CaptainPanic

I agree with Enthalpy. Water has a nice combination of low viscosity, relatively high boiling point, and a huge heat capacity. For efficient heat exchange, you need a low viscosity, or else the flow in your tubes of your car's radiator and inside the engine will not be turbulent, and therefore heat exchange will be horrible. And with oils, you replace a boiling problem with a decomposition problem. If your oil gets too hot, it will not boil - that's true. Instead, it will carbonize and form a black muck, blocking your radiator...

That bold part is something you might want to explain, so that we can give you a better answer. See, as I said, if you just leave some water standing in the open air, it will reach equilibrium. It might take some time, but it'll get there. If something is consuming the oxygen (microorganisms??), we have a different scenario. Anyway, the quickest way to reach equilibrium is to make a larger surface area. If the water is in a glass, pour it into a soup bowl, and your water will reach (approach) equilibrium a lot faster. In industrial biotechnology they bubble water through the bioreactors. If you cannot do that, then just use a large surface area.

No. I wish people understood how a risk assessment works, because it's a perfectly reasonable and simple approach how to deal with any risk, in any situation - also if you have many unknowns. Risk assessment certainly does not advise you to assume the worst, unless you have the intention of going bankrupt trying to prevent the most unlikely scenarios. Risk assessment tells you to look at every scenario, and look at the effects and the chance it happens. Risk = effect * chance For example, if a nuclear holocaust happens it's very very very bad. But the chance it happens is really small (please don't believe the scaremongering). The risk is then reasonable. The effects of some local terrorism in Israel is much smaller, after all only a few people will be directly affected. But the chance that will happen is nearly 1. It's almost a certainty. So, that risk is a bigger risk than Iran attacking with a nuke. Iranians are not completely stupid. They know that if they lob a nuke on Israel, their own country will be reduced to a molten sea of sand too. They might use strong words, but that's a lot of bluff, which sounds good on Iranian TV. Also, for all we know, they might have a new and more reasonable president soon. Ahmadinejad might actually lose the elections... they do have a functioning democracy in Iran. This year they elect a new parliament, and next year a new president. You might argue that they don't seem to have a lot of choice, but when I look at the current US elections, I get that same impression

That doesn't matter. We should still bomb them. Note how the war hawks resemble Cato the Elder's way of arguing that Carthage should be destroyed. History has shown that if you just repeat it often enough, the truth does not matter. Who needs evidence if you are already certain that Iran is the new ultimate evil?

The amount of gas you can dissolve is roughly linear with the pressure of the gas above the liquid (if it reaches equilibrium). Oxygen in air has a pressure of about 0.2 bar. So, with patience you will reach the maximum concentration in your salt solution - the max you can reach with air. Note that obviously CO2, nitrogen and some other gases dissolve too. To get an even higher concentration, you need either a higher pressure of air, or a more pure source of oxygen. You can increase the speed at which you achieve your equilibrium (that's the maximum concentration) by bubbling the air through the water.

Forrest Gump.

Actually, the decrease started way before that, but it is very difficult to unregister from the Roman Catholic church. You talk about registered people, I talk about those that actually believe. These are two very different things in the Netherlands. But I propose we get back on topic... religious demographics of the Netherlands could get its own thread, but I propose we just leave it at this.

I don't think religion (or the lack of) has anything to do with it. What I observe in my part of the world is that many people just follow the religion or lack of religion of their parents. In other words, both atheists and theists just follow what their parents did. When it comes to following authority, or doing as you're told, both seem to do that just as much. But then again, over here in the Netherlands, many atheists are 2nd or 3rd generation atheist. This story might be different in other countries where people of this current generation comes to their own (personal) conclusion that religion is not for them. These people who change their system of beliefs during their lifetimes might fall into a different category. But personally, I do not know such people. What you suggest might be true, or not, but at this moment I see no reason to think so. I have a lack of data, and any claims from my side would be speculation.

We're talking about politics. You are talking about a for-profit commercial propaganda machine. You are really stretching the definition of "politics".

Nonsense, lies are rampart in business too. Companies lie about who they do business with. They lie about how clean their processes are. They lie about how good they are to their employees. They generally want to paint a picture of themselves, and their products, which is better than reality. Have you never seen an advertisement? An advertisement is 90% lies, if not more!! It's even a lie about what the product looks like (pizzas never look like in the advertisement). And it totally works. And that's why politicians use lies too: they are just advertising themselves so that we vote for them. I think iNow nailed it. In many cases, there is no single truth. You can run an economy in several different ways and it's possible that they're all equally good. That said, there are many levels of lies. And sometimes it is very obvious that it's a lie, but they still get away with it. I think that in such a case a number of factors keep those liars in power: - The political opposition, through mistakes and lies of their own are powerless - People are not organized enough to form a strong enough opposition, or they just don't care - People choose the certainty of this particular liar to the uncertainty of another politician (yet unknown) - People don't mind that someone is lying, as long as the liar is good to them Could be anything really. I just completely disagree that politics is the only place in society where people lie. Lies are everywhere.

