imatfaal

I guessed that was how you were using litter - but thought it was important to make the distinction On a personal basis - whilst it is clear that any individual action is swamped by the actions of society it is worth thinking about personal ways of changing consumption patterns; apart from waste and litter, the first thing that would occur to me to lower one's "H20 footprint" would be diet/lifestyle. some foodstuffs and associated processing/packaging will require more water than others (by that I mean that more or less water will be removed from immediate and usable circulation). There is genuine concern in parts of Spain that the combination of great tracts of poly-tunnels growing fruit and veg and a hugely thirsty tourist industry are denuding water supplies to a dangerous extent.

My basic ethos is that if I haven't read both widely and deeply then I go with the scientific consensus . Without reading acknowledged experts, understanding the theory and attempting the maths I would have trouble believing much of modern science including einstein's relativity, qm, and most cosmology. There are huge amounts of academic reading material out there; unfortunately it is difficult to sort the scientific wheat from the political chaff - but it is worth the effort. Science just does not admit to testing by the "what I think is right" methodology!

- Feynmann on mirrors

Rach - there is a diamond synchrotron podcast. I haven't listened to it myself - but I know the team that do it and I think the podcast will be fairly accessible

There are so many different attributes to take into account - realistically only history can be the judge. As a nomination from the teaching/educational side (although not exactly lacking on the theoretical/experiment either) - Walter Lewin, whose televised lectures of his first year physics course at MIT have been watched by millions of people. He is the archetypal nutty professor with wild hair, burning enthusiasm and a genuine engagement with students

I think you have to expand the definition of "litter" to fully grasp the problem. As an example perhaps look at the amount of water used in the production of usable fossil fuels from oil tar sands in Canada. It might also be worth considering salt water - whilst we often concentrate on fresh water, there are vast swathes of the ocean that are close to sterile and support very little life; the sustainability of water requires usable water and the definition of usable changes with context.

Hal - I thought you previous got to the core; the wise are those who regularly take deliberate actions in real time that others with the benefit hindsight approve of

"Two people separated by a common language" Seems we can't agree on anything not even who said that - first handful of Google searches give George Bernard Shaw, George S Patton, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, and Winston Churchill (2 yanks, 2 irish and 1 half American-English)

I would go along with Sam (and not with Sato!) - alternatively you could use the standard equations of motion and look for one that relates initial velocity, final velocity, acceleration, and distance. These will give the same result (phew!)

You have noticed that most of the people who have argued with you on this forum are either agnostics/atheists or liberal fairly free-thinking religious believers (and no obvious fundamentalists or literalists) ? If you are serious in wanting to convince fundamentalists of the error of their ways you are going about it the wrong way - your posts are aggressive, hectoring, and offer no argument merely comment. I made similar comments in Lemur's thread talking about the issue of hate and polarisation http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/57593-hate/ You will win no one to your cause by mockery and contempt. And I do fight the good fight - I am an active member of both the Rationalist Association and the South Place Ethical Society both of which are dedicated to providing a reasoned humanist alternative to religion. Your posts are at the point of becoming impossible to discern from a parody of anti-fundamentalism - a sort of Reverse Poe's Law.

Good luck suing the police for pulling you over if they have a reasonable suspicion - at the moment you have the devils own job making anything stick when they push you to the ground and cause a fatal heart attack in front of the cameras. The tools can be ordinary tools btw - but then there is a burden of proof to show that you had them in order to commit a crime, if the tools have been adapted (a telescopic arm with a hook to get car keys off the table beside the front door through the letter box - ie a car aerial with a bit of coat hanger) or created (ie those clever keys that open multiple sorts of car doors) then no further evidence is required other than possession. Oh and on the hash codes - to get a forty character message from a SHA1 hash is very difficult and processor hungry as I mentioned above. But a major use of hash codes is the encryption of password lists. this forum, for instance, might keep all our pass words in a single file in hash form. These lists are often not kept as secure as they should be (people thought they were uncrackable). But most passwords are only 5-8 characters long - so nefarious sorts used a hash generator to make tables of the hash result of every combination of 5,6,7, or 8 standard keyboard characters. these tables are enormous but if you use a very fast graphics chip with optimised programming you can use the encrypted password as a search term and find it in a short amount of time - and if it is 8 or less standard characters then it will be in your table and you have the unencrypted password. And I am sorry to say - it's already on wiki.

Famous graffiti in London Gents WC "My mother made me a homosexual" and written below "If I gave her the materials would she make me one too?"

