Cap'n Refsmmat

Back when I lived in Michigan and rode the bus to school I listened to rap and prank phone calls, since that was what the bus radio was tuned to. That helps to explain why I find it so easy to tune out music now... Now I mostly just take a nap or sit in quiet contemplation. When I want to listen to the radio, I'll fire up my shortwave receiver and listen to a Radio Netherlands broadcast, though those are only on late at night. (There used to be BBC World Service broadcasts but they stopped broadcasting to the US. Darn.) It's much more interesting to get your news from a different country - you get a totally different perspective. They have cool accents too.

Because not everybody will be informed enough to know if what they attempt is safe or not. As lawsuit-happy as America is, we'd probably get sued if someone tries an experiment and gets their face melted off.

If it requires significant speed to be useful, C is the obvious choice. C is also, in my experience, rather painful to use. If you want something relatively simple that can do the modeling (just not as quickly), try Python. It's fairly simple to learn and you can probably find pre-existing Python code that'll help you do what you want. O'Reilly's Learning Python is a good place to start.

"Convoy" implies grouping the merchant ships together. Do that and you might get their numbers down to a reasonable size. If only we had the 600-ship Navy of the 80s...

The FDA leaves it alone because they all have disclaimers saying the FDA hasn't evaluated it. Otherwise the FDA would shut them down -- even if it's harmless stuff, you're preventing people from getting real medication, and that could be harmful in itself.

I think your uniform design on the far left there is dorkier. In any case, I am having the Detect-o-dork installed tomorrow between noon and 8, assuming the guy shows up...

Pff. My helmet has radar.

Of course you do. You also mentioned something about appeals to authority being punishable by machete.

proofnottheory: You know, repeating yourself would be a clever response if it weren't for the fact that the exact same argument has been made verbatim on quite a few dozen other websites. Would you like to answer our questions or just copy and paste a message again?

If the universe started with no angular momentum, it is in fact required for some things to spin the other way -- net angular momentum must remain zero. As for the rest, they are acknowledged problems. (Well, not sure about the entropy thing.) How does your theory address them?

What is "plotanium"? Why should everything be spinning in the same direction according to the big bang? The universe did not start with a large angular momentum, from what I understand.

How's this?

Interesting. I think the authors of your own source disagree: (emphasis mine) Now I suggest that if you want to make bigoted remarks you at least find evidence that actually backs up your claims.

Well, you wouldn't get three times the amperage on the same circuit, you'd just be able to supply three times as much if the circuit required it. Adding batteries in parallel won't melt a circuit or anything.

Thermally challenged?

The capsule did not have much in the way of radiation shielding, from what I recall. A thick atmosphere can serve that purpose well.

I think the difference is partly because the human eye is more sensitive to green wavelengths than red.

There is no lead in our atmosphere. It's just that having a giant cloud of oxygen and nitrogen around you acts a bit like having lead -- the atmospheric gas absorbs or reflects the radiation like lead would. It just takes quite a few miles of air to equal a few inches of lead in effectiveness.

If you did it in the atmosphere your positron beam would annihilate electrons in the air in front of you. The only feasible way to do it would be in space where there's not much to annihilate. Even then, you probably wouldn't need the electron beam -- you'd get enough results letting the positrons hit the electrons in your target. Which brings up another question: Would the positrons even collide with many electrons, or would they likely pass through the target? Atoms are pretty spread-out, after all.

The description of that image claims it's a 5mW laser. I'm guessing it's a relatively long exposure time to show up that well. My 50mW laser will do that for the naked eye at night.

A negatron is an electron. Do you mean antiprotons?

Diffraction would cause the beam to spread out -- even laser beams spread out over a distance -- but you could make it fairly narrow with a parabolic reflector.

Try making a post with [math]x^2[/math] in it and see if it works. If not... Do you have latex and dvipng (the programs) installed on your server? If not, what operating system are you using on the server? I might be able to find instructions to install LaTeX and dvipng for you.

Go to the headinclude template in whatever theme you're using and edit it to include this: <script type="text/javascript" src="clientscript/latex.js"></script> As for step 6, I don't think you need to do anything like that. Once you've installed the plugin and included the JavaScript you should be able to post LaTeX in math tags.