Dave

debatable

It's very useful for proving things like Euler's formula (e^(pi * i) +1 = 0) and stuff like that. Not sure I can think of anything else to use it for, but it's mainly used in proofs and such things. And approximations to things like circular/hyperbolic functions etc.

I hate stats

irc > * when it comes to chat.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/31077.html Scientists have announced that they've securely transmitted data over 100km in fibre cabling using quantum cryptography; a major breakthrough meaning that we could have commercial equipment available within 3 years apparently. Quite an interesting read.

Happy birthday I just had mine 2 days ago, got an iPod and can now legally drink. w00t!

The equation you gave is a quadratic, which can only possibly have two solutions at most. If both solutions are real, then there are no imaginary roots to the equation. You can check it out by plotting the graph if you really wanted to - if the graph doesn't cut the x-axis then there are no real roots to the equation.

I like the new ones although in the second one there's quite a few images missing in various places.

It would depend on how our brains interpreted the signals from our eyes.

I don't think there is a "best" OS. Different OS's are good at different tasks. I currently have three machines here. My main computer is an iMac (one of the old ones) and it's great. It does everything I want it to do (so don't say "omg imacs suck cos they can't play games - that's what I have my PS2 for), and I have that triple booted with Mac OS 9, Mac OS X and Gentoo PPC. I also have a dual-booted windows 98/Gentoo x86 machine running in my hallway that acts as my server. This machine is just brilliant because I can run all my server applications there without the risk of the box crashing unexpectedly. I wouldn't entrust Windows with anything to be honest, and I can't stand the damn thing. The experience I had of installing Windows 98 on a blank harddisk with the CD (which wasn't even bootable) was enough to put me off it for life. My other machine is quite an old Mac Performa, which basically sits around and my dad does his invoices on it from time to time. Feel free to disagree, but I don't really care

Looks okay. Bit of a crap question though

Just got back from seeing it myself, and it is absolutely brilliant - the best film I've seen so far in the past couple of years with maybe the exception of the Two Towers. It leaves you with no choice but to drool and hang on for Revolutions. I get the feeling it's going to be quite a long six months waiting :\

Couldn't be bothered. Seen one before and although it looks quite nice I didn't really want to stay up until 5am watching it.

Tom Clancy is one of my most favourite authors, although I haven't read any of his stuff for a while. I do have all of the books in the Jack Ryan series though. Tolkien's stuff is brilliant, although I haven't got around to reading the Silmarillion yet. It sounds sad, but I do like the Harry Potter books immensely, and they definately rate up there for me. Other than that, I'll read any book that I like the look of. On the science side, my definate favourite would be "Fermat's Last Theorem" by Simon Singh, although I've not actually read too many science books (just the ones I could find in the school library). Oh yes, and any Dr. Who books/other random sci-fi is good.

You'd be surprised

I have a friend who passed his driving test about a year ago. He's just written off his car and three others when he drove around a corner at 75mph, didn't see the line of traffic in front of him that was queueing up and went into the back of them at 30mph, forcing the fire brigade to cut a person out of their car and him to be seriously enough injured that he had to be hospitalized. For this reason, I simply cannot understand the mentality of people who (like yourself) drive like maniacs. If you were going to do something that risked your own life only, then yes, I could understand it. But if you're gonna go around and perhaps go and kill a few people on the way, you're just being completely reckless. I also don't see how this is something to brag about. Anyway, on the original topic I've played GTA3 myself and there's enough fantasy in it to say that you couldn't really want to go out and shoot a load of random people unless there is actually something wrong with you. It (quite sensibly) has an age limit of 18+ and I think this does help a lot - although enforcement could be a little harsher imo.

Partial derivatives are fun because they allow you to do lots of funky stuff like fluid dynamics and work with planes/surfaces. It basically involves holding one (or more) variable constant whilst differentiating the other one. so :pdif:/:pdif:x (xy) = y. This is useful for surfaces (e.g. z = sin(xy)) because you can find normals/tangents etc. Also, if you're interested in this then you might want to look at something like double/triple integrals which can be used to find volumes under surfaces (which aren't really all that hard really). Other than that, if you're interested in statistical work, a lot of calculus is used for pdf's and suchforth. There's a wide variety of calculus applications in mechanics. If you're masochistic you can look at something like general relativity which has some big maths in it. In general, calculus can be applied in a wide range of fields, so you're better to find something you're interested in or you like the look of and see if you can get a book on it.

In fact, your question has already been answered:

The reason that we say that we need infinite energy to travel at c is because we need to accelerate to that speed, and to do that we need to put in an infinite amount of work because as your speed approaches c, the mass tends to infinity. I don't think anyone knows why light travels at c.

In fact, I'm completely wrong. Have a look at this: http://www.mathmojo.com/interestinglessons/originofzero/originofzero.html But yeah, I was kind of right

I believe the origin of zero comes from the arabic number system, who invented the idea of there being some way to describe having no amount of something.

One way of gauging whether something is intelligent or not is by using the Turing test. See this, found via google: http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/scrapbook/test.html and enjoy.

indeed..

Having never heard of the paper it's pretty hard to comment on it And the shape is a hyperbola, because it can be defined parametrically using hyperbolic functions (which I'm sure you know anyway). If you have any questions I'd be happy to lend a hand with them/give insight/whatever.

Fair enough. I've found TI calculators to be superior to the other brands of calculator out there in a lot of ways, and they're very easy to program.