Cap'n Refsmmat

Light isn't transmitted by the lateral vibration of particles in a medium. Light can travel through a vacuum where there are no particles to vibrate at all, unlike sound. Light is usually described as traveling as photons. See here for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon

You can attach pictures for viewing here. When you hit Reply scroll down to Additional Options and hit Manage Attachments.

Hocus pocus!

So you're saying that in certain fields, data is indeed freely available and published alongside the articles? You have a good point about data curation; I can see there being a need to reformat and normalize data in my imaginary online database, even if it's just to use consistent units for measurements. What fields may not have freely available data? I know the psychology journals I saw did a pretty poor job in general, although they were the more obscure journals.

Hey, I did spend some time at PCL during orientation... in the computer lab. Yeah, basically. A central location for all of that kind of data. Perhaps even provide systems to allow combination of data between experiments or listing of similar experiments to compare datasets. If you want to make it really easy on amateurs, the site could provide basic graphing and statistical features.

Sometimes I see news articles saying that someone re-analyzed data from another experiment to produce a new conclusion, suggesting the authors of the first study shared their data. But I presume that usually takes conversation with the experimenters, not a search on a website. The UT Libraries website lets you get access online to most of the major publishers' online databases. I'll keep your advice in mind when I go searching for paper copies, though

(Please note that I start this discussion a month before I start an undergraduate degree in the sciences. I don't purport to be an expert in anything I'm talking about here.) (people with no attention span should skip to that one-line paragraph down below) Recently I received access, via the University of Texas library system, to hundreds of online journals. I can look up journal articles in pretty much any subject I please, trying to find good information and answers to my questions. I think this is fantastic: online journals make accessing the information far easier and let ordinary undergrads like me learn about research done by pretty much anybody. That's not to say it's optimal, though. There's always the problem of issues that are not yet available online, and if I weren't a university student I'd have to fork over a whole lot of money to get this kind of access. Along those lines, there have been attempts to create open-access online journals that aim to consolidate a lot of research and provide easy search systems to find articles of interest. There's the arXiv, PLoS (all seven of them), indexes like PubMed, and so on. But their openness doesn't solve everything: the conclusions of the papers may now be viewable by the entire world, but what about the rest? The data? Many of the journals I looked at merely provided a few charts, leaving me unable to consider conclusions the authors didn't cover. So, a thought that has been brewing in my mind for a while now: What if there were an open-access online journal that not only provides a medium for authors to publish their work, but which provides them a way to publish their raw data? Think about it: it's very easy to provide online access to heaps of data. Researchers conducting a particular experiment could upload not just their research but a dataset from a particular experiment, giving anybody, anywhere the ability to comb through the data for missed conclusions and new patterns. Combine this with a really clever cross-referencing system and you could make it easy to anyone to find, say, every experiment involving neutrino production, allowing a researcher seeking to answer a question about neutrinos to just look up some datasets and spend a few days analyzing them, rather than spending months setting up another experiment. The journals I have seen generally offer descriptions of the experiments, a few graphs or charts of the data, and some conclusions. (Maybe I'm looking at crappy journals.) But the Internet provides an easy medium to post data as well. What would happen if such an online tool existed? Would it revolutionize the publishing world, or am I too stupid to have noticed that such a tool already exists or would never work in practice?

Many graduate degree programs require knowledge of a foreign language like French, German or Russian before you can graduate. I know the University of Texas' graduate programs in physics restrict you to only those three languages, in fact. So while Latin may have some use, you'll end up learning a non-dead language anyway.

Once you have five or ten posts to your name and we're sure you're not an evil spammer, go for it. The software flags you otherwise.

Again, LaTeX is probably something they should install for you as well. Once that is done, you will be set to install the vbLatex plugin and set it up.

No rules against it. It's just not very helpful in a discussion when it'd take a few weeks for us to even get enough time to read the whole thing, merely so we can tell some random guy on the Internet that we think he's wrong. Could you be more specific with the reasons the author of the book presents?

Now, if you mean by "possible mathematically" that the mathematical equations of physics allow for something to occur, then sure. There have been several phenomena in physics that were shown possible through mathematics and actually observed in reality later.

If it's a Linux server, it's probably in their package repositories. For example, under Ubuntu there's a dvipng package they can install with apt-get. Other Linux distributions may vary. Otherwise, dvipng can be downloaded here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvipng/files/

I recall my local vet says he gives vaccinations to animals in a different spot every year due to the risk of cancer (or some other problem, I don't recall correctly) if vaccinations are given in the same place every year. I'll do some research. edit: http://www.whale.to/a/vets1.html blames it on the adjuvant and says it's limited to cats. Interesting, but not necessarily the best source. A link from Cornell University: http://www.vet.cornell.edu/fhc/brochures/vaccsarc.html

You try laying an alternative pipe network in a small city and see how well that works out for you. They're called government-regulated monopolies because they're natural monopolies that are regulated to prevent abuse of consumers. The government didn't say "Hmm, we should make water supply a monopoly," they said "it's a natural monopoly, so we'd better regulate them." Water is a monopoly because of incredibly high natural barriers to entry. That's all. The governments are not imposing the barriers because they feel like it.

For a motor as simple as that, I bet it could work on different battery types. But what level/grade science fair is this? You'll want to explore something more than just "more powerful batteries make it run faster!" Perhaps you could hook it up to something...

I think you'll need to contact your host's support people and ask them to install dvipng and LaTeX for you. Unless you're running a dedicated server, you just can't install it yourself.

Are you on a shared server or a dedicated/VPS server? If it's a shared server, you'll likely have to ask the host to install it for you -- dvipng is an executable program, rather than just another web application, and shared hosts don't let you install stuff in the locations dvipng installs itself.

I haven't actually installed it, but I can provide a bit of help, since I've worked a bit on our installation before. Can you tell me which step(s) are vague or unclear for you? Also, what kind of web server are you on? Shared hosting, dedicated, VPS... You'll have to see if you have dvipng and latex installed, and doing so varies depending on webhosting.

She's just resigning in advance of the news of her affair with Jenny Sanford.

Logarithms! [math]8^{x^2 - 2x} = 0.5[/math] [math]\log 8^{x^2 - 2x} = \log 0.5[/math] [math](x^2 - 2x) \log 8 = \log 0.5[/math] [math]x^2 - 2x = \frac{\log 0.5}{\log 8}[/math] and you can see how that will work out in the end. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithm

Why would a gravitational field branch off into hyperspace?

It's no miracle drug. I took some last night and died twice before I even fell asleep.

What's hyperspace?

http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/ Brain simulation is being done on classical computers. It has worked so far. So one doesn't need a quantum computer to simulate a brain.