Greg H.

First yoiu'll have to decide which god you're praying to.

I have no trouble getting my brain to stop thinking, at least consciously. I do it every night about 10 pm local time, and resume when my alarm clock yells at me circa 6 am the following morning. My wife, on the other hand, has the problem you seem to be describing. She cannot get her brain to "turn off". I'm not sure why.

Remember this: 1. The average intelligence of any group of people is inversely proportional to the size of the group. 2. In general, people are assholes.

Well, for one thing, the engineering challenges associated with sending people to another world have already been solved - now it's just a matter of scaling them up to support more than three people at a time. The engineering challanges of finding, harvesting, and assembling something that weighs [math]5.97219 \times10^{24}[/math]kg are so far beyond anything we have ever conceived, I doubt we'd know where to begin. Not to mention, building something that large would most likely result in an unstable orbital trajectory around the sun, which would be extremely bad.

As Bugs Bunny would say: "I know this violates the law of gravity, but I never studied law."

I didn't see the show, or read the articles. On the contrary, science routinely challenges common knowledge - see, for example, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. As a result, we learn an astonishing amount of new things all the time. What science ignores is junk science, and bunk. External sources of fire may not cause burns from the inside out, but microwaves could (IIRC) because of the mechanism involved in the heating. (Some physicist may come along and correct me on that, however.) You might not have noticed, but this is a public discussion forum. I find it a supremely odd place to bring up a topic you're not comfortable discussing in public.

I would say it's hard to generalize. For some people, it absolutely makes a difference (probably). For others, not so much. For me, when I have to wear a suit and tie, it makes me grouchy and irritable, so my productivity would probably suffer, at least initially.

Time for me to break out this nugget again: C.P. Snow on thermodynamics: Zeroth: You must play the game. First: You can't win. Second: You can't break even. Third: You can't quit the game.

Well, let's take Compsognathus logipes then as a starting place, as compared to a Striped Polecat, Ictonyx striatus, an African mammal of roughly the same size. Both eat small vertebrates, C. logipes documented as eating small vertabrtate lizards, while I. striatus is known to eat small mammals, birds, snakes, and insects. There's no real reason to suspect that C. logipes couldn't adapt to catch other small, agile creatures such as rats and mice, since they were already adept at catching small, agile lizards. I suspect that the "winner" in this contest would come down to something more subtle, and quite possible environmental. It is possible that the dinosaur would win in some environments and the weasel would win in others, based on conditions present at the time, and the ability to capture food and avoid larger predators.

Black magic would be easier to learn.

This is how the conversation should go: Kid: "Why are those two men kissing?" Parent: "Because one of them just accomplished something very important and his partner is very happy for him." I'm not sure why that is so hard for people to wrap their heads around.

That's entirely possible. A "chip", if you will pardon the simplification, that does the quantum calculation and returns the result to a more traditional computer infratructure for consumption. In fact, I expect that to be a lot more likely that entire computers running on quantum based technology.

If you read the entire page, it actually explains it. Specifically, look at the section under Post Motem.

Or to put it another way, it's the quantum computer version of assembly where you have to move the bits around in the memory by hand and calculate the outcomes. There's no such thing as BASIC or C++ for quantum computing - yet.

As it is trivially easy to debunk the notion that women are bad at science and/or math, why are we spending our valuable time trying to change the mind of a bigot?

From: http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/09/health/artificial-dna-life/index.html?hpt=hp_c4 The paper was published in Nature just this past week. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13314.html It's interesting that they were able to add completely synthetic genteic information and get that information to pass stably from one generation to the next via reproduction of the organism. I'm more excited about the posibilities this opens up for expanding our definition of what counts as life, especially in terms of space exploration.

It doesn't. We have occasionally found the same mutation appearing and vanishing, and then reappearing again. For example, 1. See http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/mammal/carnivora/sabretooth.html

There's as much danger as if you were in a car at the same speed. All the energy has to go somewhere. The collision might be slightly less damaging, given the hovercraft's frictionless nature compared to the ground (i.e. they may tend to bounce off one another more than say, cars), but I expect there would still be some damage. As for how much wear the skirt can take, that's completely dependent on what it's made of, how durable it is, and will vary from manufacturer to manufacturer.

Not much. Steering a hovercraft is already pretty easy - you make them spin in a circle if you really need to. The problem here is you're trying to make it work in a way it was not intended to. Never forget, a hovercraft has no physical contact with the groud, the skirt not withstanding. It is essentially riding ona frictionless surface, so it depends on its thrusters for steering and braking.

Because (as I understand it) at distances less than that amount, the force of expansion is smaller than the force of gravity

Or download a browser that doesn't suck.

What are you actually trying to do?

Did you check out the manuals for MySQL on their website? http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/database-use.html Also, here's a coding example for Python to connect to a MySQL database. http://dev.mysql.com/doc/connector-python/en/connector-python-example-connecting.html

At 25,000 RPMKs, you end up with a speed of Mach 4 at your propeller tips, which would probably result in the catastrophic failure of the fan. Attaching a jet to it would, all other things being equal, make the hovercraft go faster, assuming the jet produces more thrust than the original fan. That's a far more complex equation and depends on a variety of other factors, such as can your hovercraft even lift the jet engine plus mounting plus fuel off the ground. Note: I'm not advocating trying this in any fashion. I have a feeling it can only end poorly and with someone being severely injured.

Here's 8 liquid ounces of gasoline. Admittedly, the energy is in a somewhat compressed form, but the application of an appropriate catalyst can take care of that. Sorry, I couldn't resist.