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i will also offer my services, linear algebra was my favorite course in mathmatics. If you really stay up on top of the class, you will be impressed with how much this subject is inter-connected with itself. That is to say taht what you learn in the first weeks will intimately affect what you are doing in the last weeks. It is way sweet!

yeah, trasition metals are kinda hard to predict -- your teacher is somewhat correct. In order to even start to accurately predict what ions trasition metals form, you need to lean a bit of what is called "group theory." However, there are some simple predictions that can be made for a very few of the trasition metals. But over all, in order to predict charge on a metal, you need to know coordination number, coordination environment, feild splitting of the orbitals, ect. It is quite a mess But it is very cool.

Dude, the oav's of kenshin are so much better than the series. Though trigun roxxors! You seen Kite? Or Jin-roh? Those are pretty sweet too Oh man, i saw Blood the last vampire, and it was SOOOO freaking sweet, and then it just ends, way early too. What a jip. Bah, it was cool though for the 30 min or however long it was.

is it a journal or a magazine. I am not quite familiar with it. I was always junder the impression, though, that it was a magazine (much like scientific american) and not a joural (like Nature). Am i incorrrect?

yeah, i knew what you ment Cap'n, but i couldn't resist. SOrry., Anyways you are correct. Accourding to the special relativity, there is no such thing as a absolute inertial frame. As such, there cannot be any frame wich is absolutely stationary.

To rephrase the double negative: It s possible to be moving. I think this is obvious

of course we are talking about telepathy here anyways, so really who knows. I mean if you are going to accept telepathy and then argue other things, it is kinda like straining out gnats to swallow camels. :/

too logical -- less thinking more screaming but you are correct, it would "doppler" shift or whatever, way too low to even be heard. But it still kinda a cool use of science for a discouncerting story

yeah, there is a cool sci-fi short story out there about this. Sadly i can't remember either the title or the author (curses!). Anyway it was about a husband/wife pair of traders. And they traded intergalactically. They were really really good at being trades becuase they were also telepathic. So they travelled seperately and could instantly tell eachother what to get at other planets and stuff. ANyway, at the end of the story, the wife accidentally jumps right next to a black hole and gets sucked in. but due to time dialation, it takes her forever to fall in. Thus, the husband has to hear his wife's scream of terror in his mind for the reast of his life. It was a pretty good story. Great idea anyway.

i propose that we kill all newborn babies as they don't contribute anything. In fact, they only take stuff for the first few years. So it is either kill all babies or learn to give birth to fully functioning people. Yeah. Oh and why 50? that seems kinda arbitrary. Why don't we just kill anybody that retires -- or isn't working. Yeah. Anyone that isn't working should be shot. That way only productive, contributing people can live.

yeah, and niether is the isolation table

lol! I remember taking those. Don't worry about bombing them though. Really they are only good for getting out of classes that aren't in your major. If you wish to go onto further education (med school, grad school, ect) they really like to see that you have taken all the courses in the major, even those ones that you could have passed out of due to the AP tests. SO really, in your major, they get you nowhere. At least that is how it was when i was in undergrad. cool

yeah, scientific american is pretty good. It seems to target peoples that have a pretty good general background in science, whilst Discover seems to target an audeince that brings less scientific education. HOwever, i think that scientific american has gotten worse over the years. It seems it has gotten a bit more "hand-waving" in its articles. Perhaps this is just because the topics are a bit harder to grasp, but if you go back to the articles in the 50's - 70's they were quite good. It was almost as if you could have taugh yourself a good part of the feild that the articles were about. Seriously. Oh well, like i say, it could just be that the topics covered now are more abstract. Gamemastermh mentioned science, but said that it was a bit too hard to read. If you don't mind shelling out ~$70 a year, you can get Nature, which is like the step inbetween science and scientific american (though much more towards the science end of things). Basically, it is a easier to understand, more fun to read, science. Cool But yeah, scientific american is good, though i don't get it myself, i have thought about it from time to time. It just i have too many other journals to read that come to my lab :/ It is kinda a bummer, but you gotta do what you gotta do

There is something that i can agree with. We just choose to be slaves to machines, becuase they are easier "masters" than the land alone would be. I am not trying to say that machines are alive or anything, i am just saying that we choose to be dependent on them, so we must attnd to them.

