Radical Edward

aah that reminds me of the infamous explosion scene at the beginning of Swordfish . for those who don't know, basicallt the terrorists strap blocks of explosive (C4 I think) to a person, and also strap several cartons of 2cm ball bearings to them, armed to a location sensor that detonates it if they leave a certain radius. essentially once of the people explodes, throwing cars in the air, and turning alomst everything in the street into a sieve. while it looks nice, it's complete rubbish, since the cars would not have been thrown into the air, and also, at the distances seen in the film, and assuming a hemispherical spread of ball bearings, hardly anything at all should have been hit, at the very least, not with the severity that it was. I'm not entirel sure about the assumption of hemispherical projection on account of the way the ball bearings were strapped to the people, but most of the debunking seems pretty sound. A great site for this sort of thing is ww.nitpickers.com

I think the mathematical element comes down to the fact that the stuff that the organisms are made out of is inherently geometrical. for example the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower couldn't follow any other geometry, or else it would fall apart. The same goes for eggs, and, I suspect, shells.

looks like the ESA have blown up another rocket http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2570053.stm this is quite expensive. does anyone think it's about time the powers got to gether to come up with a slightly less explosive way of getting things into space?

yeah it only has one side effect: death

evolution doesn't have an aim in mind, so given any realistic situation, something like a crab wouldn't have any drive to push it out of it's niche and into one that involved it having fins. especially since there are already creatures with well evolved fins out there that would make out promordial fisabs extinct.

aah, the sorts of beams these people were talking about were realy thin ones. If you have quite a wide beam to start with it's not so much of a problem, though the lasers almost invariably end up being pulsed then. aman: you could probably direct it using a mirror, you'd still run into the problem of aperture size from the source itself though. all the mirror does is fold the beam up.

I'm talking about the diffraction limit really, as being the most significant factor, since it would expand a beam so much that you would have to dump incredible amounts of power into it to make it effective over even a few hundreds of kilometres.. the people who were suggesting this thing were considering orbital weaponry, and shooting things from light seconds(!) away.

it makes me think of the endless times I've had to explain to people why laser weaponry won't work over long distances....

stealing gold would be a waste of time. you could always manufacture diamonds... but then, why bother, money itself would be entirely worthless since you could have almost literally anything you wanted.

never. women must be kept in their place, or they get silly ideas like emanipation and equal rights.

you know he could be implying that you're always right

there aren't any cameras with that resolution yet around the moon. Personally I think it is all faked, A mate of mine met someone down at the pub who knew a tabloid reporter who said he'd seen the film set that they did it on down in the old London Docklands.

it depends. if you boil it in a vacuum, then it contains nothing but water.... what else would there be in it. If you boil it in air, then naturally the steam would be a mixture of water and whatever medium you boil it in, but ultimately the boiling component of whatever you boil will only consist of water, and perhaps molecules carried from the water. note how a cup of coffee smells of just that, because it contains molecules of coffee stuff carried up in the water vapour.

similar to a proof that I heard from my physics teacher at school when I told him about the momentum of photons, althugh in his case he thought that light doesn't have mass. if photons have momentum, then p=mv, and so they must have mass, which they don't. so photons can't have momentum. silly man. I knew more about physics than he did when I was doing my A-Levels.

no? what is happening to NASA's budget then?

you will always have to have subordinates to whom you are wiling to delegate power, but if you are willing to do that, of course one person can do these things. Hitler did it, the Roman Emperors did it, Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussain are still doing it, and so on. I believe that your conclusion is somewhat flawed however, since the problem is usually that the only people to rise to that sort of power are megalomaniacal anyway, and the greed problem is something inherent in them, as opposed to inherent in gaining the position. There have been numerous benevolant dictators, who, while nothing amazing, would do very well given the right ircumstances, which personally is why I think the US government is opressing cuba in the way that it is. (in other words, I think castro's regieme would be rather successful without all the embargoes)

I get that too. I had a great experience when I signed up to a doctor and had to have a regular health check. she pointed at the chart and said to me that I was underweight, and should eat more. so I told her what I normally ate... and suddently she puleed thes "I'm Jealous" face, which women nearly always do, and just said 'well some people are naturally thin' it was ace.

well it depends on the physics of it. If it is too expensive and difficult to get to the stars, then I cn't se us doing it. Capitalism will probably kill any dreams that people have.

but fundamentally all life follows that particular path - the prolific dissemination of it's genetic line. infect a planet with bacteria and it will become infested with them (assuing they can survive) and the same would go for absolutely any animal, plant and so on. the only difference is, like virii, we have no natural predator, and hence can multiply with impunity.

how about relativity?

I believe his followers have a vivid imagination.

even truly empty space (neutrinos et al) isn't empty at all on account of quantum fluctuation wossnames.

that's just the quantifying of their magnitudes realy. I am talking more about their fundamental nature.. how the EM field actually ends upinteracting with the gravitational field.

haha, I'm not that mad. I'm not saying they are the same force, but there must be a link somwhere that is more concrete than anything we have now - probably in the form of a GUT of some sort. To a degree I agree with Dirac that the Final Theory must be mathematically elegant, and far less scrappy than Quantum Mechanics and all the particle Physics that comes with the package.

however there must be some link between electromagnetism and gravity since there is a link between em radiation and mass.