JaKiri

I can program, just not in perl.

What's the question?

Not a valid comparison, if the car industries offerered more economic cars, and the infrastructure was in place to run them, people more likely would. In addition, your explanation of 'Cold War politics' and 'underfunding' is also invalid, because ALL THE OTHER GROUPS use rockets as well.

Then you're being stupid by coincidence

Look at it this way. If there was a substantially cheaper way, that maintains standards, to put stuff in orbit, NASA would probably have been using it. They don't use rockets just because they're pretty.

It takes more fuel for a launching mechanism to a. Travel to that height. b. Travel ALONG a long way. The distance is much greater, and the engines that conventional planes have are much less efficient than the ones used in rocketry.

You must not have read the thread on Scienceforums.net when RadicalEdward explained (or at least posted the link to the explanation) of this phenomenon and how it doesn't break the c speed limit.

He was talking about blowing them at the sails

It won't work if it's blowing into the sails. Blowing out the back, yes, but not into the sails.

Because it costs more.

No it wouldn't, stop being stupid either intentionally or by coincidence.

I shortly will have the option of taking a quite highly paying job in the North East, and this involves knowing one or the other of Perl and Javascript. Unfortunately, I know neither. Here is where YOU! come in. Resources for the above if you would be so kind folks, and wrt Sayonara, any book type suggestions. Also in regard to sayonara, once I learn every programming language under the sun, would you like some help with AW, or is it just a leeds posse exclusive thing?

It's the same as trying to lift yourself off the floor by picking your feet up. 'Conservation of momentum'

Get rid of it and I'll KILL YOU ALL. Maybe just Sayonara. He's nearer.

It is in England, and WE INVENTED THIS KIND OF THING DAMMIT SO LISTEN TO US AND NOT BE, well, AMERICANS

Liquids are funny like that, they tend to slosh around. Just get two empty ones and put a mass inside one of them.

Well, if you learn the real stuff, the fake stuff that they teach is much easier; it'll also hold you in good stead for university. Its always good to have interests

Everything in schools up unto the age of about 18 is entirely wrong (at least in the sciences). Just learn what they tell you to pass the exams

I'm 19

Newtonian gravity is expressed in the equation F = GMm/d^2 Where F is the force due to gravity, G is a constant to get the units right that we can ignore, M is one mass, m is the other and d is the distance between the object's centers of mass. F = ma This is newton's second law of motion. It states that acceleration is equal to the force divided by the mass; this leads to the common expression of mass as 'resistance to acceleration', because the more mass something has, the harder it is to move it (this is pretty obvious, try and lifting a house; but it's nice when every day things can be explained) ma = F = GMm/d^2 a = GM/d^2 All that we did was cancel the m's (note, this only works if M is much bigger than m). As you can see, there's no term in there relating in any way to the man or the spaceship's size, so they must bother undergo the same acceleration, and thus appear to not move relative to eachother. As to the spinning... the equation we need is F = mv^2/r, where r is the radius, m is the mass of the object you're spinning and v is the straight line speed it's going at (this is the same speed as a car would go if its wheels were spinning at that rate). The equation describes the amount of force required to keep an object spinning in a circle, given its mass, the radius of the circle and how fast it's going. (The force is pushing into the centre of the circle) Lets now consider what happens when you're standing on a rotating cylinder. Obviously, you're rotating in a circle about the centre, so there must be a force acting on you. This force comes from the floor pressing up at you, and if you spin the cylinder just right, it feels like the floor is pushing you up as much as if gravity was pulling you down. (Remember Newton's famous 'for each action, there is an equal and opposite reaction'? This force (you feel it, say, on your feet when your standing up; it's the floor pushing up at you) is called the reaction force). This is why most people talking about space ships with artificial gravity are talking about making it spiiiiiiiin. Either that or some scifi rubbish

Gravity is not caused by the spin of the earth. Gravity is caused by the interaction of two masses. On the other hand, you can simulate gravity by standing on the inside of a rotating cylinder, like the Wall of Death they have at fairgrounds. What happens then is that your body is moving, and wants to keep moving in a straight line, but the wall forces you to move in a curved path, so you're pressed to the wall as it changes your direction (like in a car, when you turn sharply). The reason that the spaceman and the ship stay close to eachother is that gravity is an acceleration; you accelerate the same no matter what your mass is. Try rolling a full can and an empty can down a slope; they should take the same amount of time to reach the bottom. The stuff about a distortion in 4 dimensional space is Einstein's General Relativity theory. It replaced Newton's theory of gravity after Newton's theories was found to have some things that didn't work (the orbit of mercury sholdn't be like it is if Newton was right), but einstein found a way to fix that. It's immensely complicated*, and for all intents and purposes up until university, you can work with Newtonian gravity. *To quote Lord Rutherford (I think) when he was asked whether it was true if there were only 3 people in the world who understood General Relativity, and then asked what he was thinking about when he didn't reply, 'I was trying to think who the other person is'. (or something along those lines) My next post will be mathematical in basis, it's just explaining what I've said above.

mmm tidals

Anyone thinking newton was right nowadays would be a quack, or at the least badly misinformed.

We don't refer to Hippocrates for the treatment of diseases, more to the philosophical side of things. Noone calls Newton a quack just because he turned out to be wrong.

Pretty much.