Cap'n Refsmmat

I believe they're trying to implement some geographically-based routing to local mirrors so you'll be downloading from a server near you, along with monitoring to send people only to servers that work.

I've got a $15 fake Rolex here that's probably the most pathetic watch around. The watchband (metal) pinches, there are no markings on the dial (try telling time!) and it stops fairly frequently. But the back of the watch is transparent, so you can see the mechanism. And that is cool by itself.

I'd imagine so. A senior representative could still slip various unwanted measures into an otherwise popular bill and have them pass.

Depends on what you mean by "intensity". Wikipedia says there are four ways you can define it. Which do you mean?

I'd suggest looking at CasioKingdom's Downloads section for some programs.

That just makes it more exciting.

You can use a small eye-hook on the arm and a matching one on the frame. When you pull the arm back far enough, the two hooks line up and you stick a metal bit through the two to hold the arm back. Tie the metal bit to some string and yank it out when you want to fire.

You use them for tension. You have an arm mounted on a fulcrum point, and attached to the arm are bungee cords stretched out and attached to a part of your frame that sticks up. The cords pull the arm forward and launch your projectile.

I think that violates some sort of funeral protocol. Especially if the trebuchet malfunctions and sends the coffin flying backwards.

Feel free to head over to the GUT forum (which you should now be able to see) and pop into yourdadonapogos' thread on the subject -- he intended to start an integration tutorial but hasn't had any time.

The most successful catapult designs I've seen use several bungee cords stretched out to power the arm. You could easily lob a tennis ball out to 75 feet with one of them, depending on how many bungee cords you use.

Sounds like a plan. You should now be able to see the GUT-writing forum. Feel free to post an outline of the tutorial you'd like to do first, and then get started.

If you'd like to write one, I'll open up the drafting forum to you so you can start coming up with stuff. Once you have something written, we'll review it all and publish it as a GUT. What sort of math would you like to cover?

vBulletin is trying to do social networking. Feel free to ignore the "friends" feature.

How far does it have to be able to shoot things, and what are you going to try to shoot? I've built a trebuchet that can launch a tennis ball more than 75 feet using a bucket filled with 50 pounds of lead as a counterweight. That may be overkill for what you need to do. With more details on what you need we might be able to help more.

Which style are you using? (Scroll to the bottom left of the page and the drop-down will tell you.) edit: ah, okay. Fixed. I forgot the way stylesheets are inherited among styles...

Must be an artifact of the upgrade. I'll turn NoSpam off.

I highly recommend the book Corrupted Science, by John Grant, on this topic. Especially chapter 6(iii): The book is very well referenced and very well researched.

I think this one will remain closed. Graviphoton, threads in this forum must abide by the Speculations Forum Policy or they'll be canned. You are no exception, regardless of any commonsense rules of behavior you might have. The heated language and blatant disregard for referencing and the rules need to go.

They're editable by anyone (I think). I think I can insert a "tag cloud" somewhere so people can browse threads by tag. They may also influence search.

That's no longer necessary with gmail.

It was actually a button that's supposed to appear in the case of an error in Quick Reply (you hit the button to make the error message go away), but I had a stray <thead> in the template that made the thing appear all the time. Oops.

So what you really mean is that while IQ scores are going up, that may not actually mean intelligence is going up.

New Scientist does, however, often cite the journal where they got their material from.

I'd argue that the apathy comes not from district size but from the fact that nobody even knows what their representative is up to. Public attention is entirely on the President. Nobody knows or cares about their own representative's actions. Were there a way to make the public aware of what their own representative is voting and arguing, voter interest would pick up. (And in any case, if someone "feels the power of their vote" in a smaller district, they'd also realize that with several thousand representatives, their representative is a lot less powerful.)