sup gene! I will try to give you a brief heads up about these things, but i don't really know how easy it will be, as they are samewhat difficult subjects. If you really want to have a good introduction for the layman, try reading Mr. Thopmkins in Paperback by george gamow. Now for your questions... As far at aether goes, well, it doesn't exist. it was once hypothesized to exist. It was supposed to be the medium through wich light travelled. Why? Well, people needed an expliniation for how light traveled throught the vacume of space. YOu see, light has a weavelength. If it has a wavelength, then it must be a wave (seems reasonable enough, right?) Well, waves need meduims to travel through. Like ocean waves travel through water, sound waves travel through air, ect. Without a medium to travel through, there is no wave. (Incidentally, this is why there is no sound in space -- nothing for the sound to travel through). Ok, so it didn't really look like there was anything in the depths of space, but we know that light can travel through space, since the light from the sun and all the other stars gets to us. So in order to rectify this with the idea that light is a wave, scientists hypothesized that there was medium throught wich light traveled, but htat we couludn't detect. This was called teh aether. Now however, we do not belive there is an aether. Rather, we think that light can travel thorugh vacumes. But, waves can't travel throught vacumes, so what is light then. WEll, particles can travel through vacumes. SO light must be a particle then. But remember that light has a wavelength, so we know that it is also a wave. So we are left with the idea that light is both a particle and a wave. This is the famous particle-wave duality. There are other other ways that light makes this strange duality manifest, but this is definiately one of them. Anyways, the take home message is that scientists thought there was an aether, but now they don't. Now as to relativity... there are two types of realtivity, general relativity and special realtivity. Special relativity is based on the hypothesis that all frames with uniform motion are physically identical. That is to say that if you have two frames of refference wich are moving, but not accelerating, then they are both equally valid. For instance, let us say that you are riding on a bus at a constant speed, right? WEll, are you moving through a stationary world? Or perhaps you are stationary and the world is moving past you? Or perhaps both you and the world are moving, relative to someone wallking down the street? Special realtivity says that all three of these "viewpoints" are valid. that the pysics of the situation can be accpetably described in all three of these frames. Cool. Now there was another idea, that when teamed with this first gives some strange results. This other idea is that the speed of light is constant for all observers. That is to say this; lets say that i was standing on a platform and shined a light at you. Now you are in a ship moving towards me at half the speed of light. Then you measure the speed of light, light's speed would appear to be the same as it would be for me, who is standing still! It is quite bizzar. So given that light always has the same speed for all observers, we find that htere are a few strange consiquences that occur. The first is called "length contraction." This is the idea that objects that are moving close to the speed of are shorter (have less length) in the direction of the motion. that is to say, if you were standing around and a a meter stick (lengthwise) flew by at close to the speed of light, it would be shorter than a meter to you! The second consequence is called "time dialation," this is the idea that, for a stationary observer, time appears to slow down for things moving the speed of light. That is to say that if you saw someone moving past you at close to the speed of light, that person would be aging more slowly than you do. The final consequence (that is commonly talked about) is called "realtive mass" or "momentum gain." THis states that, relative to a stationary observer, things that are going close to the speed of light have more mass than they do at reast. That is to say that if you were standing still and a 1kg weight wizzed by at close to the speed of light, then it would be heavier than 1kg to you. ok, so those are the basic concequeces and ideas of specail relativity. It is some wierd and wakey stuff, but cool. I should say that these effects occur even at noraml, everyday speeds, but the effects are so small as to be unmeasureable by our equipement today. The effects of special realativity do not become very noticable until you obtain a considerable fraction of hte speed of light. So, we do not really notice them ever. Of course that is why the ideas of special realaitivy do not really make alot of sense to us. They are not observed on a reagular baises. So now we come to general realtivity. I am afraid that i can only give you a cursory introduction to this. Both becuase the math behind it is quite intense and becuase i myself do not udnerstand it that well. General relativity is biult on a statement similare to that of special relativity -- with on important addition. IN general relativity is is stated that all frames that are in uniform acceration are equally valid. Prior to this is was just frames that were not acperating (called "reast" frames). Cool, so we can see this works by other simple thought experiment. Imagine you are in a box without window. And you are sitting on the floor. YOu are expreienceing a force pulling you down wich is the same as the force you experiece from earths gravity. now is there anyway that you can determine wether you are in a box sitting on earth or in a box in the middle of space that is accerlerating at a constant 9.8 m/s2 (this is the same acceleration you expreince from earths gravity)? General realativty says that there is no way to tell these two situations apart, if you are in the box. So we are left with the idea that all constantly accelerating frames are equally valid. Ok, so then you can start to unravel the concequences of general realitivity. The simplest of these is that space is curved. Space is curved in three dimentions by mass. That means that every bit of mass "bends" space. The earth does, you do, a baseball does, ect. Large masses bend space more than do small masses, as would be expected. SO there is consequence one. There are others, but it would take me a great amount of time to tell them and i have already typed for a while. Perhaps later i iwill talk about htem. As for now, i am leaving. I have to go to a funeral so i won't be around to answer questions about this for a few days. however, i am sure there many others here can talk about this knowledgably (some more than I). So have fun leraning

welcome katy YOu will need to be a bit more spcific than that, i am afriad. What do you mean by "distribution of matter in space"?