Cool - glad you have got your head round it

GIA - what do you hope to accomplish with your posts on religion? I am a firm atheist and rationalist and have been for many years so my criticism of your posts is not made with a religious perspective; in your posts you seem to be going out of your way to offend and upset those who do believe in god and are members of an established religion, is there a reason for this constant attack? I cannot believe that you are of a mind such that you think religious members of the forum will read your posts and re-examine their faith, they do not raise any interesting or new points, and they use highly inflammatory language; to me they only seem to evince an attitude of snide contempt and mockery, and I am curious why you bother.

Ok Mossy Now we are cooking with gas. First equation firstly put stuff in nice neat columns if I was you - its helps keep things together secondly do your basic arithmetics more carefully 15a-15a= 0 10b-3b =?? 5 - (-51) =?? do these sums and it will work out a bit nicer edit the captain is damn quick with his [maths] markup

Great article - though fraid I cannot help you. MduS's books are very popular though and you might be able to pick up a copy of the book he mentioned super cheap on Amazon. Suddenly humbled by the fact that Riemann did all that and so much more, yet died at 39!

Mossy Put down what you have done to the two questions and we will push you in the right direction. There is really no difference at all - ie the fact that the constant is positive or negative makes no odds If I was helpful, let me know by clicking the [+] sign ->

If you have the time and effort - - use bamboo and just slowly whittle a hole in the bamboo close to end (ie outside where wheel goes) - I would cut a notch in each side and then poke/drill through - cut a very slender needle of bamboo - put wheel on - put needle of bamboo through hole to stop wheel coming off - if you want wheels to turn without fouling bamboo needle use thin and small radius piece of radish as washer between wheel and needle and seriously trigonometry?

OK - there are a few pointers. 1. You can add and subtract simultaneous equations from each other. Your equations are made up of three terms (using the first question) an 'a' term, a 'b' term, and a constant - ie it is 3 times 'a' plus 2 times 'b' equals 1. When you add or subtract a pair of equations you get the 'like terms' together. You cannot subtract 15a from 2b and get a simpler answer, but if you subtract 3a from 15a you get a simpler answer 12a. 2. An equation remains the same if you multiply all of it by a number If you multiply each part of 3a+2b =1 by a number, say for example 4, you get the same equation but with a fixed multiple 3a+2b=1 says the same thing as 12a+8b=4 Play with these two rules and you will find that multiplying equation one (remember every single term) by a number and then taking it away from equation two (gather 'like terms') will give you a simpler equation where one of the terms (the 'a' term or the 'b' term disappear). Try it and put up your ideas If I was helpful, let me know by clicking the [+] sign ->

And Ed Witten (amongst many others) shows that this process is still on-going

Sam - I would be interested to see you show a nice simple solution/factorization. Note that [math] b^2 -4ac < 0 [/math] That means complex roots. the question was either far too difficult for students who were just starting algebra, a trap by a teacher to catch out students, or a transcription error. Now [math] 3x^2 -6x - 9 =0 [/math] or the equiv [math]x^2 -2x -3 =0 [/math] now they are easy

I dunno if this is what Moontanman meant - but you can use a ice, salt and one container within another to make ice cream. It definitely works (although I have not tried the two tin method linked) - the salt water is able to be cooled to a lower temperature by the ice cubes, which means that it can draw the heat from the cream till the cream freezes. Now tell me an experiment that ends up with making ice cream isn't a winner with kids

Will it soon be possible to run qualitative / comparative experiments - ie whilst sample size might be too small to get measurements that in absolute terms are useful; could you not create two identical magnetic holding volumes one with hydrogen and one with anti-hydrogen and identify differences (or lack of) between the two samples. with interferometry would you be able to notice a change in interference pattern where one route ran through a hydrogen containment and the other ran through anti-hydrogen - or would even this qualitative view be swamped out?

they are the same. If you take [math] = \frac {-1(5x - 1)}{-1(-5x + 18)} [/math] ie multiply top and bottom by -1 you can get two different and slightly nicer ways of expressing same fraction [math] = \frac {1-5x}{5x - 18} [/math] this is both upstairs and downstairs multiplied by -1 or [math] = -1 * \frac {5x - 1}{5x - 18} [/math] this is with the minus 1 taken outside bracket and downstairs of fraction multiplied by -1

Couple of things - firstly this is a help forum not an answer forum, it's preferable if you tell us first what you have attempted. secondly are you sure you haven't made a transcription error - the equation is not able to be factorised in the normal easiest sense