Cap'n Refsmmat

A more plausible explanation, given that people nearby were already tweeting the events, is: Neighbors call cops about helicopter crash Cops go "it's a helicopter, let the Air Force deal with it" Air Force sends jets to investigate unknown and possibly well-armed helicopters swansont has already addressed why the academy was in a poor position to respond. Writing progressively more creative responses won't change that.

This is exactly what the government has been claiming upon reading through the documents discovered in his house, although of course they're not releasing those documents for public inspection.

Yes. You want a long pipe that is in contact with as much soil as possible, with air in the pipe for as long as is possible. It may be more efficient to pump air from your house into the soil and back, rather than outside air; 90-degree outside air will take much longer to cool than 78-degree air from inside your house. Some rough estimates: Suppose you pump 1000 cubic feet of air through the piping each minute. (There are commercial products that can move air that quickly.) Suppose the air is cooled by five degrees Celsius while in the pipes. Each minute, you can dump nearly 200 kilojoules of heat into the ground. That's nearly 11 megajoules per hour, which seems to be the equivalent of a 10,000 BTU window air conditioner, which some random online calculator tells me is good enough to cool a sunny 350-square-foot room with excellent insulation. Caveats: You have to move a lot of air through the pipes each minute, while letting the air stay in the pipes long enough to be cooled by 5 degrees C. A 4-inch pipe 400 feet long would only give the air one minute underground, which I don't think is nearly enough to cool it down that drastically. This is why I suggest using water. Water has a volumetric heat capacity over three thousand times greater, meaning you'd need 3000 times less water to dump the same amount of heat.

Radiation pressure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure Solar sails use it to fly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail

That would be more effective, yes, but I still think you'd want to run a liquid through the pipe instead, and use a heat exchanger on your side. Air won't conduct very much heat into the ground.

If it's directly in contact with the ground, conduction will be a far more effective heat transfer method than radiation. If you lived in a country with no sunlight, you could paint your walls black and they'd radiate out the house's internal heat. In sunlight, though, they'll end up absorbing more energy from the sunlight than they would radiate from your house. (Ever stand outside on a sunny day in a black shirt?)

Well, here's the problem: Suppose it's 90 degrees outside and the soil is at 68 or so. You pull 90-degree outside air into the pipe and run it through 50 feet of earth. Once it arrives at your house, it'll have cooled by a few degrees, to maybe 85 degrees. That's not really air-conditioning. What you need is an efficient way of dumping heat from outside into the pipes, like a geothermal heat pump would do. Look at the Wikipedia article I linked to.

Also, how do I make a base-4000 calculator keyboard?

There's really not much about Hell in the Old Testament. There were Jewish groups that didn't believe in any afterlife at all up until the times of Jesus. It was merely a practical concern -- follow God's rules and he will protect the Israelites from marauding neighbor kingdoms. Break his rules and he sees no obligation to help you out. That's the concept of the Covenant. Er, no, Abraham came before Moses; the Commandments didn't exist yet. It makes significantly more sense when not taken as a literal account of historical events; it demonstrates the kind of absolute obedience to God that is demanded of His children.

What you describe sounds more like ADD than autism. Why would this epigenetic adaptation lead to autism rather than any other possible developmental disorder? Similarly, many autistic people were born before the information boom. The autism prevalence is likely just as high among adults as among children: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/05/autism-epidemic-more-likely-were-just-better-at-diagnosis.ars Those adults were born decades before the Internet brought the information overload.

Shorter numbers aren't a huge advantage, either -- we developed scientific notation because it makes large numbers easy to handle in our base-ten system.

