imatfaal

Nice Post Captain. The Innocence Project at Cardozo School of Law provides profiles for over 200 people in the USA wrongly convicted and subsequently exonerated through DNA evidence - 17 where awaiting the death penalty!

not because Einstein says so - but because it explains the known facts better than anything else. few physicists wouldn't jump at the chance of expanding upon or even overturning einstein (the nobel prize money would be nice for a start) - the trouble with that plan is that einstein's conceptions tally remarkably well with a myriad of experimental data. To challenge einstein's work requires more than a general disquiet and unease about the possibly counter-intuitive conclusions - one would need either to show a situation in which predictions fail, or a complete new theory that not only explains everything as well as einstein's work it must also go beyond and explain other stuff. it is a common fallacy that science sticks with theory through some outdated adherence to dogma and over-respect for the status-quo - perhaps this was once true but in modern science as soon as a theory stops making provable predictions there are a pack of new ideas ready to replace it

it was spam. your original post, on the other hand, was offensive and nonsensical

Positron were initially conceived of as gaps in the dirac sea - this is a long way from being just simple vacuum. it was thought that for every positive energy state that a corresponding negative state should exist - but what stopped an electron shedding energy, emitting a photon, and dropping to a lower energy state to below zero and onwards. the dirac sea is the model/conception in which all negative energy states are filled - this theoretical model stops an electron from being able to drop down a state because it is already filled and the pauli exckusion forbids more than one electron in the same state. in some interactions one of these theoretical electrons in a negative energy state is removed - leaving a "hole" in the dirac sea. but a missing negative energy particle can be seen as a present positive energy particle. This present positive energy particle must have same mass and opposite charge to the missing negative energy particle - it is now thought of as the positron.

Paranoia - but we are the government, we exist as members of the state, our human identity is as part of the polis; to differentiate between the people and the government is make-believe. When a system of governance loses the support of the people it changes; sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, but it always changes. There is no 'us' and 'them'! You can set a "federal government" up as some sort of folk devil whom we can all hate and talk against, but at the end of the day we exist within the state, we are the state, the state is us.

I am presuming you are American - forget Lamy - get a Cross fountain pen. Fountain pens are lovely to write with unless. like me you tend to scratch your ears, put them in your mouth/pocket and gesticulate with them - in which case it can become very messy. Cheap biro or expensive fountain - both are great to write with, but other people tend to judge you on your penmanship and the fountain pen trumps everything.

Dean Normally we would say probability of any one ball is 1/3 or 1:3 not 3/1. Ie with a fair dice the probability of throwing a 5 is 1 in 6 - 1/6. your second proposition is strangely phrased - " the odds of 2 coming out 5 times in a row". Is that two different results coming five times on the trot or the result #2 coming solely five times... from your calcs I guess it is the second. The next part of your post is the mistake - once you have got four "2"s on the trot the random generator DOES NOT remember this fact and still produces the same odds for each option. You have already got the four "2"s - and the next throw is as random as any other; the dice, the cards, the ball etc do not remember what has got before!! This is vital in gambling - unless you are working on a restricted deck then there is no memory of the previous event. to be explicit - if you have just rolled 2,2,2,2 on a fair die, you are just as likely to roll another 2 than any other number. the high chance of 1 in 243 is for 5 times a certain number - but that is only applicable before the first ball is chosen. If the first ball is "1" then the chances of five "2"s is zero, ditto if a "3" is chosen . If you know the first ball is a "2" then the chances of 5 "2"s on the trot is simply the probability of the next four balls being a "2". In essence, basis a fair game (and if it is not a fair game then walk away) probabilities only work forwards and remember the dice/cards have no memory

Perhaps you should write down the equations of motion that you know - and see how they apply to your question. Bear in mind that you might have a situation that has a period of uniform acceleration followed by a period of uniform velocity. Michel is 100% correct - draw a diagram

Steevey read the first paragraph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangent - or read the 7-8th line http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Tangent.html The reason you shouldn't explode is that just touches or touches is a fairly recognized phrasing for describing a tangent line.

Your first link seems to tell the story of a situation in which the police will charge him with any possible outstanding murder charge and he will plead guilty. There is no downside to him pleading guilty - but if he denies it and gets found guilty he can suffer death penalty. Some police forces would have already charged him with every outstanding case just to improve their clear up rate.

If you are at the star it moves away from you at light speed - but the gap between me (on earth) and you (at the aforementioned star) gets bigger so rapidly that the light will never reach me if the universe keeps expanding. Light travels at light speed - but the space it must cross does not remain constant

A change to large tax-free allowance with a highish flat rate above that allowance from a progressive system tends to benefit the poorest and the richest, but those in the middle ground lose out. As floating voters tend to be those in the middle we tend not to see this pushed by many political parties who actually want to get elected.

