Dave

cheese

6. could be a rhombus also.

From that last statement, I'd guess not very many people.

I've got a question I'm rather bamboozled on with regards to SMS messages. I need to transfer my messages from my old T68i to my brand spanking new panasonic X70. does anyone know how to do this without forwarding them to the new number? Cheers.

same here. i don't really like being called david that much.

Don't think that'd work unless you could make sure that the concrete/surface underneath wasn't affected, otherwise you'd have large holes in the pavement afterwards. Much better to use high powered water pressure I would imagine.

Number of turns in the coil will affect the amount of electricity generated. Basically the more surface area of wire you can surround the magnet by and the faster you can move the magnet, the more current will be induced. Not sure about the core material.

The gold foil was Rutherford's Alpha scattering experiment. He basically fired helium nuclei (alpha particles) at an extremely thin (couple hundred layers of atoms) piece of gold. Using the model of the atom that was thought to be right at the time (plum-pudding model), all the alpha particles should have passed straight through the foil. But he measured a very small minority (like 1/10000 attempts) that were deflected back on themselves. So he was able to determine that the current model we use today of the atom was the correct one, not the other one. That's probably a crappy description, but if you want to learn more, just google it.

You can't cool something to absolute zero. I've never done much thermodynamics to be honest, but the reasoning is something along the lines of not being able to remove all energy from the molecules of whatever you're trying to freeze.

It's not all that expensive in the grand scheme of things to make liquid nitrogen. To keep it you use something called a joyst (sp?). I've seen a few, you can keep about 20-30 litres (or more) of liquid nitrogen liquid for about a month or so. They're about £300 and they're essentially big thermos flasks.

Not if the second law (edit: maybe first? can't remember) of thermodynamics has anything to do with it

I just feel kindof sorry for the Beagle 2 crew, it's a terrible shame that it didn't make it.

I'd be very worried myself if I ate some alpha emitting source. It causes massive ionization of the skin and can lead to all sorts of internal damage; I do believe Marie Curie died from some kind of radiation induced cancer from the Radium she carried around. They like to use things like Technecium 99m in hospitals for tracing (good old a-level physics) because it's got a short half-life (matter of hours) and it's not likely to damage many cells at all. So it's probably not the best idea to have depleted uranium on toast for tea.

Since the forum really does run the risk of going completely sour if someone doesn't post something in it, I thought I'd try to liven it up a bit. I don't know whether anyone who reads these forums has ever written a maths thesis/paper, but I think it'd be quite interesting to find out whether anyone has any particular areas of mathematics that they're fascinated/interested in, or whether you've ever written any papers/theses/short proofs/whatever on anything. Personally, I'm quite interested in the convergence of infinite series and finding their limits (mainly from all of the work we've been doing on it in Analysis this term). Hope we get some more people replying

Currently working on my BSc in Mathematics at Warwick. Definately not as good as most of the people on this forum however

surprisingly (and somewhat unimaginatively), dave.

Just started a linear algebra course myself; looks quite interesting, apart from the fact that the lecturer is possibly the most boring human being alive, and presents his lectures with as much enthusiasm as a small baked bean would. Apart from that, it's fine

Yeah, been to see it 3 times now, it's a bloody good film, best one of 2003 easy. Beats revolutions into a bloody pulp easily.

Merry Christmas to you all, and I hope you all enjoy the presents that you will inevitably get Hope you all get what you want, and you enjoy your holidays.

Including all the adverts and stuff they had, I was in the cinema for 4 hours. It seemed like about an hour because it was so damn good. The battle sequences definately rock.

And that other order just can't be right.

It's not, is the short answer.

All C/C++ strings are null terminated, which just means they have the ascii code 0 at the end of them.

I should think any decent software manufacturer would if it's that kind of genre.

I don't know whether you've ever found derivatives of functions by first principles, but if you did then you'd see that your order is correct. The idea is to take two points on a curve, joining them up with a line. If you keep one point fixed, moving the other one closer to it, then as you move them closer and closer to each other, you can obtain the limit of the line joining the two points. Then when the seperation tends to zero, the gradient of your line tends to the gradient of the curve at that point. Indeed, the derivative is defined using limits: dy/dx = limh->0 [ (f(x+h) - f(x))/h ] I'm pretty certain integration came afterwards, using the same kind of principles. Could be wrong about that though. Hope this helps.