CaptainPanic

Btw, what I disliked about the latest Firefox is the location bar (where you type the web address, and it gives suggestions for autocompletion). It's too big and bulky. But there is an add-on called the "Old Location Bar" which hardly removes any functionality, but makes it just a little more modest. It still autocompletes everything, and immediately gives the most likely suggestions on top and less likely ones below.

First of all, I am not a doctor, and the wise thing right now would be to go see a doctor. I read that: So, the fact that it doesn't hurt might mean that it's actually a deep burn.

Amazing, isn't it? I cannot be angry at people who think along these lines - I'm just incredibly disappointed about the stupidity of such thoughts... Here we are, in Western countries where women had very few rights just 100 years ago. Where today's sexy women's clothing would certainly have resulted in a visit from the local priest or vicar. Decency was the only way to go. Women listened to their husbands. And now, only 3-4 generations later, we link such treatment of women with terrorism, because a handful of idiots throws stones at women (while billions of people don't). I guess that until about 100 years ago, the entire world was terrorist then. I certainly think that the Wild Wild West was a whole lot more terrorist than any Muslim country we see now... And we're not only saying that Islam has to change, but we also overlook that lots of people already changed. A brainwash seems to come over all Western countries... and we no longer look at the facts. We think of Islam as evil... just like in 1984 - it took only 10 years, and now we regard the new enemy with a fanaticism that was previously reserved for the Evil Communists. It fills me with sadness to see that this is a movement that just creeps on and on and on... it can't be stopped. Anyway, back on topic. The USA obviously should support ANY democratic movement... as it is not the land of the Christians and the home of the true Belief, but the land of the Free and the home of the Brave.

1 mile <===== 1.609344 kilometers 1 inch <===== 2.54 centimeters 1 bar <===== 750.2838 mmHg 1 cal <===== 4.18 J That's just how it is. Also, it's possible to change the units of temperature, for example Celsius to Fahrenheit... but you need a formula. The next question is: why did they choose the Calorie as a unit for energy??? The reason is that it was practical. Someone (Mr. Celsius) had found a practical scale for temperature, using the freezing (0 C) and boiling point (100 C) for water. Then they called 1 degree C increase for 1 gram of water 1 calorie. It seemed practical. Later, in France the metric system was invented (click for a quick wikipedia history lesson)... and it was found that a number of units wouldn't be used anymore, like the grave for weight, the foot for distance and the calorie for energy. Instead, the kilogram, the meter and the Joule were used.

Given the fact that the US has little problems with religious regimes (only with terrorism and violence, but not with religion in itself), I see no reason why the US could not be at friendly terms with any newly elected democratic Islam government. Ok, it might be hard to swallow for some extremist Christian voters in certain states in the US... but it is downright silly to say that every Islam government just supports terrorism. Why would such a government bite an ally? I would suggest that the US hold most of the cards in this game... and it has the chance to play the game as it likes. One major threat, as I said, comes from within - the US voters who would under no circumstance accept any allegiance with a democratically chosen Islam government. US politicians are probably quite sensitive for that. Note that Iran is a democracy as well, and its government was democratically chosen... and there were no reasons to claim fraud on a big scale at the last elections there.

It's a trick question. Stealthy people typically don't answer questions.

Sorry for not accepting this without a struggle... I agree that if the CMBR would be from a gas cloud near us, it would probably not be uniform. However, if the CMBR is form all the interstellar particles in the entire universe, then could it not be quite uniform? After all, all the differences in density (planets, stars, galaxies and clusters) can all be considered local phenomena compared to the size of the entire universe.

It reacts in a possible runaway reaction, and forms an unstable explosive. Don't play with this... it can go wrong in many ways, all of which will hurt you or even kill you.

I use Firefox, because it came pre-installed with my Linux (ubuntu 10.4)... and I'm too lazy to change it. Also, it actually works fine, it's fast enough, and never crashes.

