riding concerns than this but we won't know 'til we try. We can keep a commentary going in this thread for the duration of the trial for purposes of general overview amongst us. I personally accept that if someone negs me in revenge for negging them due to the open system I'll just take it on the chin because as Spyman says the rep is about overall trends and one or two spiteful points received are neither here nor there. I think more importantly, as Ophiolite mentioned, it can matter who gave you neg/pos rep which may prompt you to reappraise or encourage your position/style as the case may be..

Are guns, outside the boundaries of ones property necessary with respect to personal protection? If the the answer is 'no' then there's a start.

From my link: James Clerk Maxwell (lived 1831--1879) put these ideas together and proposed that if a changing magnetic field can make an electric field, then a changing electric field (from an oscillating electric charge, for example) should make a magnetic field. A consequence of this is that changing electric and magnetic fields should trigger each other and these changing fields should move at a speed equal to the speed of light. To conclude this line of reasoning, Maxwell said that light is an electromagnetic wave. Later experiments confirmed Maxwells's theory. It is the product of two types of field generating each other. No aether needed.

Just seen this. My comments you quoted were general comments and not pointed at you. If I was I would have quoted you or named you. I apologise if you thought otherwise.

So, the magnitude of the "flaw" inherent in the system 'just happens' to vary, in any applicable test situation by a specific amount and to high precision, as predicted by GR and SR?! The Hafele–Keating experiment was a test of the theory of relativity. In October 1971, Joseph C. Hafele, a physicist, and Richard E. Keating, an astronomer, took four cesium-beam atomic clocks aboard commercial airliners. They flew twice around the world, first eastward, then westward, and compared the clocks against others that remained at the United States Naval Observatory. When reunited, the three sets of clocks were found to disagree with one another, and their differences were consistent with the predictions of special and general relativity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele%E2%80%93Keating_experiment Time is phenomenon or property of things, it is not a ‘thing’ unto itself. It is the subject of an accounting system that we use to describe and relate certain aspects of the universe to each other. This property of the universe is not a constant, as predicted by SR and GR.

Doesn't matter which one you start with but the electric field creates a magnetic field which creates an electric field and so on. One field oscillates perpendicular (at right-angles) to the other and the direction of the wave is perpendicular to the oscillations. http://www.astronomynotes.com/light/s2.htm

If the the effects of time variation between the ground and the GPS satellites weren't compensated for, your sat-nav wouldn't work. It's a fact. If these effects [special and General Relativity] were not properly taken into account, a navigational fix based on the GPS constellation would be false after only 2 minutes, and errors in global positions would continue to accumulate at a rate of about 10 kilometers each day! The whole system would be utterly worthless for navigation in a very short time. This kind of accumulated error is akin to measuring my location while standing on my front porch in Columbus, Ohio one day, and then making the same measurement a week later and having my GPS receiver tell me that my porch and I are currently about 5000 meters in the air somewhere over Detroit. http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html

I've no experience with handguns but I have used 12 bores quite a bit in the past and I would guess the latter are much more stable to fire given that they are anchored more solidly. In terms of 'aggressive presence' towards an intruder they are much more "impressive" and more likely to un-nerve an intruder more effectively and induce him to make his escape, possibly, than a handgun. Don't worry about what other people think...you are much more pragmatic and sensible, it seems, than the general US consensus. The Second Amendment does decree "A well-regulated milita..."; it's long since time the government started to bring that bit to reality.

Yes. Ta. The Daily Mail is not a very unbiased paper but nevertheless that stuff's within gang culture and quite localised within certain inner city areas...it's not a general phenomenon. Here's the official updated UK goverment assessment to September 2011 released in January; Note: Clicking link will download a pdf for the House of Commons Firearm Crime Statistics http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=gun%20crime%20statistics%20uk&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CDsQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.parliament.uk%2Fbriefing-papers%2Fsn01940.pdf&ei=KNzPUL7eDuSg0QXPz4G4Cw&usg=AFQjCNGH6atVDylpEjVwNHfABXpLQLKybg&bvm=bv.1355534169,d.d2k Here's a couple of graphs from it. These describe ALL firearms offences in the UK of all types. A thought. What do you think, as part of allowable home defence policy, only allowing handguns up to a prescribed maximum muzzle velocity and restricted magazine capacity conducive to defending ones home and family as determined by the appropriate experts?

