Sayonara

Explain it to him like this: When you fire the gun you give the bullet a tremendous amount of energy, and it leaves the muzzle at high speed. In order to come back down again, it's going to have to slow down. And slow down it does - due to gravity's attraction for the mass of the bullet. In fact it stops the bullet completely. The bullet has now lost all of the energy the gun gave it (disregarding any heat energy that is still held in it). Now it begins its downward journey. The only reason this happens is because the mass of the bullet is subject to the gravitational pull of the planet, which causes an acceleration of 9.81ms-2. The only other factor on the way down is the resistance of the air, which retards the acceleration due to gravity until the bullet reaches terminal velocity. If he disagrees with this, invite him to test it with a live gun. He might want to consider though that it's not exactly news to the rest of the world.

I thought the point of athletics was to see who is the most athletic person, not whose comptetitive ethics or pocket book can be stretched the furthest.

There's no reason why it would return at the same velocity. The factors involved are different on the return journey.

Appears in my PM summary bit, but when I click the link I get one of those damnable "no permission to access this page" messages.

^ See? Judicious!

Someone with a lot of reputation is likely to be more judicious with what they mete out.

How many times do I have to tell you? Roid rage is FUNNY.

Yes, probably. Brewing tea is basically aggravated diffusion, whereas with coffee the whole lot gets disolved in your water.

Any organism that causes pathology, be it a virus, bacterium, fungus, parasite or whatever.

No, the myth is that tea contains more. Coffee (depending on blend and brew-type obviously) contains between 2 and 5 times more caffein than tea. This is an interesting read if you drink a lot of soft drinks: http://wilstar.com/caffeine.htm The info on this page might help explain why this myth came about: http://www.chinamist.com/knowledge/health/caffeine/content.htm

I notice (and am not surprised at all) that Enterprise has 0 votes so far.

Holding the Earth to ransom? Seriously, shooting a 20x20 ft pipe of water into the mantle would be like attacking a multi-storey building with a pin.

Try to AVOID incubating above about 33c. When you culture random bacteria at body temperature there's a good chance you'll have great lumps of pathogenic organisms in with your results.

It's a small change to the query that grabs the rep info for the profile pages. It's certainly doable, but obviously up to Blike.

I don't see why an ant would have a system for detecting and responding to changes in microwave radiation.

Why would it? I dind't say anything about members seeing it. It'll make it easier for mods to track feuds etc.

It would be nice if mods could more easily see who gave what.

There are a few people abusing the system, like a certain person who gave negative rep to another member for "didn't read the article" (you know who you are). Apart from the fact that the level of article-reading did not impact on this reputation thief, as he did not have any posts in the thread; had he read down it would have been clear the subject did in fact read the article. Snide pot shots aren't going to get you anywhere in a system of trust. By the way everyone, people with negative reputation can't actually remove points from you.

Pffft. Don't be a poor loser faf.

I'm saying there's compelling evidence that life as we know it exists off Earth, or at least can exist off Earth. As possible as we can make it sound, there's no evidence of life that is not as we know it, and we can hardly strive to understand something we have not experienced in any way. That's why the life under discussion is usually that which is familiar, is all I am saying.

But without any evidence they exist (IE, some kind of observation) it's fairly pointless to speculate. If we can't perceive them we basically don't care that they're there, even if we know. The reason exobiologists focus on known, less "exotic" life is because we have a fair idea how to find it, and there's precious little evidence that carbon-based cellular life is less or more prevalent in the universe than any other form.

OK... then I agree with Glider. Take that everyone!

For those confused by the non sequitur start to the thread, this discussion began here: http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3503

The speciation discussion is now here: http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3527