Dave

I could never get into Iain Banks. I've got 'Excession' sitting on the bookshelf next to me and it's not really going to move very much. Apart from that I generally read quite a lot of Tom Clancy more than anything else (which isn't really sci-fi, but oh well). Ringworld series of books by Niven's quite good as well.

On the whole the NHS is a brilliant concept, but unfortunately it definately doesn't receive enough funding, and what funding it does receive is split over a very large area of medical services. On top of that, the infrastructure of this country is just falling apart anyway since there's far too many people, far too many short term bodge jobs by the government and not enough space. Having said all of this, someone I've known since I was born got told about 6 months ago that he'd got Hodgkin's disease (lymphomatic cancer) and he's received outstanding treatment off of the NHS. So it's not all bad.

Unfortunately, most of the governments of the world care more about their popularity ratings than finding a solution to the impending doom of the planet. The problem is that most governments don't want to invest money in long term projects because if nothing happens in the short term, then it doesn't get their ratings up. Hence being seen to sink money into a seemingly bottomless pit, there is no impetus to get the ball rolling.

I can just see the captions now and the random bodily parts flying everywhere

Then why quote my other post and not include this one? I don't particularly like Microsoft (and may I say that the post was written with a certain amount of irony in mind - after all it is a beta), but I was simply trying to point out that in my experience OS X has been stable. There is no need to bite my head off for saying such a thing.

That looks pretty good. Hopefully they can build on the research and get a few more million neurons into it

What's your point then? I don't believe I was attacking the stability of any certain Microsoft products. I was merely pointing out that from my experience of OS X, it's an extremely stable client OS.

It'd just get spammed with ideas about black holes.

I've been using OS X for about a year now and I think the only time that it's ever crashed has been when I loaded a dodgy kernel module.

It's a load of crap to be quite frank - it'd be something if it actually worked and you could use it, but to use it as an artistic "accessory" is just plain stupid imo.

Well it's like the guy said, we may not even have the technological capability yet to discover how fast the speed of gravity is - unless, of course, someone comes up with a viable method that is relatively easy to implement.

Damn, you got some big ones over there. I just don't see how it's possible for someone to be that stupid enough to "molest" a crocodile.

Yeah, our spelling is right damnit.. anyway, I think the hat suits him.

I personally thought Voyager was the best of the lot. Enterprise isn't too bad either imo. First Contact was definately the best film they've done. Didn't bother to see Nemesis though because it just looked crap.

erm... I think that's just about the most off-topic post I've ever seen

I don't look at it too much, not a lot on there really apart from birthdays, and they're on the main page. btw, your avatar disturbs me.

Nice car

lo there, hope you enjoy your time here.

So were neutrinos at the time. When people discovered particles not recoiling in the direction they should have, they assumed it was another particle that was causing this; although it took a while to prove, they turned out to be right in the end. Likewise with the graviton - there is a possibility that it is totally a fiction of our imagination, but we need to find out either way. Until we come up with some more experiments for detecting (or disproving) the graviton, we're not going to find out either way.

Fractals have an uncanny way of showing up in nature. I wouldn't be surprised if they showed up in some arrangements of atoms and whatnot, but I think I'd be a bit surprised if it had something to do with the actual makeup of the atoms themselves. Who knows?

There is a difference between a trick and a flaw. A piece of 'trick' mathematics will try to convince the reader that there is a flaw in the mathematical system by falsely 'proving' something (like I 'proved' 1=9 in the other thread). This is NOT a flaw. I posted that particular thread so that I could get people to think a bit and say 'oh yeah, that's neat' or whatever. If I was trying to show you all that the system of trigonometric identities is wrong, then I would have posted a conclusive proof. The particular post is wasn't posted in that fashion. I mean, clearly it's just taking the wrong sign on a square root. blah.

Okay, basically, you have to imagine that you're going to take one small segment of the arc, delta s. Because it's so small, you can approximate it to be a straight line and hence you can derive it using Pythagoras. A diagram would help, but unfortunately I can't post one at the moment. Hope this helps.

ouch. coincidentally, I hope that's not your hand. If it is, I think I'd get it checked out

Nobody knows really - it's an extremely important constant, but it still surprises me when it turns up in a really obscure part of mathematics (like the infinite limits of sums going to things like pi^2/6). I suppose its because circles, angles, and more importantly radians are used in so many parts of science.

No they aren't. Sure, some might be quite simple, but it encourages people to actually think about why things are wrong. When I was 16, my maths teacher showed me a bit of 'trick' maths that was interesting because you can't get it to work without explaining why the equation x^3 = 1 has 3 different answers, and this encourages people to continue with mathematical studies - and hence help them understand the mathematics.