That's John Cuthber's but do you mean the UK's three massacres?

It's all relative to your own frame of reference; I live in the UK so, as you might see given the relative lack of gun violence here, why I see your position is paranoid. However, something ParanoiA wrote, in his thoughtful post #187, makes me understand a bit more....it would seem the onus is more on the homeowner, when push comes to shove, to sort themselves out in a potentially lethal situation involving firearms than I previously knew:..this is not good. The typical American gun owner needs to have confidence that the forces of law will bend over backwards to help him if he relinquishes the right to have firearms that are not locked away. Also, if it must be allowed I think your shotgun is ample...no need for high-capacity semi-automatc military-style weapons.

Because the paranoid gun owner needs to have instant access to his arsenal.

Did you double-click the Enter key after the last word/character of the quote before you started typing your response to get the cursor outside the box?

That's ok.

I'd be happy to interpret your every word as sincere and to any nominally intelligent person, commonsense. The only hint of a joke is in your last sentence...you know your country well. Don't you find it rather perverse that, collectively, the US is so religious yet covets such a violent symbol as a gun?

Analogously, the CPU (Central Processing Unit) is your brain and the Random Access Memory (RAM) is the table you are sat at which you can put your data on and the hard-drive is the filing cabinet where you keep your data for long-term storage. Following this analogy through, you can see that the bigger the table (RAM) the more information you can put on it and consequently, the less trips you have to make to the filing cabinet (hard drive) to keep filling the table as your brain (CPU) uses it. IF the ram is too small and the computation or demands too large (too many apps open), the CPU will create something called 'virtual memory' (VM) which is space allocated on the hard drive that it uses as extended memory. It will swap files that it currently needs between RAM and VM until it has caught up with demand...this is really slow and you will notice long pauses between operations. Analogously, VM is the equivalent of you picking up bits of info that you currently need and putting it in a special folder in your filing cabinet then getting some more info from your cabinet, going back to your table, performing your calculations, taking that back to your filing cabinet and getting the old info out of your special folder, walking back and using that...this cycle will be repeated until all currently pending demands are met. In terms of speed of access and retrieval, the processor cache is the fastest, followed by RAM then the hard drive. The function of the processor cache, which is embedded with the CPU unit, is to pre-fetch information that the CPU guesses that it's going to need next. If it gets it wrong it dumps that info and gets the right info from RAM. The SSD is just the latest form of hard drive that has no moving parts, unlike the currently predominant mechanical hard-drives, and because their is no physical movement of components in it to read and write data it is much faster to deliver data into RAM. Cache memory and RAM are classed as 'volatile', which means they only hold data whilst the OS is running. Mechanical HD's and SSD's hold data regardless of whether it's running or not. Conventionally, only the CPU cache and RAM are called 'memory'; the HD and SSD are called 'storage'.

Coincidentally the title of this Science Daily article is the same as the OP: It is well known that plant growth patterns are influenced by a variety of stimuli, gravity being one amongst many. On Earth plant roots exhibit characteristic behaviours called 'waving' and 'skewing', which were thought to be gravity-dependent events. However, Arabidopsis plants grown on the International Space Station (ISS) have proved this theory wrong, according to a study published in BioMed Central's open access journalBMC Plant Biology: root 'waving' and 'skewing' occur in spaceflight plants independently of gravity. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121206203148.htm

You shouldn't air your personal alternative ideas in the proper science sections; it confuses novices.

Why what?

Sounds like it's time to pull out some pennies for a new one.