Mr Skeptic

What, just because your clock is fancier than mine? Just so you know, a lot more people ask him what time it is than ask you about any measure.

The force of each wire on the other. Both experience the same force. Just because infinity is undefined, does not mean that it is not useful. Mathematicians often take the limit of something as one variable tends toward infinity (and the same for division by infinitesimals). In fact, I don't know how you could understand calculus if you don't understand the useages of infinity (an integral is the limit of a sum as the number of summed elements tends toward infinity, for example). And another thread starts marching toward where threads go to die. (Though that's not my prerogative this time). Let's not go the route of endless repetition again. That has the correct units but makes no sense. The infinitesimal is going to make the result zero unless you integrate.

Yes. Mathematicians do this all the time. Essentially, different things may share some of the same properties, and anything based on these properties will be the same. This is also why we can do medical testing for humans on fruit flies or yeast as starting points and still get results.

If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it. -- William Orton A lot of that happening lately.

I just don't believe that either the US nor Russian governments are stupid enough to do this. And no one else has the capability. Well there's smallpox, Dutch elm disease, myxomatosis, bubonic plague, AIDS... We've got plenty of incurable diseases, and plenty of cases of a disease wiping out huge percentages of the population. ~90% give or take mortality rates are not uncommon for invasive diseases. And these are natural. Natural diseases are limited in their virulence, because if they wipe out their host population they too die out. An artificial disease need not be limited like that. Do you really think US and Russia are going to destroy the world? Isn't it much more likely that someone somewhere is going to develop and use bioweapons? It's not like bioweapons haven't already been used in warfare to great effect. Yes, a dead city would be quite a mess. But not a global catastrophe. Yes but there's only two "swords" and I trust the folks holding them not to do anything crazy with them. Can you say the same of bioweapons? Disease, even unweaponized, has killed far more people than nukes ever will. Pandemic#Biological_warfare As for unintended side effects, the Black Death may have been an unintended side effect of biological warfare.

Good catch! Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged If their answer disagrees with yours, will you believe them? I hope they answer. Undefined. Without knowing what limits there are on the integral, you don't get a definite answer. No, the result of that integral would have units of charge times velocity (ampere*meters if you prefer). What were you trying to calculate? Does this surprise you? Your other equation however is correct for the definitions of coulomb and ampere.

Well whenever I'm about to die in a dream I always wake up instead.

Not with current technology -- I don't think the result would be as healthy as a regular child. I'm not sure that's possible. --- How about making a clone to harvest organs from?

Wasn't it? My question is a dimensional analysis question, which seems to be the topic. But hey, if you can't answer it that's cool. Speed has units of distance over time. This isn't a speed, it's a flow. An area if you prefer. You need to take into account the free electron density and the wire's cross sectional area before you can find the average drift velocity of an electron.

The problem really is that your question was a very specialized engineering question, one that several people (just probably none here) have already calculated. It's not like many of us here can simulate a nuclear blast.

How about: [math]KE = \int_{v = 0 m/s}^{v = 10 m/s}1 kg * \frac{1}{t^2} * r * dr[/math] That's a nice little integral over distance.

OK, now how about we do a dimensional analysis of this equation: [math]KE = \int_{v = 0 m/s}^{v = 10 m/s}1 kg * a * dr = \int_{v = 0 m/s}^{v = 10 m/s}1 kg * v * dv[/math]

It being an empty promise isn't really a plus in my book. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged We also have strong defenses against radiation, against fire, and against explosions. An underground bunker protects against all of those. We long ago evolved to have DNA repair mechanisms to deal with radiation of various kinds, from UV to radioactive decay. Even against all the nukes on earth, a nice bunker with nuclear power and sunlamps would keep a few people alive for quite some time (or a humongous stockpile of corn would do too). Said bunker would protect from bioweapons as well, so long as we didn't let anyone infected in. Certainly comparable to detonating 10,000 nukes though. If you're saying that 10,000 nukes beats 1 bioweapon, yeah I'd probably have to agree. It would depend on the bioweapon and on chance, but I'd take my chances with the one bioweapon. Bacteria and viruses trading genes is definitely in the realm of verified fact. Whether this with a weaponized germ could result in a humanity killer type of disease, I agree is unlikely -- but can you really rule it out as impossible? How about if a weaponized virus crosses with an avian one, so that the little birdies spread the virus everywhere? Impossible you say?

