Cap'n Refsmmat

No, that's not it. I just plotted it in Mathematica and got a similar oscillation. I find it hard to believe it's just a rounding error, as Mathematica uses GMP for arbitrary-precision floating point numbers. I think the reason a calculator doesn't show it is, in fact, rounding. Look at the scale on the graph: each label is, in fact, exactly the same. The variance here is incredibly tiny, and you're not going to spot it without using something like Mathematica. Now, as for why the function does that, I don't know...

Make sure your hands aren't resting on the trackpad. Whenever my mom tries to type on a laptop, her wrists hit the trackpad and she ends up clicking all over and typing in the wrong places. If that's the case, and you can't get out of the habit of putting your wrists in the wrong place, there's probably a mouse setting to require you to actually press the mouse button to click, rather than just tapping.

To be fair, it's really three stages. There's a rocket booster that has to get the scramjet to operational speed.

I'd suggest getting that bubbly urine checked out by a doctor. http://www.ehow.com/how-does_5486040_causes-bubbles-urine.html Could be something totally harmless, of course, but it's definitely not normal.

So what you're really saying is that "it takes $10 to save certain lives in certain situations," not that $10 is the "value" of human life. I mean, you could do the same sort of analysis in a developed country for the cost of treatment for heart disease, and you'd end up with a much larger number.

Not according to our government. http://fast.faa.gov/Riskmgmt/Secriskmgmt/secriskmgmt.htm This is for cost/benefit analyses for safety measures taken by the FAA, although I'm not sure how they derived the value. I recall reading somewhere that it was based on the estimated contribution to the economy by each individual over their lifetime. Or something.

Also consider that most ships in science fiction seem to have enough maneuvering power to slow down significantly from orbital velocity, so they don't have to re-enter at 17,000mph. Sometimes they even just hover and gently go straight to the ground.

I think a better comparison than "number of people who die in road accidents" would be "number of people who die due to violent crime." If it were the case that more people would die from wrongful convictions than violent crimes, or that the reduction in violent crime would be matched by the increase in deaths due to wrongful convictions, your argument would fail. Now, while I think there are far more than 500 violent crime deaths per year in the US, it's still a much smaller number to compare against than traffic deaths, and makes people pause. I mean, if you're wrongfully killing as many people as, say, all serial murderers in a given year (since I assume very few murderers are serial murderers), you're not helping much...

I haven't done this personally (still an undergraduate), but I have heard many success stories from people who got their PhDs later in life. If you did undergraduate research and can get good recommendations based on that, you have one huge bonus right there. So no, I don't think you're crazy. You just need to begin researching PhD programs, find labs and professors whose interests are similar to yours, and generally start shopping around.

What kind of class is this for? There are several ways to solve it, and which you use depends on what mathematical knowledge you have. Also, if you have formulas given to you, rather than being expected to derive them yourself, they could be important.

Hence us caching the compressed files. We're just trading bandwidth for a few hundred kilobytes of disk space.

There's already a mechanism for the Internet. Most of the static files on SFN (CSS and JavaScript) are served zipped, meaning they take far less bandwidth to transfer. As most content delivered over the Internet is not text but data, like HTML, XML, and all that junk, compression algorithms are the way to go. (We also cache the compressed files so the server doesn't have to compress them every single time someone requests them.)

Egh. Nothing about black holes or Hawking radiation here: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/WhyLHC-en.html and that's the "Why the LHC?" page. So much for staying on topic...

LHC is not trying to create mini black holes. I'm not sure where you got that idea from. Some hypothesize that it might create them as a consequence of its operation, but that's not its goal. In any case, I don't think any of the LHC data has actually been analyzed and published yet. It's far too soon for them to jump to any conclusions. Now, shall we get back on topic? SETI and the LHC have nothing to do with gravity.

I thought we had agreed we weren't talking about your model any more. Oh well. We certainly aren't going to be now.

I don't think there's peer review in philosophy.

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=123758 I realize this is World Net Daily we're talking about here, but even if it's not true, it's still a remarkably good idea. What's next? Banning breasts on long flights? I wouldn't be surprised.

Sure. Use the regular HTML table syntax: <table> <tr><td>Table cell</td><td>Table cell</td></tr> <tr><td>Next row cell</td><td>BLARGH</td></tr> </table>

That's cheating.

Although viXra does not have a particularly good reputation when it comes to scientific credibility.

That really depends on the journal, I think. Some make you sign over your copyright completely, some let you retain rights, and so on. I know in some fields of physics it's popular to publish your papers yourself online as "preprints" before they're peer-reviewed, but some journals want the copyright to your article. Best to check, I think.

Generally I think one is supposed to go one journal at a time -- it's considered bad etiquette to apply to several, get accepted at one, and then have to withdraw your paper from the others. However, I know more about publishing in scientific journals than in others, so the situation may be somewhat different. I'm not sure.

I thought one of the characteristics of white phosphorus was that it's very difficult to get off of skin.

White phosphorus ignites on contact with air. There's no need for the explosive charge, although one is used to disperse the phosphorus bits.

You can also enable the Spam Karma 2 plugin in your admin panel to save you the trouble of sifting through all of it. As for their nature... I think many of the bots are human. I've adjusted the registration page several times to make it difficult for bots to register with no human help, so they're at least getting help there. Some spammers also seem able to spam with relevant-seeming comments, whereas others just open loads of threads. So perhaps it's a mixture.