NIN - just reminds me of original Quake - not saying that is a bad thing

El Cheapo yellow plastic blue ink bic biros for prose and very hard (4h and over) pencils for numbers

Do we have a right to drive - I would have phrased it that we are licensed by the law of the land to drive under certain circumstances. Some rights can be seen as absolute (life, not to be tortured etc), others are contingent (freedom of speech, association) - yet other notions are thought of as rights, but in fact are just generally applicable and accepted practices. There is a convention of the rights of the child - UNCRC - I haven't checked but I don't think driving is one of them.

As SwansonT said the experiments on antihydrogen at cern indicate this is not the case. The anti-hydrogen (ie anti-matter that was not electrically charged) created at CERN had to be maintained within a huge magnetic field - if matter repelled anti-matter it could have been easily constrained within any system made of normal matter. the link to the nature article that describes the containment of anti-hydrogen is here. Anti-matter is opposite charge - not opposite mass.

Widdekind - but why? in my limited knowledge, so far as we have discovered everything has that has mass has positive mass (energy - positive energy) - we have no basis to think about repulsive gravity or spacetime distortion in the opposite direction (if that can even happen). For there to be a repulsive gravitational force then we must first acknowledge the possibility of negative mass/energy. Rather than jumping straight out to the long scale interaction of gravity we should first try to understand how we could accommodate negative mass into our small scale world.

Benice - i have seen your question on a few fora, but not sure what it is about. Could you explain further? Is it a representation of an equation with three plus variables? Your last message seems to say it is a real figure disguised. What significance does the black section in the bottom left have? Or the obvious multiple layers on the right hand edge?

NO! Jeez! Tangent = Opposite over Adjacent. For heaven's sake - Silly Old Harry, Caught A Herring, Trawling Off Afghanistan SOH CAH TOA Sin = Opposite over Hypotenuse Cos=Adjacent over Hypotenuse Tan = Opposite over Adjacent take a right-angled triangle - the side that does not touch your angle is the opposite, the long side is the hypotenuse and the short side that touches your angle is the adjacent. The secant is the reciprocal of the cosine function ie 1/cos - ie hypotenuse over adjacent. This is basic trig HamsterPower the tangent and secant have other definitions as well . The Tangent is a line that "just touches" a curve - this is the same as saying it is perpendicular to the curve at that single point. the secant is a line that cuts a curve twice. But I would think that your teacher was talking about basic trigonometry. It's worth learning - it seems abstract at first, but it is incredibly useful. If you are having trouble make a post in the homework forum and I am sure people will talk you through it And Steevey - if you don't know don't answer

Jackson - I am familiar with the Daily Mail. To give you a USA based analogy - posting The Daily Mail as a source for data is probably not far from an American citing the National Enquirer; their stories are not quite as ludicrous and they pretend to be serious journalists, but there reputation of mincing up data and printing lies and half-truths is awful. My statistics were merely provided to show that picking and choosing a particular crime and time range can totally distort the facts - you will note that I made no conclusion or comparison apart from the UK gun-homicide rate. Just out of curiosity are you able to provide a schedule of the gun homicides within the USA for last 20 years or so - this http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir_percap-crime-murders-firearms-per-capita table seems to suggest that for death by gun at least the daily mail is a long way off the mark (note this is murders not homicides)

I have also heard it called Muphry's Law - which I really like

Rigney Here are the figures for UK Homicide by Firearms 1990 60 1991 55 1992 56 1993 74 1994 66 1995 70 1996 49 1997 59 1998 54 1999 49 2000 62 2001 73 2002 97 2003 81 2004 68 2005 77 2006 50 2007 59 2008 53 2009 41 Your quoted source is picking and choosing his years and crimes - if I could post a table I would, but here is a link. http://www.parliament.uk/briefingpapers/commons/lib/research/briefings/snsg-01940.pdf There is no doubt the UK had a surge in guncrime in the late 90s early 00s - but today it seems to be back to the levels of the early 90s.

His body/skeleton is still there - its only the head, which was disastrously restored, that was moved to the basement storage. I didn't realise that there was an LLM devoted to Bentham - seems a bit turgid. And I still disagree with your dichotomy that the only alternative to a strict bean-keeping calculus is romanticist...touchy-feely; but I don't think we will persuade each other on that matter.

[pedant] A fiddle of gold against your soul 'cause I think I'm better than you http://www.youtube.c...h?v=cDm_ZHyYTrg at 39-45secs [/pedant]

Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh is a great popular science read.