It's still going to need the oxygen in H2O ...Oh, you mean an animal that lives without oxygen. Ok, that's much more impressive. (suggest changing the title to say animal instead of life)

Yes, although as only one vector. Consider area vectors, for example -- they are a vector with units of area resulting from a cross product of two vectors with units of distance.

I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter for dimensional analysis. When it comes down to it, an integration is the sum of a whole bunch of very thin areas... the result would be the same as multiplying for the dimensional analysis, although of course the numbers would depend on the specifics. --- To get the correct number out of that formula you really do need to do the integrals, and properly. Carrying numbers through the dimensional analysis doesn't cut it.

Still, only two countries in the world have the capability to do that (and also I doubt it would kill every human), and neither of them have the motivation to do so at the time nor for the foreseeable future. Biological weapons, on the other hand, could potentially kill most of humanity with one single weapon, possibly as an unintended consequence, and there are several reasons and peoples that might want to use bioweapons. Possible people who might use bioweapons and could have the capability to develop them: *Small countries *Terrorists *Pharmaceutical companies *A person or group with resources seeking a huge ransom Possible reasons: *To kill a target small gathering *To kill people in a city *To cause global pandemic *Any of the above, for ransom or other demands *To create huge demand for a cure And again, bioweapons are the only class of weapons that could unintentionally kill most of the world population with a single weapon. They don't take massive and detectable infrastructure to develop, and much of the necessary knowledge is common knowledge and the equipment needed is all over the place and cannot be regulated.

It's also perfectly conceivable that a biological weapon not intended to be a world-killer accidentally becomes one. Bacteria and viruses can, and do, and will continue to, "borrow" genes from each other in the case of co-infection. In case you're wondering, 90% of the cells in your body are non-human. A biological agent could acquire additional virulence genes from your normal microfauna, or from a sick person, or could transfer the specially weaponized genes to infectious organism or normal human's microfauna. A nuke can't accidentally wipe out most of humanity. A biological agent could. A nuclear war could, but then so could a conventional war. Additionally, with biological warfare, people in shelters may not be safe as others may seek shelter or treatment after they got sick.

While that is almost true, the government is not allowed to censor free speech as part of the government's free speech. The government gives many of these companies a monopoly, and we can't have them acting on behalf of the government to censor free speech. The government got their grubby little fingers all over this and so now they ought to play by the government's set of rules as an agent of the government. Of course, one then wonders about how the government made a mess and that gives them the right to regulate the mess. Interesting thought, ecoli. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged So long as there's competition, I say they're more than welcome to abandon common carrier status and become personally responsible and liable for the content they choose to allow (including copyright infringement). What I don't want is if they try to worm their way out of it by degrading selected content and claiming they aren't choosing the content because they still eventually transmit the content.

There's no reason you can't have fibers in the powder.

Who said it was about the protests? I thought this was about her commentary on the protests, and how it differed depending on whether she agreed with the protesters. Ie, hypocrisy.

Hair cells are tougher, and are arranged in such a way as to be extruded into a long cylinder. (If your skin was made of the same stuff as hair but in one solid block, you'd be armored but have a lot of difficulty moving.) Making hair in this way takes a little more effort than just piling on the cells: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_follicle Also note the complex structure of each hair:

This is why we have polls in secret -- to avoid political persecution so people are not afraid of retaliation for their vote. The guy says he's still giving treatment to the folks, which makes him a liar. If I put up a sign in my restaurant saying "if you are black go elsewhere" but don't actually follow it, I'm still going to be labeled a racist.

Well living cells have self-repair. Dead cells do not. Inside the body, if a cell does die it is recycled and (if all goes well) replaced. On skin, we just keep producing more skin cells pushing the previous ones outward, which creates a moving barrier, a flow that carries away anything within it unless it moves faster than the flow. Our mucous works in a similar manner, we produce a constant flow of mucous that keeps almost everything out.

I'd credit CharonY, he's the expert. I'll probably mix up my enzymes again. Hydrogen peroxide would go about oxidizing your body if it didn't have something to react with first. We're made of fragile chemicals... We do have sacrificial chemicals to react with oxidizers first, either produced ourselves or stolen from other species (all those antioxidants they say to eat, including vitamin C).