Cap'n Refsmmat

Nope. There's no mechanism to transfer momentum between the Earth and the Moon this way. How do you propose it works? A giant steel girder? No, here's what happens (and this was explained in the NASA link I gave earlier): Earthquakes shift mass around on the earth. A change in mass distribution causes the Earth's moment of inertia to change. Since angular momentum is the moment of inertia times the angular velocity ([math]I\mathbf{\omega}[/math]), the angular velocity of the Earth must change to compensate. So the Earth rotates faster or slower, changing the length of the day. This does not require the Moon. The chart you show in post #32 shows that the annual variation in day length is on the order of milliseconds. It is not a graph of day length change for each earthquake -- it is a continuous plot of variations in day length. Those variations are at no point greater than perhaps a third of a millisecond. NASA has also published the day length change per century, and of course they are not prone to error under these circumstances. http://eclipse.gsfc....p/rotation.html

It's also worth noting that the day length listed in that chart is in milliseconds. There is nothing to support gentleman-farmer's claim of several-second shifts. And nothing to suggest this has any relation to the moon.

I think this is what you're looking for: http://en.wikipedia....ars_and_rockets

The "Mozilla" reference is a leftover from the old days. Some sites use user-agents to tell what features browsers support, and back when Netscape (internally called Mozilla) was dominant, Internet Explorer called itself "Mozilla" in user-agent strings so sites would think it supports fancy features, instead of giving IE a degraded version of the site. Something like that. There indeed should be no back-and-forth communication when you're highlighting and scrolling and so on. We don't get to keep records of your eFidgeting so we can send targeted marketing data to Ritalin manufacturers. It's possible that the way the HTML is structured makes it difficult for some browsers to scroll it. I'll have to experiment on my Windows machine. I just realized that I had put the Google Analytics code in completely the wrong place. It's fixed now. Perhaps that has been causing some of the speed problems. Anyone notice a change?

Specifically, the online book JohnB references is available in printed form, from 1952: http://catalog.lib.utexas.edu/search~S29/?searchtype=X&searcharg=mercer+pyramid+texts&searchscope=29&sortdropdown=-&SORT=DZ&extended=0&SUBMIT=Search&searchlimits=&searchorigarg=Xpyramid+texts%26SORT%3DD I suppose if I were curious I could wander down to PCL the next time I'm at school and have a look, but it's definitely not my area of expertise.

JohnB's online reference is merely the text of a published book, anyway. One that has fallen out of copyright.

Uh. http://www.sacred-texts.com/egy/pyt/pyt03.htm Incidentally, the N. you are wondering about is also explained if you take the time to read:

What web browser are you using? (If it's Internet Explorer, what version?) If you're not sure about the specific version details, just visit What's My User Agent? and copy and paste the user agent string here. In terms of webserver performance, we're nearly as fast as we can get. Half of our response time is simply the time it takes to get to the datacenter in the UK and back. I suspect some of the slowness is down to the style we're using and how it renders in webbrowsers.

What kind of research paper? It could describe the results of a scientific experiment, it could be about the history of chiropractic medicine, it could be about a survey of doctors, and so on and so on. It's hard to give suggestions when we have no idea what you're critiquing.

Unfortunately, no. However, there is an option for View New Content that you may like: http://www.scienceforums.net/index.php?app=core&module=usercp Under "View New Content Method" you can choose to have it work by your last visit time or by tracking which threads you have and have not read. The latter option will have it show old threads if you haven't read them, even if they haven't been updated since your last visit. It should be very handy for people who don't read everything in New Content every time they visit SFN.

Postcount-based elitism? Really? I haven't seen any of that since the days I regularly made 25 posts per day. This is now one of the best threads we've ever had in Speculations, since it proposes a clear hypothesis, makes testable predictions, proposes a method for testing those predictions, and was rather civil until very recently. Anyway, carry on.

Really? Why wasn't I informed of this?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but SFN runs on the principle of rule by a minority. Regardless, there is now a SFN Blue style available in the style switcher. It looks very boring.

Really? I was never a fan of our old front page. The news item (the image on the front page) was never up to date, and just displaying a list of threads wasn't particularly engaging. However, the current SFN front page can definitely be improved upon. I'm going to be doing some programming to get better features on the front page so you can dive right in to interesting discussions. Also, we tried blue for the tab bar during the testing phase. It ended up not working at all -- there was too much blue all around. I'm fairly confident the theme works better with orange.

