kanzure

Death Star? We're already working on it. It's completely practical, the only questionable item on the list is the supermassive laser. - Bryan

I still have yet to understand why Tegmark argues there must be alternate universes. His mathematical reality interpretation is good as it is. - Bryan

FYI- Cal BC typically requires AB beforehand. But if you want to gun it, just study like crazy and make sure you *know* each of the topics thoroughly. A good idea would be to memorize (or at least remember how to derive) 100 theorems in calculus, as well as differentiation and integration methods to go along with it. And trigonometric substitution techniques, that's important. - Bryan

At first glance, it looks like a simple reaction that will make children happy, something like an explosion, not a serious nuclear reactor. The real deals are intense pieces of technology and engineering, you'd know one if you saw one. - Bryan

Uh oh. She. Yes. I see I've been away for too long- curious, I am usually up-to-date on the "regulars" across the forums. - Bryan

Indeed he does. - Bryan

Hey all, I am in search for some good mouse literature to read up on, such as taking care of lab mice as well as training methodologies or previous successes and so on. Where should I look or does anybody have a zip file of papers I can take a look at? Thanks, - Bryan

Let's take that answer seriously. I have some information on x-ray diffractometry, so go there and search for "XRD". Some of the resources include a mailing list and some tutorials, but I have not found any designs/schematics for XRD machines. - Bryan

What environments are conducive to the construction of water in particular? Is there any statistical likelihood that there are large bodies of water in interstellar space? Sorry to hijack the thread. - Bryan

I recently posted about "time before time" elsewhere, as well as on the existence of "time as a dimension". Yeah, that is a good answer. Also, the problem with saying "time began" is that you are trying to use time to define time, since time allows for beginning and ends. - Bryan

Computer science, in the sense of the study of computational abstraction and the mathematics of computation, is indeed an active area of development. However, I would be careful when saying "CS is programming languages," because technically that's not true unless you were wanting to make abstractions about all sorts of Turing-compatible languages, but I see that this is not what you are talking about. I agree with pcollins, "What?" - Bryan

Was not the flux density on the surface density of the earth, mind you. I was using this SVG image over at Wikipedia on cosmic ray flux versus particle energy and a conversation with a friendly particle physicist earlier this morning. - Bryan Edit: Haha, so I was off by an order of magnitude. How much volume did I neglect? Probably enough for trillions of trillions of earths.

So I did some calculations of how large a detector would have to be if we wanted to capture the gamma photons at 10^11 eV (10^-8 joules). So if we wanted to capture 80 terajoules of energy, enough for an atomic explosion, by my calculations we would need much more than a trillion octillion square light years (about 10^88 square light years?) of our absorbent machine/substance. Note that the observed universe is only 10^9 light years across. Thank you, Mr. Dyson. - Bryan

As to actually implementing your ideas. You may want to check out the DIY 1000 watt wind turbine project. You will not be able to harvest the complete energy output of tornadoes and hurricanes, but you can at least get something out of it. Edit- somebody said: And I disagree. You cannot harvest the totality of energy, but the increased wind speed can be harvested to some extent, etc. Re: cosmic rays. That's an interesting question. Gamma radiation is said to release more energy than other photons, so how big of a surface would we need if we wanted to harvest the power of gamma rays and get some stable energy levels? Would it have to be the size of the area of a city? Or maybe the size of our planet? Would we want to point the surface perpendicular to any particular area of the universe, to maximize the likelihood of hitting gamma photons? - Bryan

So, I have done my research on the sorts of schools that I would like to apply to since it is just about time for me. Originally, I started with the list of 50 schools that had MD/PhD programs as sponsored by NIH, and then narrowed it down to those schools that had good chemical and computer engineering programs, or maybe experimental physics, etc. However, recently I have found that I would much rather find those universities that bust paywalls. The importance of universities is not only the social environment wherein professors and other experts and peers can be contacted, but the library. These libraries with thousands of journals and tens of thousands of archived subscriptions are really awesomely important. Not to mention the online databases. What schools are focused on busting these paywalls, like EBSCO, Science Direct, ACS, JSTOR, and all of the many other databases that Google Scholar crawls? What university libraries are the most well funded? Which schools are focused on providing information to their students, rather than enforcing nasty copyright violation policies? Not everything can be accessed through the Interlibrary Exchange after all, right? BTW, this is a massive cross post, so check out my pub/portal for this thread on all of the other forums. - Bryan