Schrödinger's hat

This is indistinguishable from nonsense. If you move towards something that is moving at close to the speed of light, you will simply see it moving closer to the speed of light. This is the origin of all the strangeness in special relativity. An outside observer could measure you each to be moving at 0.999 c, thus you could have a closing speed of ~2c in his frame.

That's how you know it is at most NP-Hard. This in no way says anything about whether it is at least NP-Hard. If I manage to find a way to turn integer comparison into the SAT problem, that doesn't mean it suddenly becomes NP-Hard. It just means I have a horrible algorithm for integer comparison. The meaning of optimization in this context was quite clear. Imatfaal -- There are constraints here that make me question whether it's polynomial time in the simplest solution. The day may be multiple shifts, people have days off, you don't want to be too inconsistent with number of hours for each person, and so on. Complicated enough that treating it mathematically would be hard. Now that's a sensible answer.

If I can construct one, I can also construct a line of √2m and measure out 100 of them. You have to remember that our base units are an entirely arbitrary choice (the derived ones, however, follow logically from that choice). This is irrelevant. It's just as hard to compare an infinitely precise 4.000.... as an infinitely precise √2 to any real object.

There's also some kind of acid in the flavouring, come to think of it. I recall reading something about a study on excessive (litres a day) diet soda intake and damage to bones, can't remember the details or conclusion.

You should have read DrRocket's post. No string or material is infinitely rigid. When you pull or push on one part, it changes the EM field around another part which then accelerates, pulling or pushing on the next part. We call the speed at which this propagates the speed of sound, and exceeding it will generally result in the breakdown of the material (barring non-linear effects, but they too have a speed limit). No matter what material you use, nothing can change the fact that the EM fields that cause the atoms to interact only update at c. So even if you exceeded the speed of sound in your material, you'd still be limited to the speed of light. You've basically said, "Assume I have something that can't exist, now I can exceed the speed of light." I can do that too. If I have the Starship Enterprise, I can exceed c.

Sure, I can think of a bunch of ways off of the top of my head. I don't know if any of them are optimal. One simple one is to just replace your switch with a pair of transistors. Have your logic circuit supply current to one of the other in the same way your physical switch would. Relays also seem like the kind of thing that would be used in this application. It's basically a mechanical switch driven by a small electromagnet. If you put a tiny bit more thought into it, you could probably just build a series of and/or gates, too. All depends on the application, really.

The dissolved CO2 forms an acid (carbonic acid, I think) in the water.

If I have a triangle with base and height 100m, then 100√2m is the hypotenuse. I can just as easily redefine my unit system so that they hypotenuse is 1flam (where flam is a new unit of distance) and 1/√2flam the base and height. Now which one is un-measurable? The point I'm making is that you have ignored the concept of experimental error. No realy measurement is going to be exactly 100m, even if we measure down further than the planck length (not thought to be possible), it'll be 100.0000000000000000000000000000000000000m We can easily calculate √2 further than this. You also have to remember that any numbers we apply are only a model. They do not represent the objects we are modelling exactly., only up to a level where any deviation from the model cannot be measured or is not important.

Online resources are still useful, and can be easier to study for some. The disadvantage is that they often lack the rigor and depth of knowledge, and they are frequently less reliable.

C is not object oriented...

I think, perhaps, you should start with some low voltage stuff and learn about electronics. Build/design a few radios and such first. If you need a step-by-step guide, then I'd be concerned about your safety working with high voltage. Once you do that, try and get access to an academic library. Some university libraries have public access for a fee, or you may be able to befriend someone at a local university (or even just wander into the library and read stuff there, there's often no entry restriction but your age may raise suspicion). You should find scientific and engineering books or journals on related subjects.

Interesting, could be the conductors along with the acid creating a cell. As the chemical reaction happens, the ph/conductivity changes. How much current did you measure? Did it alternate or just change in magnitude?

Khan academy http://www.khanacademy.org/ is a good resource to suppliment any book(s) you choose. The exercises section can provide a source of quick feedback in terms of where your knowledge is at. They're arranged in a tree structure which makes it easier to find out what you don't know (go up the tree until you have a really good handle on the concepts and the exercises are trivial, then go down one level). The videos are also very good. Come hang out in the chat room, most of us don't bite. I would also agree with DrRocket's point about non-calculus based physics. It is possible to learn the basics without, but it is much more rewarding, and the connections are much more apparent with. Trying to get a deep understanding of physics without calculus is like trying to get a deep understanding of literature without knowing the language and only having half of a traveller's phrase book. It will also be much quicker if you understand the calculus. Unfortunately, the mechanics section of Khan Academy is largely calculus free (last I checked, at least), but it may still offer a concrete grounding/context in some of the principles if correctly combined with a more mathematically oriented textbook.

Also, neither calculator is wrong. Both are internally consistent, they are just following different conventions. You will likely find that both calculators act like the one on the right if you use the * or [math]\times[/math] button. 2*(1+2) instead of leaving it implicit 2(1+2). The lessons we can learn from this are: 1) A world with many different conventions can be confusing. 2) Make yourself clear. When there are multiple conventions around you have to go the extra mile to avoid ambiguity -- as DrRocket said. 3) If you are going to use a tool, learn how it works.

Really now? What about the dynamic friction if you slip? What if you start falling and no longer have all your weight on the shoes? You go for a nice long stroll on a 70 degree roof, and I'll come to see you in hospital if you survive.

