Dave

I think there'd be a lot more women in science if it wasn't for the fact that for some reason it's misconstrued as a man's subject. At least we can be grateful for the fact that at least the prejudice doesn't seem to be as apparent in the scientific community any more.

A: A lot. Q: A monkey or a jar of treacle?

news.bbc.co.uk - definately the best news site on the net by a long way.

It's gotta be done

I had to play part of a Mahler symphony for my Grade 8 piece so I've gotten into his style of music quite a lot. Also had to play a piece by Guilmant, so I've listened to a bit of his stuff. Debussy is also one of my favourites, especially his piano pieces.

I can think of better ways. Personally the comedy option would definately involve a trebuchet.

The thread's just a bit of a laugh to let new people see who's who really. It's not meant to be an authoritative list of people's scientific interests - after all, this is the discussions forum. To be honest, the forums don't really sport any kind of chaos; they're quite sedate in my opinion. And people aren't obliged to put any information in their profile that is optional - some people value their privacy more than others for whatever reason. More than likely, people who would post their details on the thread already have their profile details filled in.

It's almost like the incredible hulk. But in a geekier way.

I've been reading up a bit on them, and they sound quite interesting. However, I'd hazard a guess to say that the ferrofluid displays are made with some kind of oil and extremely fine iron filings (although I could be wrong of course). I don't know whether you made your own ferrofluid or not, but this could be causing your problem.

I suppose you just need to find the right mix. They probably spent quite a while trying to get the right one themselves.

I just read the sentence: You need to read this. Basically we know that mass and energy are interchangable for high-speed particles (i.e. close to c) through E = mc2, so this explains a lot of things. Give it a read. Plus that system you've quoted requires a lot of energy to actually fuse in the first place. Don't know about you, but I don't know many balloons of hydrogen that spontaneous undergo nuclear fusion. From your bird example: I suggest you read up on some chaos theory. http://www.codynamics.net/science.htm This explains the butterfly effect - or basically put, how a bird can cause a thunderstorm over half the planet away just by flapping its wings. However, that's just a sidenote and has no contribution to the real argument. I can't see much else wrong with your example, apart from the fact that you've ignored quite a few fundamental laws. This bit just confused me: Well, yeah. You just did. The earth is attracted to the bird (equal and opposite reaction). If it stays up there long enough, it's going to cause something to move, and indeed if it stayed up there for 10^19 years (which is about a billion times older the age of the universe, give or take) then it's going to cause it to move. I think you'll find you're mistaken. Tried making a perpetual motion machine recently? I haven't had time to read the rest of it, but you need to go through and re-read more or less all of it. I'm sure most physicists in the world have great confidence in conservation of energy for (relatively) slow moving particles. I'll post more when I'm less tired

I'd say guns are probably the only cause of death-by-guns myself But seriously, your statement is right; guns were created to kill or harm other people and for that reason they are only designed to do one thing. You can apply a similar argument to people who say 'nuclear weapons are designed to release a very large amount of energy by the process of nuclear fission' or 'nuclear weapons are a deterrent'. They may do both of these things; but they were designed to kill people and as such they can only be used for one thing.

The major intelligence communities have quite a lot of control over what the press publish; after all, the press usually get their stories from leaks within the intelligence community. So in a sense they can control the flow of information, but only to a certain degree - obviously big stories can't be kept secret for long. You also have to realise that the intelligence community is very capable of releasing misinformation and have probably done so on many occasions. I'd also be surprised if they didn't have quite a few contacts within the major news networks as well to stop them publishing certain stories. So maybe they have a bit more influence than you might think.

If he did, I can't for the life of me think what.

It's certainly possible I'll still be around to see it; I hope so, definately can't wait

I'm not building huge rockets since primarily I don't have a car yet and it's a bit awkward to get around without my dad's car (which isn't around too much). I'm just planning to build a couple of tester rockets to get me started, and I've also been thinking about the wireless transmission on the video (although it's a pain to get them over here).

Nothing too ambitious really. Maybe some kind of simple altimeter setup at first just to record how high the thing goes and to get the parachute out at a sensible altitude. However an entire linux system for just that would probably be (a) expensive and (b) stupid. I'm trying to make it into a joint model/electronics project for the summer (in which I have 3 months to kill), so I'm just looking at various possibilities. My original ambition was to have some kind of small camera attached to the side, then pipe the feed directly into RAM storage (flash data transfer rates aren't that good, specially not for video transfer) so I can view it later, but it's definately too ambitious for a first flight.

Chopin is very good, especially some of his piano sonatas.

I'm doing some theoretical work (as an alternative to doing yet more revision) on model rocketry again, and I'm wondering about the effect of rapid acceleration on computer hardware. What I'm currently thinking is that the only (?) things are likely to be affected are things with lots of moving parts. Obviously mounting a hard drive in there is completely out of the question. At the moment I'm considering mounting some kind of mini ITX motherboard into the rocket chassis, then using some kind of usb flash device to boot linux (my os of choice) from. (If anyone cares, I'm doing this as a challenge to maybe get some kind of flight management system on board a rocket without the hassle of having to deal with embedded systems too much).

Big fan of film composers (which I count as classical) like John Williams. My favourite 'proper' classical composer would probably be someone like Mozart or Beethoven, although they can be quite dull at times. Can also play Moonlight Sonata

Yes. Aliens. More than you can shape a UFO-sized stick at.

I look forward to the day when commercial space travel becomes a common occurence - I just hope I'm still around to see it

The sooner the better in my opinion. NASA seems to think that they 'own' space, and I personally believe that is an attitude that we would be much better without.

I'm pretty sure there'll be a time it'll happen to me, unless you create the elixir of life in your lab