One way to find out. You can try out a lab for a semester and see what it's like. There's no real commitment, particularly in the Freshman Research Initiative.

Perhaps you could label the weak acid as an acid, rather than as a non-electrolyte? That might make more sense. [ce]C5H10[/ce] is a hydrocarbon - pentene. I'm not sure what they're looking for here, but hydrocarbons are combustible, so that's one idea. Acids and bases change the litmus paper, yes. Other things, like salts, don't. That should be all you need.

Isn't the unspent stimulus money allocated for a particular purpose already, even if not actually spent?

5/ Why has JohnB's last post been completely ignored?

Apparently the French law also imposes fines and prison sentences on men who force their wives to wear burqas in public. I'm happier with that, although I'm not sure I get the point: if the wife doesn't wear her burqa, what will happen? If the husband responds with abuse, that's already illegal. I suppose he and his family could shun her, but a prison sentence won't fix that. Is there another option I'm forgetting?

Oh, one other thing -- if you're often in RLM, check out the posters for the Pizza Talks. They're lectures by professors who're seeking undergraduates for research, and they have free pizza for everyone who attends. Usually they give the schedule for the next few lectures, so you can look for talks you're interested in. Hmm. I need to start taking my own advice.

So, let me get this clear: A schizophrenic episode which results in a mother drowning her children in a bathtub because "the voices told me" is actually a "religious experience." Okay then. What's your view on cognitive behavior therapy -- i.e. the experimentally validated non-drug part of psychiatry? Also, Poe's Law.

First off, welcome to UT, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I have. I'm a sophomore natural sciences major (physics), so I can tell you a bit about how things work. If I recall correctly, you aren't actually required to declare a major until the end of your sophomore year. In natural sciences, you'll have quite a few required courses to get out of the way -- calculus, government, US history, your foreign language, your fine arts hours, and the basics of biology and chemistry and so on -- so you'll have plenty of time to decide before it's too late. If you're really curious about research and whether you'd enjoy doing it, take a look at the Freshman Research Initiative and see if there's a research stream that interests you. If you find nothing on FRI, you might consider using Eureka to find a lab doing research in your field, and ask if you can join for a semester or just have a tour. (From what I'm told, many professors will gladly let you have a look around while they explain their work, if you ask in advance and schedule a time.) If you do start doing research, remember you can leave whenever you want. You're just doing it to experience the field and learn what research is like. Finally, let me remind you of a few things they told us in freshman orientation. Among the over 1,000 freshman who enter seeking to go to medical school after college, only half do so -- the rest change majors and choose to do something else. In general, the average student will change majors at least once or twice. (I know a physics major who's on his fifth major.) You won't be locked in to your degree after the first semester or two. If you're uncertain about the future, talk to the natural sciences advisors or find your professors during office hours. Generally, if you ask a professor about their job, their field of science, and what their research is like, they'll gladly tell you far more than you want to know. (Make an appointment if necessary, of course.) And, of course, enjoy Austin!

How can you possibly consider the orbital Sagnac's center as the sun when it is in fact the center of the galaxy? The sun orbits around the center of the galaxy, you know. (There's a point to be learned from this example.)

The day length change caused by earthquakes has been precisely calculated, and it is on the order of a few microseconds. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/03/02/chile-quake-shifted-earths-axis-shortened-the-length-of-a-day/ If you want to claim that a figure of several seconds is more accurate, you'll have to substantiate that claim with calculations. In any case, the recession of the moon is well-understood, and is the result of tides, not of earthquakes. You can see the physics and mathematics of this here: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/moonrec.html And the change in length of day has been measured and calculated quite accurately. The change in day length is 2.3 milliseconds per century, plus or minus a little bit. Nothing more. See NASA's site: http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEhelp/rotation.html

So, let me get this clear: This problem only occurs when you are logged in. SFN itself loads quickly. It's some sort of google ads or google something script that's taking minutes to transfer. Removing Google Adsense doesn't solve the problem. Removing Quantcast doesn't solve the problem. This is immensely puzzling. The best guess I have is that some JavaScript downloaded by IPB when you are logged in takes too long to run, but that doesn't coincide with your google observations. Also, you shouldn't have to download any of the JavaScript more than once a week, since your browser can cache it. I'm going to do more investigating and see what I can discover.