Radical Edward

does he explode when he touches midgets? I should have come over to see you that time, but I got confused

I prefer dense. 1g of uranium is not very heavy at all.

nope. you have assumed that one of the bodies is at rest, and there is no way you can do that. all you have done is put yourself in the intertial frame of one of the two bodies. imagine yourself in the inertial frame of the other one, and your results will change.

wolfson: the GRE is for graduates, hence he is trying to get into grad school, and not university. It is mainly a test to get into US rad schools, though some other countries like canada might use them too, I am not sure. Gampin: The difficulty of the GRE depends on how clever you are. There are a number of books available out there, have a look at Amazon, many are fairly inexpensive, retailing at about 20 quid. beware that if you are going to the US, as I suspect you are, then some universities will, rather bizarrely, expect you to do an English test.

stable relative to say, U235.

lies. were't you one of the hobbit stand ins in the recent LOTR movie where they could't be bothered to scale the actors down?

There are stable forms of Uranium, such as U238. Stability of an isotope can be determined by looking at the semi empirical mass formula. this is a nifty little formula which allows you to calculate the binding energy of an atom and see if it is stable or not. if you include gravity as a perturbation, you end up finding that the lowest mass for a proton free atom to be stable is about the size of a neutron star. neat eh?

it would probably be homo sapiens technologicus or something (since there would still be homo sapiens around). nested hierarchies and all that. actually there is already at least one human group on the verge of speciation (the !kung tribe)

give me a rail gun and I will give you the universe. most energy weapons suck because they don't behave. light suffers from all sorts of things like diffraction and so on, making it useless over long distances, not to mention that lasers are pretty delicate. other weapons such as anti matter and plasma things suck because they require too much storage effort. the idea of star trek type conversations such as "oh no, the anti matter containment has just failed" are complete fiction, since you would never get as far as the o. As MrL said, you need stuff that is safe and relatively easy to store. kinetics and nukes are the way to go.

replicators form through chemical processes. life is just the result of the natural selection of the best replicators. there does not nescessarily need to be any more explanation than this.

yeap, and this is a good selfish gene argument. The real purpose of the organism is to serve as a vehicle for the propagation of the replicators which make the vehicle (genes). In the case of ebola, it does not care aout preserving it's host so long as it can propagate it's genes. Ultimately this propagation may be a self destructive one (i.e. it kills all available hosts and then dies itself) but this is just an unfortunate side efect and does not diminish it's initial effort. Humans are a bit of a funny oddity in this, since we aim to preserve our individual existances long after our genetic use has waned. I would take this to a memetic argument, since humans can continue to propagate their memes long after genes cannot be propagated (caused by the meme that values life being propagated by those who are older). This is only a really rough sketch though, people are bound to argue.

I agree with YT2095. anything else is just philosophical junk or baby eating propaganda (it is propaganda btw, unless anyone making such claims wishes to present evidence)

as regards vacuums, space is actually pretty crap.

space isn't.

excellent observation.

If you want to read about the universe, read The Elegant Universe. it has knobs on. btw MrL is teh authoriteh!

escape velocity is a bit of a useless term really. really what you should try to think of is escape energy; the kinetic energy of the escaping object has to be greater than the potential energy of the object it is escaping at infinity.

not only that, but he has failed to establish how people over 50 are actually a drain on the economy and how they are unnescessary. same goes for jobless people.

I think that peewee is about as economically literate as a fart.

we could do with a bit more info as to what it is you are constructing. if it is something like a plane, then you have to be very careful that you don't screw up barometric readings by virtue of the fact that the plane is moving.

the thing that would stop them is the design problems. remember that evolution progresses up a firness peak. for something like a horshow crab to develop fins, it would need to go down the peak and back up a different one, and that won't happen evolutionarily, because any crabs "evolving" down the peak will be outcompeted and die.

well an awful lot of what we do today is copied stuff, it would be difficult to say how innovative a modern brain would be in that sort of situation.

well in terms of set theory, there are the same number of odd numbers as there are naturals, since you can create a 1:1 correlation. however you can't do this with primes so far as I am aware has my avatar been corrupted for everyone else too?

my avatar is teh pretteh!

I have been avidly learning set theory for the past day and a half, and I was wondering if anyone knows if the set of prime numbers is smaller than the set of natural numbers. I would hypothesise that it is, and I have been trying to think of methods to prove it but I am perplexed... is there a method for this? thanks