I agree with Greg H. that you should discuss this at your school first. You have a study advisor or something that can help you with this. Also, I'm sure a bunch of professors will have research topics that they can use some help with. Master Thesis students are just assistants to such a professor, and generally speaking they love to get some help. It also means that your project fits into a larger research topic, and might actually be relevant to the overall project. But if you have to do it all by yourself, ask yourself: What kind of work would you like to do after graduation? What company would you like to work for? And what would be a typical project that you could do at such a company that would conveniently have the duration of half your final thesis? (Why half the duration? Because the other half will be used for problem definition, getting started, writing a report, and a lot of unforeseen problems).

A fence is not gonna stop people who will commit murder. The owner of a piece of land will decide what happens to the trees on the land. If there is no private owner, the government decides. However, in some places - especially the tropical rain forests - there is nobody to uphold the law. There is a law, but no police. And people just ignore the rules... or in some cases the local governments even give permits to cut the forest down. Anyway, a fence is not gonna stop murderers who do not care about the law. And people don't care enough to do anything else about it.

Assuming that we are indeed talking about drilling into the crust of planets, moons and asteroids, I think we should first define the goal of such drilling. The goal could be: 1. Mining for minerals / metals 2. Science (how did our solar system form?) 3. Something else The design, execution and financing of the project will be different depending on the goal, although there might be an overlap.

Seems simple to me: if the laser beam heats up a particular surface too much, use a larger (and/or) more reflective surface.

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Yes, alright. I see your point of view. We are indeed part of this world. We did not invent DNA. But from the panda's point of view, we might seem a little ex vivo, perhaps? I mean, what the hell do they know. First some monkey comes and destroys their habitat. Then they build panda hotels and help them to get sex.

We are technically capable of making (forcing?) an animal reproduce. IVF. It might turn out that the pandas would survive without our help. But it seems that some people have decided to help them anyway. If we select which animals mate with each other, and even do the fertilization for them, aren't we in control of their evolution, just like we controlled the evolution of certain types of dogs, cattle, etc.? According to wikipedia, there is a discussion whether the pandas would survive without us. I've cherrypicked two sentences that show the discussion and/or lack of agreement.

! Moderator Note Fuzzwood, that was a spammer wanting traffic for some silly website, next time just report it and the moderators will do the rest. To everyone else: if you don't understand what we're talking about, that is because I just deleted that post. Nothing to see here, move along, move along. Let's get back on topic.

Star trek, because of many reasons, but primarily because of a select number of scenes in which Captain Picard (Star Trek, The Next Generation) explains ethics to the crew, and thus to the viewers. Some epic scenes.

From an evolutionary point of view, pandas might well be a dead end. But we (humans) really helped them to go extinct by destroying their habitat. Without humans they wouldn't be so close to their extinction yet. There's no way of telling whether they wouldn't evolve better teeth and a better gut to digest plants. Animals have switched from being herbivores to carnivores (and back) before. That said, the main reason that they receive more attention than say, an African wild ass (which is critically endangered), is obviously the fact that it's so cute.

Just a back-of-the-envelope calculation: A liter (which is 0.8 kg) of some cheap vegetable oil costs maybe 50 cent (euro cent) for a regular consumer. That means 50 cents for about 800 grams of oil, which contains about 40 MJ/kg of energy. That means that your oil costs about 1.6 cent/MJ. Electricity costs about 10 cents / kWh, or about 2.8 cents/MJ. Prices may vary depending on your location. Gas costs about 60 cents/m3, or about 1.8 cents/MJ. Again, prices may vary depending on where you live. The bottom line is: you'll need dirt cheap vegetable oil to compete with electricity or gas from the standard networks. Your investment should be low, and your maintenance/cleaning on that equipment should be simple and cheap, or you will never make any money. And you should minimize any additional operating costs if you have any. Finally, please note that biodiesel is not very sustainable. It is a primary food source that you turn into energy. Its production has a large carbon footprint (a lot of energy was used in cultivation, fertilizer, transport, to name a few). So, unless you happen to have access to oil that would otherwise go to waste, I do not think this is either economic or good for our environment. (Please note that I am a great fan of sustainable energy, but local home production really limits the options and it is important to be realistic about that). [edit] Large industrial players are able to compete because of 2 reasons: subsidies, and the economy of scale (for investments, bulk transport and bulk purchase of the oil).

It's easy to get a creditcard, but hard to get ID. Where I live it's the opposite.

The nice simplistic answer is "Yes". The popular practical answer is "Yes, but we don't care", and/or "We already pay for development money and charity". But my answer is that we should first grant them proper independence. We can ship some money and goodies to the poor countries, but we still suck those economies dry now, so what would that change? They might have their own government, and their own flag, but in every economical sense they are still colonies. The people there do not receive a fair price for the goods they produce. Trade barriers prevent their economy from competing with ours in fields where they excel, while we dump goods on their market to kill off any new developments there. The solution is a lot more complicated than giving some money to poor countries...

There will be friction, which should slow down the dragonfly. However, there may also be (very small) winds inside the room. In fact, it is almost certain that there is some movement of the air: - you are there (breathing, and heating up the room with your body) - some walls / windows may be warmer than other walls/windows because the face the sun All these differences in temperature will cause air to move a little bit. But a little bit is enough to move such a delicate dragonfly. It is certainly not the dragonfly itself that causes the movement. If you would hang a very thin paper from a thin wire from the ceiling, it would also move because of the same movement of the air. A paper on a piece of string is obviously not a perpetual motion device. I think that your best chance to find a room with really stagnant air would be a basement, with no windows, with relatively cold air. In such a room, the dragonfly should stop.