Do their orbits really intercept though? That is do the paths taken by the planets really cross eachother? Or is it just that depending on where the planets are one is farther away than the next?

i am serious. Society could not function without cars, busses, farming machines, airplanes, computers, medicines, the printing press, the lever, the pully, boats, stoves, refrigerators, flashlights, batteries, powerplants, water proccesing plants, sweage processing plants, food proccessing plants, steel mills, wood mills, radar, sadly TV, radio, ect ect ect. Of course you could point out that man might survive without these tings, as we did once, but there is no way that we could support the population that we have now without some of these machines. Furthermore, (and most importantly) we choose to live and depend on these machines. Whenever new technology comes out, we adapt it and integrate in into our lives. Thus, we choose to indroduce something that will demand our time, energy, resources, ect. This is why we are slaves, we choose to serve machines (by fixing them ect.) when they demand fixxing. And many people would die, if we stopped servicinng the machines. Sure, machines may not be alive or have a conscience. So perhaps this is not the type of slavery that we usually think about. But it is there. Whether you like it or not, you choose to serve the machines in your life. (ie. you pay for the electricity for your computer) Perhaps this seems like it is comming out of left field. I don't know. But what i do know is that we could not survive as we to today without machines. So we are dependent on them, just as they are on us. We say that we are the masters of machines becuase they serve us, that is they do what we want. But then we to do what they need. Is it so hard to imagine that this too is a form of slavery or dependence?

as far as i am concerned, we are already slaves to our machines. The majority of us could not live without the nor would we choose to, given the choice. For further elaboration, read Player Piano by Kurk Vonegut

[quote name='But then you're assuming that y & x have a linear relationship. Yup. But it doesn't matter if i assume that. I make no assumption about what k is' date=' so it iwll not affect the answer any. If you don't quite see this, then lets take a look at the two answers you posted.... OK for this solution can set x=4 and y=2, right? then for x/y=k we have 2/4=k so k=0.5 next answer... WEll, you already did this one. And you are right, for this X and Y, k=1. well, there is no reason why k has to equal 1. It is a variable. Just like x and y. There may be other solutions to for x and y, we don't just assume there is one. Likewise, depending on what x and y are, k could by (prolly will be) something diferent. I hope that helps.

of course asking whether or not the nuetrinos count doesn' t really answer the question then, does it? Rather, it changes the question to "what exists in the space between neutrinos?" And really this question is "can there exist an area of space in which nothing exists?" That is a great question. I will have to think about that alot before i can even begin to formulate an answer. Cool

why not textbooks?

Ah. I see what you are saying now. I thought you were saying that one LED will emit at multiple wavelengths. But most of them only emit at around one particulare wavelength. Sorry for the confusion. True, true. But that was not my point. We were discussing LED not OLEDs. THat was all i was saying :/ Definitely lifetime is a major disadvantage. However, brightness is still somewhat of a problem. As least at certain wavelengths. Right now (or as of 3 months ago, wich is, admittedly quite a long time) people will still having issues finding the righ wavelength of blue light at the needed brightness. Granted they may have found this by now, but last i heard they hadn't. The reference that i have for this is not a site, unforntunately, but it was a visiting chemist from DOW that stopped by our lab. It was a prettty interesting talk. I know it is not so far away. The guy from DOW even had a working 15" demo monitor, pretty sweet! And they have made "full color" (in quotes because like i said the color is not quite right yet tv displays that were the size of postage stamps! Completely nuts. Anyways, i know the OLED's are not that far away from being marketed as large displays. I was just pointing out the problems that i had heard about while chatting with another chemist. thats all.

What are the ways around them? I would be interested to hear

well, sam_mil90 was correct in his statement. LED's are typically only one color. The way you would get different colors is to put two or more of different color right next to eachother or on top of eachother. Then you would let the differnt colors blend to form form more colors. Also, the links you provided are for OLED's wich are a bit differnt than you standard LED's. Standard LED's would not make for very sharp displays, and they are rather clunky things. The LED part is rather large, usually, and they must be encased in an epoxy. OLED's on the other hand can be quite small, also, they can be encased in things that are quite flexible. Thus, they have the potential to make liightweight flexible monitors. (you could walk into a room, pull a sheet out of your pocket, unfold it and plug it into your computer as your monitor!). Of course OLED's are still a bit far off, at least from what i have heard. They are comming along, but they don't quite have the brightness and colors that the market would require. And besides, right now they don't really last all that long and would burn out kinda quickly.