Mr Skeptic

What you are describing is an electric dipole. It would be capable of picking up pieces of paper and other non-magnetic stuff like the static electricity on a balloon that has been rubbed on hair. Also, you can't have an electric dipole of that size on a conductive material like iron. Cut the magnet in half. If you had positive charges on one side and negative charges on the other side, you would have the two sides always attract each other.

Follow swansont's advice. You are probably right that no one would read the whole poster if it is just text, and especially if they know little of the subject. Cut down on detail. If you really feel the need to include lots of text, put it in a side bar that people won't feel bad about not reading, and put all the juicy stuff in bigger font with pictures. It should look more like an outline/slide show than a paper.

What war?

I was wondering what people could tell me about coating glass, particularly windshield glass, to make it better. Normally, glass is somewhat hydrophilic, which is annoying because water droplets can form on it, and stick to it. --- Some examples that I know of: A coating of detergent left on glass will prevent fog from building up on the glass, eg on the inside of a windshield or on a bathroom mirror, by breaking the surface tension of water droplets. However, it will come off when washed, though it will stay for quite a while otherwise. A thin coating of titanium dioxide will make glass hydrophilic and also act as a catalyst for decomposition of organic compounds with UV. It is called self-cleaning glass. It also somewhat prevents nonpolars from sticking on it. With UV, apparently it becomes superhydrophilic with a contact angle of nearly 0 degrees. It should also prevent fogging, and make rain drops spread into a sheet. But why is it not used much? Alternately, applying trimethylsilanol (CH3)3SiOH to silica should make it hydrophobic enough to prevent water droplets sticking to it. This is particularly seen in "magic sand" where the hydrophobic sand has some interesting and fun properties. -- Anyone know if these or other coatings can be applied to improve windshield glass?

Not if you want the sphere to be hollow. The effects of the other charges on the sphere's surface cancel each other outside the sphere, making it as if the sphere wasn't there if you are inside it. You'd have to have the charge at the center, but how would you hold it in place?

But always the same choice? I think that you and I would make a different decision here. If the parents are too incompetent to have safe sex, and too incompetent to decide whether they want a child or not, I wouldn't want the decision to be forced for them in the affirmative. Why condemn a child to a life with incompetent and perhaps resentful parents and the risk that they may have a poor education and higher crime rate? My own view is that abortion is a bad thing, but preferable to an unwanted child. However, if there were good parents volunteering to adopt of an unborn child themselves, I would think that the abortion would be immoral.

But some types of factory work are extremely simple. Packaging is a major part of manufacturing, and there is little to screw up. I'm not very familiar with monkeys, but hiring humans is quite expensive. I don't know how hard it would be to train something like that, and I'd imagine their work would be lower quality. That's also why I suggested using genetic engineering to make them smarter, which should also make this discussion more interesting. If they were able to be communicated with and teach each other, it would be much more profitable and ethically questionable. The benefit over machinery is that they should be more adaptable, won't jam, and won't need repairs. --- Oh, and I just remembered that some monkeys are used for harvesting coconuts. I'd imagine they rather enjoy that kind of work. They have also been used to help the blind. And of course as test subjects, though that wouldn't count as work. So there is some precedent for using monkeys for work.

Using a black hole to focus solar power seems a little extreme. A better, and actually practical solution is to use mirrors to focus the light. This has been suggested as a way of making Mars warmer, and also the reflected light could stay on at night. Also, putting solar cells in space is a very practical solution that could be done right now but would be better with cheaper, lighter, more efficient solar cells.

If the police asked me to shoot a man that was defenseless and in custody, I could get charged with murder even if the police told me to do it. Likewise, in the military, you get told that you are responsible for refusing illegal orders. There's no reason that the telecom companies would not have been familiar with the wiretapping laws that forbade warrantless wiretapping. If they were to be excused for breaking the law, what is to stop them from doing so again? Shall we have a precedent that breaking laws that the executive branch doesn't like is OK?

I just heard over the radio that that is what happened.

I like JohnF's idea of making patents royalty only, without the monopoly that would allow someone to bury the idea. However, that also has some issues. Many times, the patent is used as a product protection thing, in which case, the company would not want the technology disclosed if others could then copy it. Secondly, a monopoly makes the new idea more profitable, which would increase the reward to the patent holder, and encourage companies to research new technology. Therefore, I would suggest that the patent holder should be able to have a monopoly, but only if they are actively working on the idea, or producing products with the patent. But if they have the idea sitting on the shelf, anyone who wants to can use the idea and pay royalties.

If it were possible to train monkeys or other primates to do boring labor like factory work, would you find this acceptable? What if they had to be genetically engineered, or specially bred to be smarter so they could do the work? Why aren't trained monkeys being used for labor today? There's some parallels to other animal issues, like food animals, and other animals already used for stuff like plowing, guiding blind people, companionship, etc.