I'd imagine that running air through an underground pipe would only cool it by a couple of degrees, since it won't radiate heat into the surrounding soil very easily. You'd want to maximize the air-soil interface surface area as much as possible, by having the air move through as much soil as possible or by splitting it into thin streams. What you're really trying to build is a geothermal cooling system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump Even when pumping water and antifreeze through the pipes, which transfers heat much more efficiently, you can still see how much piping is required to cool a house: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:3-ton_Slinky_Loop.jpg

Because the one thing God requires is obedience and faith, in the sense that Abraham had faith in God when he was willing to do anything God asked even if it sounded ludicrous. ("Wait, you want me to leave my house and move to Israel, because I'm going to have a bunch of kids there? I'm 90 years old!") Disobedience is the only sin there is. As for the question of why, God answers that quite well in Job. Primarily by saying you're a piddly human and you shouldn't be asking.

http://www.nytimes.c...el.html?_r=1 So I guess if the Pakistani military academy woke up too quickly, we'd have blasted them out of the way before leaving.

In a country with frequent terrorist suicide attacks, it seems to me the worst possible response to explosions and gunfire is to throw a couple guys in a jeep and drive out to see what's up. Of course, the large explosion happened as the Americans were leaving, and the Pakistani Army arrived not long after to cordon off the area and figure out what had just happened. Where'd you hear this story?

You seem to be mistaken. http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2011/05/some-white-knuckle-moments-for-elite-navy-seals-team.html One must also note that "next door" in this case is "more than a kilometer away," and that a military college is not the same as a military base. What occurs outside is the jurisdiction of the local police, not a bunch of trainee soldiers. Because there were a bunch of men with guns outside by this point? Once the helicopter crash-landed, the Seals on board debarked, and the crash may have occurred before or after the other helicopter had already landed. Also, why would you try to run away from people in helicopters? Just how far do you think you'll get before they catch up? I thought you said there were videos from next door as the compound was on fire. Wouldn't the neighbors have noticed the Pakistani military hanging around? Wouldn't the civilians awakened by explosions and gunfire notice a bunch of men in uniforms standing out front? Why wouldn't they tell the local news? Wouldn't it save a lot of embarrassment for the Pakistanis?

After a few minutes idle, it flips the screen to a random picture of an author, rather than displaying the book you're reading. It's not an animated screensaver, and it does nothing other than look nice.

Yeah, there's a mobile version. I just adjusted things so the Kindle should be automatically served the mobile site. Is that better?

I'd like to see something like Google Books bring public domain and out-of-print books to ebook readers and computers everywhere. They have something like 3 million available so far, but not in any Kindle-compatible format (only ePub and web-based browsing), and they're still scanning through a bunch of university libraries. Wandering through our campus library with several million books is more impressive when you realize that in a few years, it'll all be available in a device the size of a Kindle.

If you want to learn about ongoing research and recently published experiments, you almost certainly need to use something like Google Scholar to look at actual research papers and actual experimental results. Also check with your school's library -- it may have online access to various databases of research. Scientific papers are the primary source for any research project. If you want to keep up on new research without going into detail, you can try a science news site like ScienceDaily.

I don't know many other people with a Kindle, so I haven't tried it. Maybe I should get to know more book nerds.

Could you be more specific? Are you looking for a website that summarizes everything that is currently known about genetics?

http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_Screen_Saver_Hack_for_all_2.x_and_3.x_Kindles It involves "jailbreaking" the Kindle, and I haven't tried it, but there are other sites with some amusing backgrounds available should you try it.

Yes, I know. That's why I mentioned the density of the upper atmosphere, which causes slight drag on spacecraft. Do you have any data attributing orbital decay to anything other than drag? Yes, that's what cooling means. I am aware of that. I have taken basic thermodynamics. Prove it. Heat makes things expand. Cold makes things contract. Being hotter does not make things maintain a higher density. If you want to prove otherwise, you will need experimental evidence. The quotes from Berkeley you cited claims the solid portion of the inner core expands due to added mass from solidified iron crystals settling. It says nothing about cooling causing a contraction.

You can also use sites like Google Scholar to search scholarly literature: http://scholar.google.com/ Just check the source of the works you find -- sometimes it searches through rather strange books along with genuine scientific journals.