Cap'n Refsmmat

Oh, I see, you're trying to avoid long-term awkwardness. But that can swing both ways. If you do well with someone in your major, you'll be able to go to classes together, help each other on homework, trade stories about professors, and so on. But anyway, back to the topic at hand. You say she sits way across the lecture hall, and looks at you. How are you certain she's looking directly at you? At long distance it can be hard to tell. Perhaps she has a friend who sits near you that she looks at. Perhaps the clock is right behind you. Do you have any other indication of interest, or is it just looks? Chatting her up and getting to know her is never a bad choice, though. Even if she's just looking at the clock, you may find she's fun to be with. Or you may find that she's slightly crazy. Either way, you'll have useful knowledge for your future moves.

What, exactly, is inconsistent, when gravity is cited as a solution? You haven't explained, but rather gone into detail about other problems with inflationary cosmology.

I think you can get that type of person in any major. There's no personality problem that's exclusive to a particular degree.

Why should new facilities be built? It's not like you're introducing an entirely new gender to the bases -- gays have always been there, whether it makes you feel awkward in the shower or not. It's just that now you know who they are. If that makes people too uncomfortable to use the same restroom facilities, I'd suggest that's their problem, not the military's. You've already admitted you know a few gay people in the military. Clearly the facilities function fine at the moment with gay people in them. Repealing DADT will just remove their threat of discharge.

Sounds good. One note: capital M usually denotes molarity. To prevent confusion, I'd use "mol" for "8.2 mol" or whatever.

doubleclick.net serves some of our Google ads. I don't know about the rest. Google Analytics is designed to load only after the rest of the page has loaded; it waits for your browser to finish loading the page, and then does its work. The only script that can be causing trouble is Google Adsense (googleads.doubleclick.net would correspond with your observations) and that is how we pay the bills. For the moment, I've put you and moontanman in a usergroup that shouldn't see any ads. Let me know if it works.

Okay: [ce]2H2O + 2Na -> 2NaOH + H2[/ce] Easy way to do this: 9g of [ce]H2O[/ce] is half a mole, because you discovered it's 18g/mol, yes? So we have 0.5 moles. According to our chemical equation above, 2 moles of NaOH are produced for every 2 moles of [ce]H2O[/ce] -- that's a 1 to 1 ratio. So, put in 0.5mol water and you get 0.5mol NaOH. How to do this in harder problems: There's a method called dimensional analysis that works very well. [math]\frac{0.5 \mbox{mol}}{ } \times \frac{18 \mbox{g} }{1 \mbox{mol} } \times \frac{2\mbox{mol water}}{2 \mbox{mol NaOH}} = 9 \mbox{g NaOH}[/math] Here's a tutorial: http://www.chembuddy...sional-analysis

You have this chemical equation: [ce]H2O + Na -> NaOH + H2[/ce] The first thing you need to do is balance that. You won't get the right answer until it's a balanced equation.

Your posts in astronomy and cosmology fit under the last criteria of "Why has my post been moved to Speculations?"; namely, You did not propose a hypothesis or a testable theory. You proposed a similarity between an ancient object and Jupiter and made some insinuations about Egyptian technology. To belong in astronomy, your "theory" would have to explain some facet of the universe -- for example, predicting how black holes behave or how stars decay. Your post was speculative -- anything regarding unverified ancient history is -- and did not address any existing scientific theory, or advance a new one. If you would like to learn how science works, I suggest the book The Logic of Scientific Discovery, by Karl Popper. Incidentally, I think you'll find that Harvard was using "centrifugal force" in the same sense D H did; that is, as a fictitious force which only appears if you are in the frame of the spinning object. I'd also like to point you at So, you've got a new theory... as another vital reference for behavior in Speculations.

