imatfaal

Brainteaser - most of your problems are easily solved by the addition of three letters after the time; and that's exactly what we do.

I think the publishers also realise they have a captive audience and they milk it. Whilst academic text books are expensive (in law they tend to be below 100quid) - professional texts are amazingly expensive. I have just had to shell out over 500quid (well my company did) for a book - the publisher claimed it was the best-selling in the subject area and the bookshop had to re-order so the publisher are doing very nicely thank you very much and selling a good number of books. There are literally thousands of texts on shipping (my bit of interest) for the layman - so the publishers have to compete on price and they do so to a great extent; there are dozens of good general academic books on shipping law so the competition is still there but not fierce enough to drive down the price much; and there tend to be only one or two specialized professional texts on each individual area - so practically no need to compete.

I am not a conspiracy theorist normally - but I think the US government has the secret formula for the machine washable suit in the same top secret facility that they keep the everlasting light-bulb, the formula for free petrol, and the never-ending gobstopper.

Green-X merely repeating an assertion or a variation does not validate it or form a proof. Your arguments are founded upon seemingly provable underpinnings - do you have any information sources to prove these points which are essential to your argument.

really? your last assertion turned out, upon investigation, to be groundless --- edited to remove horrible spelling mistake

The heavyweights may wish to correct me, but I think the interesting parts of this series of experiments is that wave-like behaviour continues to occur at a particle level (ie diffraction with individual photons), that if one enforces classical behaviour (ie by ascertaining which slit - quarter wave polarisers) the wave like qualities disappear, whilst still ascertaining which slit - if you erase that information (ie the polariser on the idler photon after spontaneous down conversion) then the fringes reappear the timing of the erasion of the information 'seems' to violate causality - the light path of the idler to the eraser device can be significantly longer than the path of the singal to the fringe detector I found the original papers made much more sense than the wikipedia pages: Quantum eraser Walborn Delayed Choice Kim

ajb - hadn't you heard? all that nonsense about inverse square law was found to be a un-necessary complication

but being less convoluted would be going against my nature! I will give it some more thought...

I think the tea party is pretty removed from my values as well - although I do think the way the liberal european press portray them is a little ott. I find it hard to believe they are all the gun-totting, raw-meat eating nutters that the depictions would have one believe.

B would only be the correct answer if the balloon/air inside was as incompressible as water. Glass spheres of a predetermined denisty can be used to ascertain temperature of a fluid - Galilean Thermometer

if you go against your nature would you recommend going through this door if I wanted a nice continued life? - and do opposite

Just off the top of my head - and I am clueless about these things: if you count jumps rather than positions I think it might help. no. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 lhs 6 4 2 4 6 4 2 4 rhs 2 4 6 4 2 4 6 4 If you just rotate (ie from that sequence of numbers looped over to start again) each number produced to make the smallest or largest - they will be unique, cover every possibility, and wont include extras. Each number would have to add up to 32 so there is a useful checksum.

Glad it went well! Are they publishing the proceedings?

Hi Vulg Quite like the game - less liked the way it dropped 40-50 emails into my inbox yesterday. . Think you might have a little bit of an issue.

Do you have any news stories or case facts to strengthen this argument, or just some wierd hypotheticals from an unusual web-forum? Women should not need to protect themselves from predatory men in a modern society - and it is a travesty that they still are forced into this situation. Whilst it might be sensible to remove oneself from situations of danger this in no way lessens the culpability of the rapist nor places guilt on the shoulders of the victim.

Did she have the grace to apologize? in his position I must admit I couldn't have resisted the immediate comeback "Yes I do ma'am, highest honours - now what about you?"

Vastor - your scales are confusing your eye. Try thinking mathematically - if the slope of tangent is 4 - what must the slope of the normal be? Remember you can ignore the constants for the slope - just look at the coefficients of the x terms. I used the graphing tool suggested and it produced a much more easily understood graph than yours - and because it held the scales the same it looked like a right angle too!

With respect Vilas - physics without a rigorous mathematical underpinning probably deserves to die, it is mere word salad. BTW in the UK applications to read physics at university are at a high (especially in Manchester and for female students - whether this is due to Manchesters success at modernising curriculum to gain engagement from young women combined with their recent Nobel success OR because they fancy Brian Cox is debatable!)

pions are bosons made up of a quark and antiquark (one up and one down for charged and two up or two down for uncharged). the quarks are fundamental or elementary (take your pick I think it is the same) - but the pi mesons are neither elementary nor fundamental

Nature had an news article a few months (12 May page 133) about the possibility of defining a new epoch, the Anthropocene.

Your inability to refute the point makes me think it was a fairly good example; I thought it showed nicely that a single definition is not necessary to hold a meaningful debate. To try to hamstring a debate by insisting on impossible or unlikely terms of reference is counter-productive. The imposition of scientific rules of engagement to a discussion of religion is of very little use - I will re-post a quote taken from laurie taylor ( a noted humanist, sociologist, and broadcaster in the UK It is no more possible to prove (or disprove) the existence of God scientifically than it is to prove the world is round musically. (orig Laurie Taylor I think)

Green-X; I dont think it is a fact, I think it is a prerequisite for your argument that you have chosen to assume rather than research. I have spent barely 10 minutes on the internet and found the track and field records of the american amateur athletics union. For your ready reference they are here below http://image.aausports.org/sports/athletics/results/nationalrecordsjogamesboys.pdf http://image.aausports.org/sports/athletics/results/nationalrecordsjogamesgirls.pdf From a quick and non-scientific glance I could not find any examples where girls records were faster/longer/higher than boys; this requires some explaining if your claim is to be true!

Multiply both sides by wavelength (and cancel out any term over itself) divide both sides by energy (and then cancel out again)

Hal - your traducing of an entire country is disgraceful, uncalled for, and illogical.

doG - two posts ago you were claiming dark energy was related to dark matter, and now you are claiming that we are certain of its existence; many physicists will argue with your latter point (and all will refute your first). The fact that you personally cannot entertain the possibility of an argument with flexible/floating parameters does not invalidate that debate. The supernatural is quintessentially unconstrained by physical and objective reality - to claim that it must be definable and certain misses a vital part of the proposition. By the very nature of your argument you would render any debate on the existence of any non-corporeal phenomenon invalid; in an existential oppositional discussion one party denies the reality that the other party propounds, this would be futile if an agreed definition was a prerequisite. Denying the existence of god or any supernatural entity is a starting point - it is one I agree with, I am a proud member of the oldest rationalist/humanist society in the UK - but claiming that any debate positing the existence of god is meaningless is incorrect, illogical, and counter-productive.