I think that, as an adult, you're more likely to make a little extra effort to keep old friends... and old friends are always a little special because you've (on both sides of the friendship relation) already invested so much time. That doesn't mean that it's not easy to make friends when you're an adult. It just sounds like you've been a little unlucky in your choice of friends... the characteristics you describe are of people you cannot trust, and who think about themselves all the time, instead of investing in the friendship. In my book, that is not the definition of a friendship. A friendship is a relation that you both benefit from (can be just humor, sharing insights, support, but also in a material way). If that becomes a very much one-sided, then these people are using you, and they are not friends. Of course, they may not mean it, and you should confront them with it. It may simply be a mistake. I disagree that there is a relation between the innocence or age, and the possible strength of a friendship. But I agree that there are certain people who are so preoccupied with materialism or with themselves, that they can no longer have true friends. They can only be acquaintances. If you realize that such a relation is only valuable if you both benefit from it, you should be fine.

Some people consider oxy-fuel combustion to reach higher temperatures, which means a higher efficiency can be achieved in a steam cycle or carnot heat engine. But if you just want to heat a house, I totally agree that there is no added benefit, other than a *bling* factor.

Vitamin C and Citric acid are not the same. Citric acid is a component which plays a vital role in the combustion of sugars in the body. So, it's basically part of the engine that runs inside of us. Here's the complete overview of the engine, and here's a zoom in on the citric acid cycle (also called Krebs cycle). Sorry for using simple words for a complicated mechanism... Vitamin C is also an acid (that's where the confusion might come from), and is used in the body for multiple things, but not in our main energy cycles. Also, citrus fruits are acidic from the citric acid - but also happen to have a relatively high vitamin C content. However, the vitamin C content might be high compared to many other fruits, but it's way too low to account for the acidity of the fruit. p.s. I voted for 'yes' in the poll, because I hadn't read the first post, but only the poll.

The mass of Earth (not: weight) is 5.9736×10^24 kg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth

The weird thing is that solids already have a vapor pressure. In the case of metals, that's just incredibly low (so low that we can't measure it). The question you must be asking is what vapor pressure you want to have, and at what temperature this is reached. I googled for [vapor pressure titanium], and I got a hit. however, it was not for free, so I can't give you the answer. The information is out there. I have experienced that very often a data set for vapor/liquid equilibria are described in a different paper than liquid/solid... and again in a different publication than vapor/solid. So, to search for the entire phase diagram is maybe too ambitious. Try instead to search for the individual equilibrium lines, and construct the diagram yourself. Good luck!

But we do measure a radiation, which is called the cosmic background radiation? Why are we so certain that the cosmic background radiation originates from the big bang (or shortly after the big bang)? Why can't it be an IR emission from particles that on average receive some light, absorb it, heat up, and emit IR at about 2.7 Kelvin?

Statistics is not a strength of mine... are you saying that you just don't believe we can do it, or is there a fundamental mathematical problem? (for example, if we would have both more time (a million years) and a much bigger dataset (all the stars), could it work then? I thought that if the change is tiny, the noise is very high, but the dataset is immense, you will find a regression with a slope that has a reasonably narrow confidence interval... But I am not 100% certain about that, and that's why I ask.

In all fairness, it's a number of other people on this forum that do most of the pondering for you. You're at best dreaming. It's not a device. It's a hypothetical situation. Devices are REAL. Stop confusing us. You got already nearly a hundred replies on this forum - most of those replies are very practical, because you confuse us into thinking that you actually want to build something. You don't. You just want to dream, and to think of hypothetical situations. What bothers me the most about your way of behaving on this forum is that you just throw random ideas at us... and then you wait. They always sound practical (like you change the fuel - as if that matters in a hypothetical perfect combustion process). Then we say what's wrong with it, and instead of learning anything about the real world, you just come up with a new random hypothetical idea. It's completely OK to talk about hypothetical stuff... scientists do it all the time. But the goal should be to learn... and you seem to fail at this point. The other reason to do any scientific work might be to build something, or to invent something... but that's never hypothetical. That's REAL. But the things you describe are not becoming more real as we proceed. They remain just as hypothetical as always. In fact, I don't see the point of all your threads anymore.

I'm assuming GR is gravity? I'm not familiar with the abbreviation, but it would make sense. So, I accept that there are objects that are very heavy, and can bend light. And I am not saying that there is no dark matter involved - it might well be. (I don't know enough about it anyway). I guess I should have said that if there is significantly more non-luminous matter in space, could that influence our models? Do we know for a fact that the light (or other radiation) that arrives in our telescopes hasn't been through a dust cloud that simply absorbed or otherwise changed a certain percentage of the light/radiation?