Suggestions, these are very useful for understanding what you did: Draw (and post, it may help us give hints without giving answers directly) graphs of your results (current vs voltage). Draw (and post) a circuit diagram. Describe your apparatus in detail, how did you record each variable? Where did you source your errors? Maybe mark on the circuit diagram where/how the voltages/currents/resistances were measured. When did you measure your voltage/current?

Microbiology would have an additional constraint in many cases where an entirely new strategy and the current strategy must be joined by incremental changes that don't lose catastrophically. So presumably you'd see cases where an organism has a winning strategy available that it is unable to change to.

I'm not sure there is a simple version. Also AS physics doesn't tell me much, not everyone has the same education system. Mentioning how many years of education or the average age of people learning something is more informative. Here goes an attempt at explanation. Relativity treats energy, momentum, and mass in much the same way. As well as treating time and space the same way. Call it energy-momentum and treat it as a vector. It has a magnitude -- how much stuff -- and a direction -- although this direction also includes information about its motion. Energy (which includes mass) is energy-momentum that is pointed in the time direction. Momentum is energy-momentum that is pointed in one of the other three. So four elements is enough to describe the...stuff-ness of a particle, but this is not enough if you have a big bunch of particles that you want to treat together, or a continuous field. Coming back to classical physics for a moment. If you consider a solid block of something stretchy and compressable, like foam rubber. There are different ways you can store energy in it. If you compress some section of it, it'll want to spring back. This stores energy. So would twisting a section. Energy can also be stored in the motion. A ripple will move through it if you hit it hard enough. The stress energy (or stress-energy-momentum) tensor is a bit like that. You count the energy-momentum in a region of space, the amount of energy-momentum moving through it, and the interactions between adjacent regions of your field. I'm afraid that's about the best I can do in terms of simplifying the concept. Someone better versed in GR may be able to help further.

Point. There are more like 10^57 atoms in a star. I guess things in things isn't really what I was getting at. More like.....a trillion is what takes us from a scale where we speak about things one way to a scale where we speak about them differently.

Indeed. I was mostly commenting on how close the numbers were that took you from one scale to another. Although, upon fleshing it out, they were more widely spaced than it first looked

Perhaps you can make it up in treacherousness?

Just one of those slightly interesting, but not very meaningful things that you notice from time to time. Average human cell is a few microns. [math](10^{-6}m)^3\times 1000kg\times 10^{27}[/math] Gives somewhere on the order of 10^12 atoms about 10^13 cells in a human body. about 10^10 humans on earth about 10^11 to 10^12 stars in the galaxy about 10^12 galaxies in the observable universe about 10^10 transistors in a modern cpu. Up to 10^12 if you count storage as part of the computer. So somewhere between 10 billion and 10 trillion things make a thing that acts in a completely new way.

Depends on the motherboard. I've seen del, escape, f2, f8 and f10 (and possibly f12, insert and tab, although they may have been something other than the config menu). It can help to mash one or more of these repeatedly from the second you power on. If you have some kind of fast-boot bios cache on hard drive thingy then you may have less than a second. If you're getting the windows boot manager (the screen you described) then whatever you pressed was incorrect or too late, by the time that registers (I think it's still f8 that activates), you're already running something off of the hard drive. If you're comfortable doing so removing (or removing the connectors/power cables to) any bootable drives will probably force the bios to consult you with what to do next.

The idea is to remove commercial incentive as much as possible. Also to make people pay in annoyance (can't find a reliable supplier easily because most people won't have surplus for more than a couple of friends, main way to get a supply is to produce your own) rather than money as much as possible. Raising prices (even through taxes, people will accept a price hike more readily if the price is already hight from the tax) mostly results in users becoming poor, and suppliers becoming rich. I think a position where drugs are actively marketed (by groups like the tabacco companies, or by drug pushers (again, not much of an issue with pot)) should be avoided. In my opinion, the organized crime and associated lifestyle is one of the most harmful things about drugs like pot/alcohol when they are illegal, almost as harmful as overuse. More addictive (ie. cocaine), dangerous to produce (ecstasy), and injected drugs would require a different strategy. I would not consider black market sales harmful as long as they were small scale (one person to his/her friends), other than upsetting the IRS. Agreed I do not think so. I was mostly putting it in for completeness. See above about small scale distribution. Penalties for minor infractions should consist of fines, with the money going to education, licensing and enforcement. For people running larger operations. I'm not sure, maybe change the prison penalties to large fines. Most of the heavy (rather than just recreational) pot users I've known were depressed at the time and self-medicating. I also should clarify/somewhat correct my point. What I should have said is that people having a hard time will sometimes turn to drugs. Ie. some troubled people turn to drugs, not most drug users use because they are troubled. This aside, I think pot is the least harmful if used in this context. I'd rate much less harmful than alcohol, beneficial in some cases. Agreed. The goal would be reduce the level of intrusion from the current level, whilst avoiding the harmful aspects of the tabacco industry and prohibition. I think full legalization would eventually lead to marketing and increased use.

URAIN, do not use the main physics forum to soapbox your personal speculations. Read the pinned notices and rules before posting: I read your previous post, but did not comment on it as it was indistinguishable from gibberish (It did not appear to format correctly, which possibly contributed to this).