Mr Skeptic

A related thing: the result of burning hydrogen with oxygen as the oxidizer, is water. Water is notoriously good at putting out fires. Likewise, the result of burning carbon with oxygen as the oxidizer is CO2, which is also non-flammable and found in plenty of fire extinguishers. These are low energy molecules, since it would take a lot of energy to separate them into their component chemicals (the reverse of the fire reaction).

Interesting. I would not have thought animals would have the patience/attention span to do this. I think depending on how you measure intelligence, humans might not be the most intelligent. Really what makes us special is not just our intelligence, but other attributes: society, communication, abstract thought, ability to create/use technology.

A few of the catalysts can be predicted, especially the acid or base catalysts, from the reaction you are trying to do. Oftentimes the catalysts just seem random, although I suppose a supercomputer and a physical model might predict them. Anyhow, looking it up is probably the best method.

These are unfortunately fairly generic symptoms. For example, lack of sleep would account for all of them. Have you asked them if it might be something other than a tumor? Do the doctors think there is anything wrong with you? You're taking drugs to treat a condition you don't know what it is?

If you look closely enough, all sciences are really just branches of physics

I don't think it can compare to plain old sunlight. The reason solar wind might be useful for spaceships is not the energy, but the momentum.

Are biological sources natural?

If you use a furnace to heat your greenhouse, just dump the CO2 from the furnace into the greenhouse. If your house is nearby too, you could pipe the CO2 from your furnace as well. Aerobic decomposition of organic material will also produce CO2. Or you could burn something extra.

You make sure that if two things were equal before your change, they remain equal afterward. One way is to do the exact same thing to both sides, whether it be multiply, add, take logarithm, etc. Another is to replace one thing by something equal, for example if x = 3y + 5, you can replace an x in one side by the other value that is equal to it. Another thing you can do is multiply just one side by 1, or add 0 to just one side. This last bit might seem silly but remember that there are lots of things equal to 0 or 1.

I don't think essentially giving up and establishing Islamic law are going to remove support for terrorism.

There's nothing "alternative" about a Stirling engine The higher the temperature differential, the more efficient the engine, in theory at least. In practice, a melted puddle of metal is not particularly efficient.

I'm Chris.

About as likely as the TV series Sanctuary being factually accurate. (check it out, you'll enjoy it).

It's a great idea, and will be especially useful for space or extraterrestrial colonies, where there isn't a huge amount of nice arable soil available. Or for the future, but personally I'd like to think that by then society will have evolved past this barbarian consumption of other organisms and synthesize our own food directly. For now, they can work on making sure it tastes OK, is highly nutritious, and functions at high efficiency.

Yeah, their conditions include the restoration of Islamic law -- can't see liberals agreeing to that.

I thought casinos use multiple decks and randomly (unknown to players) shuffle the deck, to make things hard on card counters.

So a lot of folks, for example Rush Limbaugh and Stephen Colbert, have given to charity, based at least in part on things like fund-raising and auctions. I have two questions: 1) How exactly does the tax-deductible aspect work? It can't all be deduced directly from the taxes, can it? 2) Who exactly gets to deduce this from their taxes? For example, if someone bids for an item knowing that the funds go to charity, and probably over-paying for it for that reason, do they get to count that as tax-deductible? Likewise, can the host, knowing that they got more money for an item than its real value since it is going toward charity, count all that money as tax deductible?

What context?

Or, it could be traced a bit further back than that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar The use of the term avatar for the on-screen representation of the user was coined in 1985 by Chip Morningstar and Joseph Romero in designing Lucasfilm's online role-playing game Habitat. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged That's pretty much how I feel. And remember, even if people put pictures of themselves, or seem to, it is absurdly easy to put a picture of someone else instead. You can't really trust people to actually look like what they appear to look like. As it is, I think that for the most part it is obvious when someone is posting a picture of themselves or not -- but if we had everyone put up a portrait, I doubt that would still be the case. Also, the fear of having job troubles is quite real: people have lost their jobs for showing up on an internet search saying something their current or prospective employers don't like. PS: if this happens to you, say it was someone else. Names aren't unique. Anyhow, you can call me Chris if you prefer.

That's false. Falsifiable means that something could be shown to be false by experiment, if it is in fact false. You can't make a meaningful, predictive statement about the universe if it is not falsifiable. If you make a meaningful predictive statement about the universe that happens to be true, it is still falsifiable (were one of the predictions it made incorrect it would be false) but in practice will never be falsified because it is true. However, we can't know that.

Seems to me that if you distort the length and time dimensions, you can distort the energy dimension as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity#Relativistic_mechanics

Not quite. It has several effects: one is that it gyroscopically stabilizes the bullet, so that it doesn't tumble. Another is that it ensures that drag from unevenness on the bullet does not make the bullet veer off course. The bullet travels in a roughly helical parabolic path. None of this applies to light, nor would it apply to keep things like buckshot from spreading.

Rodents can be very nasty. See this for example: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/19/wildlife.endangeredspecies And rats are even nastier, probably having caused the extinction of thousands of species after we carried them along on our ships to various islands. I doubt their tooth structure will change to the one shown though, but they can be nasty enough as is.

But opinions are just another form of fact (personalized, anecdotal facts).

I think it depends on how much value there is to removing competition, and how much value to losing one's job (although that last bit may not matter if you assume pure rationality).