John Cuthber

Where on earth did you get it from?

Glided's "horrible way of putting it" got DeBroglie a Nobel prize in 1927.

I'm not sure; has proton decay been observed yet?

If you completely "free-marketize" it who treats the very poor? Or do you just let them die? Having their fees paid by the government isn't a free market (as has been pointed out). Even if, for example, the church picked up the bill for the people in extreme poverty this would distort the market. So it seems either you have an inefficient half and half compromise, people dying on the street or totally socialized healthcare. Interesting.

Has anyone mentioned the fact that some might think it's just plain unciviliseed to let poor people die in the street? It's also unhygienic and dead people can't work very hard so they are a loss to the ecconomy.

Unless he picks Osama Bin Laden or something I'm still not interested. My guess is that he might pick a politician with views similar to his own. So what?

Actually I said It's try to remember. Incidentally, you said it was just a matter or pushing a button. That's not true, it's a matter of copying it then deleting the irrelevant bits. Also you may not that the post you replied to quotes from 2 sources. Anyway. The timer switches use current drawn through the lamp to run. A CFL doesn't conduct properly then it suddenly conducts briefly. Neon oscilators are an interesting toy but I don't want one in my ceiling.

"Which works fine if you already have the heat on all day, every day." To the same degree that you have the lights on all day every day. "Where are you buying your CFLs? In a time warp back to the 60s? All of mine turn on within 1 second." They may fire up in a second or so, but they take a lot longer to warm up to full power. does it take you up to 5 min to get out of the car? http://genet.gelighting.com/LightProducts/Dispatcher?REQUEST=COMMERCIALSPECPAGE&PRODUCTCODE=19609

Here's a quote from Paranoia. "Here's the crux: The problem with healthcare is cost. And competition has solved that problem time and time again - so many times that I hardly see the logic in ignoring its possibility. That's cold, hard pragmatism." The data above show that the US systme- based on competition and a free market- is the most expensive. In this case competition has failed to solve the cost problem. Since healthcare is an infinite sink (no matter what you spend people will still not be satisfied because their loved ones will still die) the question is how much healthcare can you get for a given cost and it seems that everyone in the world does better than the US on this score.

One thought that strikes me is that the CFLs take so long to warm up properly that you would have parked the car and gone inside before the garage lights came on. Also, if I can't buy incandescent lamps I will have to replace the timer switches I use on some of my lights (they can't cope with CFL)- who pays for that?

Was the battery flat or charged? There's much more free acid in a charged one.

Since sulphuric acid can be identified in a number of ways, any unidentifiable liquid isn't sulphuric acid. I guess you are talking about an unidentified liquid. Where did it come from? If it was in a working car battery it's probably safe to say its sulphuric acid. If it came in a bottle labeled "cola" and it's brown and fizzy then it's probably not sulphuric acid. Boiling off any water present will give reasoanbly concentrated sulphuric acid which (after cooling) will blacken sugar.

Is there a difference between McCain calling it an overhead projector for political reasons and Agentchange calling it a movie projector?

A few facts and the non-fact that Bi isn't radioactive.

Not if you stand to lose a lot of money. Perhaps you would like to explain the funny side of this. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/charities-see-163120m-frozen-in-iceland-bank-collapse-957874.html

Stop worrying, you are perfectly safe. The hydrogen would have dissipated in seconds, it's very light and doesn't hang about. Also, do you think your friend was the first one to do this?

It would be easier (and a lot cheaper) to poison yourself with whiskey than with heavy water. Other than for hydrogen's isotopes the differences in chemistry are generally too small to notice. The only really noticable differences are in the nuclear properties; thing's like neutron capture cross sections.

It worked fine. I think that if the can had been perfectly clean there might have been a problem with the molten Bi dissolving the Fe, but I burned the paint off the tin with a blowtorch so the Bi was in contact with iron oxide which is relatively inert. Also I was casting 2 lumps of bismuth for a magnetic levitation experiment- I wasn't bothered about great purity.

My mother gets by (and has done for three quarters of a century) without calculus or algebra (in the sense where you rearrange an equation using symbols to represent values). She was an English teacher and the only time it gave her any problem was when converting test scores into percentages. She solved that by getting me or my brother to do it.

OK, bear with me on this for a sentence or two. At one level Traveler is right. There is no way that we could drop a feather and a hammer and time their fall accurately enough to distinguish between his "theory" and the conventional one. You would need to measure the time of flight to about twenty something significant figures and the best determinations of time "only" give about 15 significant figures. All that tells us is that droping rocks is a dumb way to test the "theory". I could say that I have a theory that says the boiling points of alcohol and water (at 1 atmosphere pressure) are the same. I could then say I have tried to find their boiling points by an ab initio molecular orbital calculation based on things like the electron charge and plancks constamt etc. Unfortunately it's an exceptionally difficult calculation and I can only get the answer to an accuracy of the nearest factor of 2 (in thermodynamic temperature) Accordingly I say that there is no evidence that my "theory" is wrong- nobody else can do the calculation sufficiently accurately to show that the boiling points are different. Since it really is a difficult problem, it's possible that I'm right- nobody can do the calculation. In the same way, nobody has a stopwatch that could test Traveler;'s "theory" But who cares? Nobody in their right mind would try to compare two boiling points this way- they would just measure them with a thermometer. Similarly, nobody would try to see if Traveler's theory is correct by comparing the tiny differences he talked about. They would look at something that's a better test- a couple were mentioned- the torsion balance would work but it's a difficult experiment to do to that sensitivity. An easier one is to look at things that are big (so the force is measureable) and similar in mass to one another (so the effect is clearly distinct from the established theory.) An example of this is the solar system. Jupiter's mass is roughly comparable with that of the sun (it isn't very close, but it's a lot closer than the mass of a feather and the mass of the earth). So we can look at the orbit of Jupiter and see how it orbits. Then we can look at the moons of Jupiter. They orbit the sun with the same period as Jupiter does (gosh). But we know that the moons are less massive than jupiter (because they would pull it about more if they weren't). So we know that relatively light thing (the moons of Jupiter) and really quite heavy things (like Jupiter) orbit in the same way. The only way you can do that is with conventional gravity. If Traveler's "theory" were right then the orbits of the planets would all be screwed up. They are not; so the "theory" is wrong. Face it Traveler; if your theory doesn't agree with reallity it's not reallity that needs changing.

I used an old tin can last time I did it (not expensive).

"Immeasurably", "trivially" or even "hypothetically" would have done too.

Someone did. DH pointed out that, if you were right, the orbits of the planets and satellites would be different (a lot different in the case of Jupiter's orbit of the sun). Since that's observably nonsense they then discounted the idea. You can stop worying about it now.

There are two ways to answer the original question, one of them looks like cheating to me. If the balloon happens to be under the mug with the neck sticking out them blowing up the balloon will raise the mug. But I think the other way where you put the deflated baloon in the mug then inflate it is a better solution since it doesn't depend on the balloon being in the "right" place to start with. Of course, if you just hold the balloon above the mug its gravitational attraction will raise the mug slightly.

Weird question. About the only thing you can do with a mug is put things in it. About the only thing you can do with a balloon is blow it up. Was that any help?