Radical Edward

what gives you that idea?

he is the rat on the bottom by the way

I think Blike is after the x-prize! so what is this chipset doing then?

what about ectoplasm?

sexist quote editing

obviously not. Art students are worked hard if they have to write one 2000 word essay per semester.

I think the OP is getting too drawn up in the particle nature of light, and imagining it as a little particle that goes whizzing backwards and forwards, and this just is not true. things like photons have the property that they act in "quanta" or discrete chunks on interaction with something else, however for most of the rest of their little existances they exist as waves. Strictly speaking, a photon is a quantum excitement of the electric field.

should be colour by the way

FIRE!!!!

as I said, light is definitely it's own antiparticle. We theorised antimatter as a result of looking at the symmetries in the dirac equation, and when we look at the symmetries for light, then we see that it is it's own antiparticle.

red is not the opposite of green. red just has a longer wavelength. physically, photons are their own antiparticle.

it does vary between organisms too.

of course the water boils in the cake. I set my oven to a temperature far in excess of 100 degrees Celsius. gases like water vapour It doesn't matter. the raisins are only a part of the illustration. The actual cake mix itself is a much better representative of the overall mass distribution of the universe. space does not appear to be expanding in our local region simply because there is a local gravitational attraction that exceeds the overall expansion of the universe. Gravity bound local areas are not the first characteristics of a contracting universe. The contracting lumps of cake mix are not the first characteristics of a contracting cake. It is not wrong at all. You are taking not taking both effects into account: local motion and spatial expansion. okay. Now imagine a really huge balloon, with two cars on it, both driving at 60mph. When they set off from garage A, one of the cars is at the front of the garage, and the other is at the back, and they are holding a pubber band between them. imagine it is a very soft rubber band so that it does not slow the first car, or speed the second. These two cars drive to Garage B, which is some good distance away, while the balloon is being inflated. Now despite the fact that they have both been driving at 60mph, when they get to Garage B, they will be further apart, and the owner of Garage A will be jealous that the guy who owns Garage B has had an extension built since he last visited the place himself. because the light from objects sufficiently distant to be affected by the expansion of the universe would not appear red shifted. You would have to take into account local motion though to be completely accurate. Another illustration of your problem is like this. Say 2 galaxies facing each other edge on are receeding from one another and are close enough to ignore spatial expansion. Now they are also both spinning, but one is spinning clockwise (to some arbitrary "north" that we will choose to be the same for both, and the other is spinning anti-clockwise. (see the picture) Now if the two scientists on the top (A) measure each others' velocities, they will think that they are approaching one another more slowly than the scientists on the bottom (B) because they have not taken their local effects into account. Another example is, say you launch a rocket from the earth at just over 11km/s so that it escapes, and a bit falls off that is only going at 10.9km/s, then the bit that fell off will fall back to the earth. so you cannot use the behaviour of the bit that fell of as indicative of the rocket as a whole.

Is anyone else a bit disturbed by this? I mean, Bush's announcement looking at it now seems not to be a case of "let's get to the moon and mars" but "f*ck science, lets just blow all our space budget on something that might or might not win an election"

difficult to search for on amazon

oh, welcome to the forums good opening question I say.

well being able to breed with other members of homo sapiens sapiens might be a plus point. Of course if you had so much tinkering done, you might end up in a whole new genus, such as homo sapiens nobilis or something. There is no real genetic definition for a human though... there is no real genetic definition for anything. Species classifications are just a rather convenient tool for us to divide things up, and we usually define a species by it's ability to breed with other members of that species and prodice viable offspring (which in themselves can breed). Even this isn't a totally black and white area though, since even horses and donkeys can produce offspring which are sometimes fertile in themselves. as can horses and zebra, lions and tigers, Dolphins and False Whales, and so on.

ooh Giles, long time no see can you recommend any good undergraduate biology textbooks?

