DV8 2XL

I should have said " it can yield fissile isotopes in a breeder reactor" not "made fissile" in the above post.

Sir, I believe that you have been sadly misinformed if you believe that this material can support fission. It is definably not fissile, it is however fertile, that is it can be made fissile in a breeder reactor by transmutation. And yes, this means it will not perform at all as a reactor fuel. As for the radiation that one could be exposed to from DU the fact is that you are under constant bombardment by ionizing radiation from any number of sources. The amount of exposure that tank crews and those of us that work with this material get from DU is several orders of magnitude less than one gets from living near a coal-burning plant. See this link: http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html As for the dangers of radiation this link might put things in perspective for you: http://www.sepp.org/NewSEPP/longevity.htm In part it says: "Present radiation protection limits for workers and the public are based largely on cancer deaths of A-bomb survivors. The significant increase in deaths from non-cancer of the A-bomb survivors at high doses compared to the significant reduced deaths from non-cancer of the radiologists indicates that A-bomb survivor data are not appropriate for predicting longevity for radiation workers or the public." Which brings me back to the point I was making above: confounding variables in war zones make it impossible to segregate the effects of any one biological insult to the effected population. A good (non-government) treatment of DU issues can be found here: http://www.argee.net/DefenseWatch/The Facts About Depleted Uranium.htm

Thomas, I have worked directly with DU most of my working life, in aviation. I have machined it, fired it, and handled it with bare hands, and I have felt no ill effects. I have healthy children (now adults) as have many of my colleagues, and I just had a major screening and was found free of cancer. Nor has my union, the IAM found any evidence that working with this material has health implications. It has been use for trim weights in commercial aircraft for over thirty years. As far as the people suffering from the health effects of being in combat, it would seem to me that it would be very, very hard to isolate exposure to any one material from the hazmat background in an active theater; such places are not exactly OSHA compliant to begin with. There are many environmental hazards caused by modern munitions, singling out DU is a bit of a red herring that is leveraging peoples fear of all things nuclear.

You got it; it disipates into heat via friction.

Well I wasn't trying to throw a damper on things, just wanted to show that even running the Drake pessimisticly, we are not alone.

The number that is missing from the above estmate is the lifetime of the Milky Way Galaxy. When that is factored in the number of communicating civilizations in the galaxy at this moment drops to a million or so civilizations within our own galaxy with whom we might detect. However if we also limit ourselves to sub-luminal communication that number drops to about three.

In his article, published in the May 2003 edition of Scientific American, Tegmark explains that scientists are currently discussing four distinct kinds of parallel universes. He refers to the Level I multiverse as “the least controversial type.” As I understand it, this level is based on the idea that space is infinite even though only a small portion of it is currently visible to us. Even though the visible universe grows by one light year each year, we will never be able to come even close to seeing it in its entirety since it is without end. Because it is so vast, some physicists now speculate there are not only universes just like ours out there, but, as Tegmark explains, they are themselves as endless as space; “There are an infinite number of other inhabited planets, including not just one but infinitely many that that have people with the same appearance, name and memories as you, who play out every possible permutation of your life choices.”4 Assuming the uniform distribution of matter indicative of our universe is typical, cosmologists go so far as to predict your closest doppelganger is 10 to the 1028 meters away, and at 10 to the 1092 meters away there exists a solar system identical to ours, and at 10 to the 10118 meters away is an entire universe just like ours. The Level II multiverse is considerably different than the Level I. In this model space is thought of as a mostly endless batch of rising dough containing bubbles in which a variety of universes exist. Because the dough continues to rise these bubbles grow farther and farther apart from each other so that it is impossible for us to ever see or visit them, even if, as Tegmark calculates, “you traveled at the speed of light forever.” What is interesting about Level II universes is the speculation that many, if not most, of them may operate under different physical laws than ours does. Some physicists theorize that our universe may have initially had nine dimensions that all functioned in symmetrical proportions. As the universe developed, however, only three of these dimensions participated in the cosmic expansion, which became our visible universe. The other six dimensions remain unseen. The Level III multiverse also stands out from both the Level I and the Level II. In this multiverse, scientists speculate our universe is constantly branching into multiple other universes in which every possible outcome occurs. If you role a die, for example, and get a one, there are also at least five other universes in which you rolled a two, three, four, five and six. The difference between Level I and Level III multiverses is that in Level I your doubles simply live elsewhere in three-dimensional space. But in the Level III multiverse they live in another quantum reality altogether. The Level IV multiverse may at first seem rather boring as compared to these others. It is the notion that every mathematical structure “corresponds to a parallel universe.” Tegmark himself refers to this as a “radical Platonism” that asserts these mathematical structures are physically real, though they exist outside of time and space. Although, for many of us, it might not seem like it would be much fun living in one of these mathematical universes, this may be just the sort of universe we need to explore from time to time if we’re going to get the bird’s eye view of reality. Many philosophers have speculated that truth is subjective, which is to say that for the frog on the lily-pad it doesn’t really matter that the stone has created a ripple effect because the frog can only experience one ripple at a time.

Transfinite numbers, also known as infinite numbers, are numbers that are not finite. These numbers were first considered by Georg Cantor. As with finite numbers, there are two ways of thinking of transfinite numbers, as ordinal and cardinal numbers. Unlike the finite ordinals and cardinals, the transfinite ordinals and cardinals define different classes of numbers. The lowest transfinite ordinal number is ω. The first transfinite cardinal number is aleph-null, , the cardinality of the infinite set of the integers. The next higher cardinal number is aleph-one, . The continuum hypothesis states that there are no intermediate cardinal numbers between aleph-null and the cardinality of the continuum (the set of real numbers): that is to say, aleph-one is the cardinality of the set of real numbers. In both the cardinal and ordinal number systems, the transfinite numbers can keep on going forever, with progressively more bizarre kinds of numbers. Beyond all these, Georg Cantor's conception of the Absolute Infinite surely represents the absolute largest possible concept of "large number". See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfinite_number

The truth in the Canadian market is that the catch phrase: "protecting national identity," was in fact a euphemism for:"protecting entertainment industry jobs." Having said that I must admit that the Canadian Content Laws have wound up giving me more choise than I would have if U.S. programing had displaced local productions.

It's a stunningly beautiful relationship; what else does it need to be?

Gravity wins if the total mass is big enough.

All of the planets are named after Roman gods. Most are male, the exceptions being Venus and Terra (Earth).