Greg H.

I finished my BS in 2006 and my MS in 2010. Both are in Information Systems Management.

25 + 3 + 2 = 30 There is no missing dollar.

Why wouldn't they? Studies done by the UCMP at Berkley have shown that It's not the car beating speeds of Jarassic Park, but they're certainly not feeling their way along like a blind man.

I doubt it, otherwise a horse would be completely blind with blinders on. Although they might have a significant blind spot directly in front of them, dpending on their field of vision. All that would really change is their total field of vision, the size of any blind spots they may have, and whether they were using binocular vision or monocular vision at any given time. To give you an example, here's a decent page about how horses see. You can also look at the comparison between cats and dogs to see how eye placement in the face affects which eye sees what. Cats actually have a wider field of vision and a wider field of binocular vision than both humans and dogs. http://horsehints.org/HorseVision.htm

What do you expect them to be able to do? Once you answer that question, you may see where the necessary changes lie.

This is especially true in populations like humans where there really is no concept of "survival of the fittest". We have, to a very large degree, overcome nature's impact on our evolutionary course in terms of deciding what mutations survive to the next generation.

Physics will probably say no. Hovercraft don't follow terrain in the same way a car does because of the skirt. If you gave it enough power to actually climb that steep of a hill, it would probably just shoot through the track - or explode on impact. What you have to keep in mind is that a hovercraft interacts with the world around it in a fundamentally different way than a wheeled or tracked vehicle. Even if you could get it to the top of the loop, the downward thrust into the skirt would blow it right off the track.

Relevant

Ok, first, a hovercraft with sufficient power will climb hills - they just aren't very good at it, especially with steep hills. See the following video showing a demonstration of a hovercraft climbing hills (the whole thing is only about a minute long) Neoteric Hovercraft Inc, has this to say on the subject1 1: http://neoterichovercraft.com/general_info/questions_and_answers.htm

I'm not familiar with the maths behind it, but I know you can affect the boyancy of water by changing the composition of it. For example, water with very high salt concentrations (such as the Dead Sea) is much more boyant that normal sea water (so much so that people routinely float unaided on its surface). However, since we have changed the chemical makeup of the solution, I'm not sure what that does to the density. It's entirely possible that Archimedes holds true, even though we're displacing a smaller volume of water, because the density of the water is higher.

I think part of the problem is simple return on investment - a 30 second ad costs what it costs, and the higher the budget of the show you put it in, the thinner the profits, unless you raise the ad prices. But raising the ad price is hard to justify to a client when the show only receives mediocre ratings overall. Shows like BSG and Dr Who already have huge fan bases - they're no brainers in terms of getting eyes in front of the set. It's one reason Hollywood loves the superhero moves - as long as they don't completely destroy the IP (*cough* Green Lantern *cough), they're just about gauranteed to fill theatres. A new series, on the other hand, with new characters set in a new "universe" is a gamble, and it's one that needs to start paying off early in the first season or, like Firefly, the cancellation ax will swing hard and swing fast.

Crush the car into a cube. Try and push the cube.

Living in the Midwestern United States, this is a common problem with a common solution. Steer very slightly into the direction of the wind. It's like tacking a sailboat across the wind.

Not only that, but cars are designed to roll as efficiently as engineering allows - anything less would be a waste of fuel. It's reallky not that surprising that it takes far less energy to push a car forward than it does to lift one off the ground.

If you can include a screen shot that might help - I use Java daily and I have no idea what you're talking about.

As far as the habitable planet around a black hole goes, I think it might be possible, if not very likely. What makes a planet habitable to us? Enough incoming energy to keep the planet warm enough for liquid water and a thick gaseous atmosphere, with a surface gravity of somewhere around a G (though given enough generations, you could adapt to even a significant change in the gravity). You would need a way to block the hard radiation being emitted by the black hole (the sun), and an orbit that was stable in the long term. You'd have to either find local flora and fauna that didn't poison us immediately, or have a way of generating the necessary "sunlight" to grow suitable crops. Of course if we're eating pill meals, a la the Jetsons, that's not a problem . Personally, I think the biggest challenge in colonizing other worlds, even more normal seemingly prosaic ones, would be the ability to find food on the surface that didn't turn out to be immediately fatal due to subtle differences in chemistry, combined with issues growing our own food which has evolved to grow well on our planet, but may be at a significant disadvantage anywhere else. Genetic engineering will, most likely, play a crucial role in any such extraterrestrial colonization.

I see what you did there.

I am guessing you would need fuel.

According to the wikipedia article on them, So it appears there must be some kind of compensation going on somewhere.

For comparison, here's a standard American one:

It would probably help a lot if you could attach a photo of the readouts in question.

I would also like to know what specific examples we're dealing with. I can't think of very many scientific theories that are flat out wrong that are still taught seriously at school, except maybe to offer a historical viewpoint on how we arrived at a modern theory.

Typically gas meters read in cu ft, which is, as Strange pointed out an abbreviation for cubic feet.

While my chemistry is, admittedly, not very advanced, the last time I checked, the air was mostly nitrogen anyway - all the nitrogen inflations do is replace the remaining 22-ish percent that isn't nitrogen with nitrogen. Since the atmosphere is normally volitile, I would assume that mixing a little atmosphere with nitrogen wouldn't change that. Note this is based on the assumption that when you say oxygen you mean the normal atmospheric mix. If you're filling tires with pure O2, then yes, you may have an issue as O2 is fairly combustable.

A word of caution: any chemical formation of a precious metal that can be dissolved in water is fairly toxic. I would strongly urge you not to pursue this sort of thing in your home. (I would strongly urge you to educate yourself on actual chemistry, too, as opposed to the alchemy that seems to be going on here). Edited for clarity.