Hmm. We have three external programs that your browser gets on each page: Google Adsense Google Analytics, which gives us audience statistics, number of visits, and so on Quantcast, which does demographics I just removed Quantcast because it hasn't been very useful anyway. Google Adsense has always been a part of SFN (well, at least for the last several years), but perhaps its location on the page means it blocks anything else from loading until it does. I will investigate if there's anything I can do. Also, a note: tracking cookies that your virus program finds can't cause any slowness you observe, and I wouldn't worry too much about them. Tracking cookies are not programs that can run and slow down your computer, nor do they slow down page loading. The primary reason virus programs remove them is privacy concerns; cookies are small bits of text your browser stores for certain sites, and those sites can use the text as an identifier when you visit. Some advertisements or analytics programs used on many sites can use the cookie to follow you across all your sites and store statistics about what sites you visit. SFN uses a few cookies to keep you logged in. Whatever your symptoms are, tracking cookies aren't the cause. If you have to reboot your computer, rather than just closing your browser and reopening it, I think there's something very wrong as well. I will, however, investigate what else I can do to speed up page loads and make SFN a better experience for everyone.

It's a "no, unless I discover someone's written the code to do it."

There's no configurable time window in which edits "don't count"; either you show Edited By all the time or let people hide it even when editing ten hours later. I'm not sure what the best way to handle it is. The current edit time limit is ten hours. I can't easily do until-a-reply-appears, although of course there may be plugins to customize the behavior. But you've already got your time limit doubled from the old setting.

While I'd agree that a desktop keyboard is bigger and better laid-out, I find that most of them are cheap mushy crap and difficult to type on. I lose a good bit of typing speed if I'm forced to use one. My mom still uses her IBM Model M keyboard for desktop typing. That thing will last forever.

Yeah, IPB loves using profile pictures. I'll see if I can swap that. Dunno about the notifications though. I'm afraid I have no idea how to fix that one.

Hmm, I've missed a few good ones: The Scientists, by John Gribbin. A history of science done by looking at the scientists making key discoveries. You learn very interesting (and surprising!) things about the scientists you've heard about all your lives. A great biographical compilation. When Prophecy Fails, by Stanley Schachter, Leon Festinger and Henry Riecken. This book advances the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance, which explains how humans respond when their expectations are violated, by infiltrating a 1960s UFO cult and observing what happens when they aren't taken off the planet to safety as predicted. Excellent reporting -- and non-fiction! -- but perhaps not as fun as it could have been, because the authors focused on their psychological theory instead of just telling a good story. Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, by Mary Roach. Well... have a guess at what this one's about...

Let's start a list of the popular (and unpopular) science books you recommend. Perhaps we can all get some worthwhile reading material out of this. I'll start: Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene: good intro to modern physics Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker: a look at modern psychopharmacology and the effects of psychiatric medicine. Well-written and researched. Why People Believe Weird Things, by Michael Shermer. Engaging, amusing, and enlightening. The Last Man on the Moon, by Gene Cernan. Cernan landed on the Moon on Apollo 17, and this book is his memoir of the entire Gemini, Mercury and Apollo programs. Great if you like space exploration. What are your choices?

Just a note for everyone: the Search box in the upper right now correctly handles searching the Blogs, so you can search for a favorite blog post if you so desire. Also, you'll notice a new tab when using View New Content that displays any blog posts since your last visit, and a similar tab in View Active Content that displays blog posts over the last day or so. And remember to sign up for the global blog RSS feed! You can even get it by email. Also, blogs now have a unified header (when the theme supports it) linking back to ScienceForums.Net and our global RSS feed. I hope to spread the word of ScienceForums.Net Blogs and get all of you more readers and more audience. Go out and blog!

I think we need to revise and improve our pre-existing resources, like the So, you've got a new theory thread in the Speculations forum. Instead of a horde of experts jumping on a new member, we can gently point them at the pinned topics and let them revise their work.

Have you experimented with different flavors or varieties of yogurt? I imagine one could put some frozen fruit in a food processor, then dump the chunks into the yogurt.

The Great Red Spot (i.e. the Eye of Jupiter) has been changing in size and shape over the centuries. It's silly to assume it looked exactly the same 4500 years ago -- it's lost half of its longitudinal size in a century, for example. It probably didn't look like an Eye if the Egyptians managed to see it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Red_Spot#Great_Red_Spot

Sounds right to me.

Fair enough. But Paul wasn't reported on after he had predicted all of the games successfully, he was reported on after a few, and continued to be a success. He still had to make three or four correct predictions while the press was watching.

Incidentally, you all now have significantly larger attachment upload limits, since we're not really hurting for space yet. edit: actually, the disk is 86% full... interesting. Time for some spring cleaning, I guess.

Lies. Real men are toilet ninjas. No sound should ever escape.