Ideally, by keeping it way the hell away from earth, using momentum from the particles fed to it, or electromagnetically levitating the charged black hole. I'm actually asking if that would be possible. I don't know for sure that black holes actually can convert matter into antimatter; I'm just guessing it would do that because I think it would eventually have to loose charge to keep evaporating. In any case, I don't think Hawking radiation has even been confirmed or if it is still hypothetical. And keep in mind that when I said it would be about 100% efficient, I'm comparing it to fission and fusion which are about 0.5% or less efficient in terms of matter to energy conversion. If the black hole emitted matter that you don't want, you can just toss it back in. The confinement should be easy energy-wise, especially if the black hole is charged; even arbitrarily small using electrostatics. The energy to create the thing might be enormous, but so long as you don't let it evaporate, the black hole will last as long as you feed it, without wear and tear. So just keep it around long enough and the energy to create the black hole will become negligible. --- Did I put this in the wrong place? Is Klaynos the only one reading Modern and Theoretical physics?

I suspect the reason that the Bush administration wants to grant them retroactive immunity is so that they will be very cooperative in the future. Next time the telcos are asked to break the law, they can consider that they will be somehow punished if they refuse, but granted retroactive immunity if they cooperate. So the laws will become meaningless.

I don't think that would work too well here. At least in places that are nearby a Native American nation (like Seneca), would be able to go there to purchase tax-free cigs and gas. The government doesn't like that, but that's the treaty they made. I don't know if there are other such mini-nations in the US that don't have to pay taxes, but then few people seem to know about such things.

Small black holes evaporate because they emit more massenergy than they take in. Most black holes are large, and for now they take in more energy in the form of cosmic background radiation, than they emit as Hawking radiation. They're too bulky and unenergetic to be of much use. But the small ones emit more Hawking radiation than they take in, making them evaporate. All you need to do to prevent it from evaporating is to toss in more matter (or energy). It doesn't matter what you toss in, you can toss in iron that would be worthless for fission or fusion, and it will add to the black hole's mass. Then it converts to energy as the black hole evaporates. For the theorized black holes that might be made in a particle collider, it may prove difficult to throw in even a single atom before it evaporates, but if it were a little bigger, that would not be a problem. It would be more efficient than fusion, because it would use 100% of the mass, not a tiny fraction like with fission or fusion. It would be better than the current methods of creating antimatter (if it even works), because it would be about 100% efficient, if you consider that the remainder of the mass used would be converted into energy, rather than having to use energy to create the antimatter.

What's the difference? You see an up-side-down image, with shadows from your nerve cells, and then your brain needs to extract the information. You need to find lines, curves, surfaces, colors, adjust for shadow, calculate size and distance, build a 3D model, recognize what it is you are looking at despite distortions and different angles, remove the object from its background, etc, etc, etc. If you think sight is so easy, feel free to make a computer program that can understand sight. Maybe you can become the top expert in computer vision.

Ideally, you would want to make your own black hole, so that it would be small enough to have more Hawking radiation. That could be done with a large dense ball, or a very high energy collision. I'd imagine the black hole would eventually have to shed its charge, as eventually the electric field on it would overcome the gravitational field if it did not lose charge as it lost mass. And, of course, the bigger reason you would want a tame black hole is so you can harness its Hawking radiation for power, as it would be much more efficient than say a fusion reaction and is not at all particular as to what fuel it burns. If it could produce antimatter as well, it might be worth doing just for that.

From what I understand, producing antimatter would be a very expensive proposition by most means. But if you had a small black hole, and fed it only or mostly with protons, you could get a highly charged black hole. If the black hole were to shed its charge, my guess is that it would do so with the lightest positive particles -- positrons. So would it be possible to throw protons into a black hole and get back energy and positrons via Hawking radiation?

Tell that to someone who was born blind, then got their eyes fixed. You really do need to learn to see, and it has to be while you are young.

I don't think "awesome" is the word I'd use to describe it, but it does seem like a reasonable idea to use nuclear power to create our liquid fuels. Quite realistic, even, if there weren't so many regulations on and people terrified of nuclear plants. By the time the bureaucrats and NIMBY's are satisfied, we will have found a better solution In any case, the results should be applicable to fusion as well, if we ever figure that out.

Actually, I think it is a good one. I'd bet several here would be interested in doing some "mad scientist" work if it were cheap enough.

But the genetic material itself does nothing. It's more like an instruction manual. The proteins in the nucleus receive signals, and look up the appropriate instructions. The proteins switch genes on or off, send messenger RNA to the ribosomes, etc. So the chromatin, that makes up the protein+DNA complex would be more analogous to a brain than just the DNA.

What's that? friction making things speed up? I don't think so. If anything, the satellite would loose kinetic energy from friction, and exchange potential energy for kinetic energy. The smaller orbit would require the faster speeds. Nothing paradoxial here, things speed up when they fall down.

Hawking radiation from microscopic black holes! Much more efficient than fusion (should convert 100% of matter into energy), and ought to add interesting plot elements