If dark matter would be actual matter that can block/filter light, would it not be possible that the measurements of the distance of stars is wrong? And would it not be possible that the theory of dark matter is wrong? Interstellar matter has a known composition. (Link to wikipedia). It can be relatively easily calculated that even if all dark matter is completely transparent, the actual dust and other matter in the universe becomes of significance when we talk about the brightness of the furthest objects. But if we're wrong in any of the assumptions in the interstellar matter table that I just linked to, and there is some real matter hanging somewhere in space (I dunno - the Oortcloud is a little denser, or there is a galactic version of the oortcloud?) and the absorption would be significantly different, wouldn't that screw up a few models? [edited for spelling mistakes]

Could it be possible nowadays to observe a large number of objects in the universe, at various distances from us, and keep track of the redshift that we measure to see if the objects are actually accelerating? I know that the acceleration will be difficult to measure, because in the course of a human lifetime, the relative change in velocity of the stars/galaxies will hardly be measureable. I know that we would be looking for tiny changes... But the possible data set is nearly infinite. If the dataset is large enough, even small changes can be determined with some degree of certainty. Imho, this would be a more direct method to support the theory of the accelerating expanding universe...

Batman?

So, you mean to say that Bush screwed up everything he did, but at least people realized that the government isn't perfect? LOL To say that people were better off because of all the screw-ups of Bush is quite a nice twist. Anyway, under the assumptions that you make, I must agree with you that Bush was a great man... possibly the greatest president of all time. After all, the entire world now questions and criticizes the leadership of the USA, and a lot of people disagree with the wars that are being fought now. I want to stress however that I disagree with the underlying assumption. I think Bush was the biggest disaster that every happened to the USA... but then again, I expect my government to do the right thing for the people. You seem to want them to deliberately screw up in order to increase criticism.

There would be no disadvantages. It would be awesome. It would be better than any modern heaters because of a number of reasons: You propose to use the dirty unrefined natural gas, while modern heaters use cleaned natural gas. Of course we also assume that transportation of the unrefined natural gas is no problem, which doubles the awesomeness and also doubles the hypotheticality. You propose that you have mostly thermal radiation, while modern heaters do exactly the same. This makes your hypothetical invention just as awesome as any random gas powered heating device in any house. Of course, you somehow (hypothetically) overcome the heat resistance of the metal casing, and emit heat directly from the flame straight through the casing which will severely reduce the heat transfer coefficient. That would (hypothetically) mean that your exhaust gases will be colder, and this increases the efficiency... which gains you several awesomeness points. Your wonderful (hypothetical) invention combusts all gas in a perfect blue flame without the need for any excess oxygen, which is already incredibly awesome in itself. If you ever manage to do this, just forget the rest of the heater, and patent the super efficient stoichiometric natural gas combustor. Anyway, it will increase the temperature of the flame, and therefore your invention beats the modern heaters hands down. It's very awesome. The use of helium, the reason why you use it remains unclear to me, is a very nice touch. It gives an extra *zing!* to the invention. I would suggest to use the words "nano" and "green" too in your next invention In short, there are no disadvantages to your idea... but that's as long as you ask our opinions about hypothetical devices. As soon as we enter the realm of Real Things, I can see a few problems challenges.

I would suggest that this is placed in the biochemistry subforum. Secondly, I am not sure I understand the question: do you want to separate all amino acids (or all proteins?) from milk? Or do you wish to obtain the individual amino acids in pure form? You need to hydrolyse the protein first (in aqueous solution, perhaps using a mild acid, or using an enzyme mixture?) and then separate. The separation is the problem. Whether a method is convenient is entirely up to you... but personally I would simply answer your question with "no, there is no 'convenient' way to separate the amino acids"... although analysis methods exist (forms of chromatography perhaps?), there are no cheap and simple ways to separate the amino acids on an industrial scale.

Not exactly. Concentrated sulphuric acid reacts with the oxide to give more water and leave iron sulfate, FeSO4 or Fe2(SO4)3. In fact, sulphuric acid will create rust on perfectly clean steel (link for more info) - so it does the opposite from what you hope to achieve. Carbon can indeed react in a redox type reaction with iron oxide to give pig iron and CO2... that's how blast furnaces work. The reaction temperature is typically around 1200 deg C (see wikipedia for more info).