Yep, I suspect that a good number of junk uses do stay quit. However do they do so in their old circle of junkie friends? (who may well still be on it). Smoking is a different matter, because as you have pointed out already, it is socially acceptable and really easy, in those moments of stress or whatever just just light up. There is no need for fumbling around behind dirty sheds with a syringe, a candle, a teaspoon and a length of rubber tubing. Alot of the problems of reoccurence, could also be due to the reasons that they stop as well, so there will be obvious psychological factors to it too. Some people smoke and enjoy it, Some hate it but can't stop BEcAUSE THEY will RIP OFF YOUR HEAD!!!!

thanks, I thought I was right it is Bicarbonate of Soda now I recall. so it would be

I have never argued against the addictive aspect of heroin, but if what you are saying there is true, then it makes alot of sense. I should have thought of it really... how many smokers are willing to go out and mug old ladies and so on, purely so they can get another packet of cigarettes. Furthermore, most successful heroin quitters that I have heard of tend to either go into a programme of other heroin quitters, or actively leave the drug-taking social group. I have never heard of a case of an ex addict who still hangs around with all his addict friends. This is in contradiction to smoking, where a smoker tends to quit while remaining in the same social group, which often contains other smokers. Finally there is the severity of withdrawal effects, which I don't even need to mention.

heck I am at work, I can't read that sort of thing here, it is too funny. I like how he is reading criminal law too, I suppose to make sure that his next experiments are a tad less well, illegal I suppose.

I am inclined to agree with you on this. The problem I find with the majority of pro-legalisation arguments is that they seem completely oblivious to a number of real world factors. For any given country to just wholescale legalise the use of all intoxicating and mind altering substances, this may well lead to that country becoming a destination point for people wishing to take them (Amsterdam++) and all associated issues that come with it. Undoubtedly it would result in the increased load on the mediacl system of that country, since with pretty much all of these substances, even nicotine and alcohol, there are medical side effects. These would no doubt have to be paid for by the taxpayer of that country. It would also end up being legal to produce in that country too (I see no logical reason why it would not be, but feel free to say if this is just a slippery slope), so it would just become the hub of global criminality, since the exporters know full well that they can produce and so on with impunity (you could make it illegal to export stuff if you like, but I see that making no difference at all). This would then have firther reprocussions on trade and relations with other countries and so on.

be a bit careful when thinking that "all the galaxies are moving away from one another" because you are not taking their relative motion into account. The distances for red shift calculations are indeed significant, and take into account local aggregations caused by the gravitational pull between those bodies overcoming the overall universal expansion. actually it kind of does. The expansion of the cake is the result of the water boiling in the mixture, and possibly CO2 or whatever emerging from the baking soda (I think it is CO2, someone correct me if I am wrong) and this we can equivocate to the expansion of space. But why doesn't all that CO2 and water just shoot off out into the oven? well it is restricted by an attractive force i.e. the molecules and fibers within the cake mix. Locally the cake mix may overcome the expansion of this space, and then you get the material surrounding bubbles within the cake (these bubbles, especially in something like really light bread, look a little bit like the overall structure of the universe actually) so we get locally high densities of cake mix in a cake with an overall low density. The further away from each other the bits of cake mix are, the less attraction they have to one another, which is why the cake on the whole expands, while little bits of the cake actually stay dense. sort of, but the thing is this. The light that was emitted from a star wasn't actually red shifted the moment it left that star. It was red shifted because in all of it's intermediate travel, it was slowly stretched out over billions of years as the space it was in slowly got bigger. well the space occupied by a photon would slowly start to shrink, and hence the photon would be blue shifted. as above, it was not red shifted when it left that star. It has become red shifted in it's intermediate journey. If a photon was emitted from me to you, then I suppose you might see that it was blue shifted, but it would be quite hard, because the space will not have expanded or contracted much in the meantime. this is false. the behaviour of the local cluster is not indicative of the behaviour of the universe as a whole. The Local cluster may indeed contract, but this does not mean that the universe as a whole will contract. Just like in the cake, a local bit of the cake might collapse when the attractive pull of the cake mix overcomes the expansion of the gas, but this does not mean the cake will collapse. Sadly the rest of your essay is built on these same false assumptions, so there is no need for me to dismantle your argument anymore, since I would in effect just be repeating myself. Your fundamental flaw has been to assume that every single galaxy is moving away from every single other galaxy, without taking local effects into account.

that is in itself a problem. most people are so stupid that they need protecting from themselves.