Greg H.

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Looking at the information provided, comparing it to the density of water, what do you think would happen?

Here's a hint for you Magnets attract ferrous metals, but not non-ferrous ones (density is unimportant to a magnet). And here's a question to get you thinking in the right direction: What happens if you put something in water that is less dense than the water itself?

Show us what you have so far, and we'll be more able to help you. What equation would you use to solve this problem?

Can I get blue cheese on that?

I am guessing it would work, but the efficiency with steam power is typically related to the pressure of the steam. You could experiment with smaller nozzles I suppose, and see what gives you the best work output, then thread the whole thing into a generator directly. I'd be curious to know how much steam pressure it would take to turn the generator.

You could, in theory at least, burn the wood in the presence of a thermopile and produce electricity directly, but I have no idea how efficient that would be. Steam engines are definitely on the dangerous side. A boiler explosion can seriously ruin your day.

I make conscious choices to avoid to much processed sugar, especially that bane of modern living, HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup). Mostly because diabetes tends to run in my family, and I'm trying to stave it off as long as possible.

No problem, and very good. I used to work for a therapy center when I was in college. On the subject of the calculators, it looks like the TI 89 is the new TI 92. If you need more advanced features than the 84+ offers, that's what I would recommend. If you don't, I'd stick with the 84+ - it's about $30 - $40 (USD) cheaper from what I see online.

The TI-84+ should be fine for an algebra class, but you may want something with more features if you plan to go into say Physics or take a lot of Calculus classes. I would make the same recommendation to you that I make to people asking for advice on buying computers. Decide what you need it to do and then buy the equipment that matches those needs. Personally, I bought a TI-92 back when I was in school. It's an expensive piece of kit (or at least it was 10 years ago), but it came in handy for a lot of classes because of the built in functionality for differentials and integrals. However, I know some schools don't like them because of the built in notepad feature. Edit to add: What is O.T. as a major? All I come up with is Occupational Therapy.

Honestly, I do not understand it that deeply, only what I have read. If you're interested I can recommend A Shortcut Through Time, by George Johnson. It's a good introduction to the idea behind quantum computers and how they should work (in theory).

The major difference isn't just that it has one more state of storage, but that the new state is actually both options at once. Consider it like this: If we just added a third state to standard bits, so that we could plug in a 0,1, or a 2, all we've really done is make computers work on base 3 instead of base 2. If we take an 8 bit register and fill it full of 2's, we still get a single discrete value. With an 8-bit register of qbits all in the third state, you do not get a discrete value; rather, you have all the possible values at once. This is fundamentally more information than a standard 8 bit binary (or even ternary) register. In theory, you can take this all possibilities probability wave, collapse it, and come up with the single answer to your calculation.

Your claim was that we (modern humans) were incapable of moving such a rock - you placed no limits on the equipment used. Do you still assert that, or do you admit that we can move objects much heavier than those rocks in modern times?

First, learn to use paragraphs. Your previous post is like trying to read alphabet soup. Second, you asked for an example where a stone as large as the stones at Balbek were moved. I provided one example that is not lost in the mists of antiquity but has historical written documentation to support it. It also says they continuously shaped the monolith as it was being moved, which implies that, logically, it would still have weighed as much as it did when the pulled it out of the ground when they started moving it. The simple fact is that humans move enormous weights everyday in the modern world, and not just in building structures. Your previous claim (bolded) is quite demonstrably false. Here's another good example for you. According to wikipedia, the Space Shuttle weighs in at 2030 tons - twice the estimated weight of the Balbek stone. We not only manage to move it, we can stand it upright and launch it into orbit. So yes, I would have to say that us poor modern humans are quite capable of moving massive stones around if we want to - did it occur to you we just have easier ways of building structures these days and those stones aren't required?

There is plenty of evidence, if you're willing to actually look for it. In St. Petersburg, Russia, sits the statue The Bronze Horsemen, a monument to Peter the Great. As the base of this statue, a 1,250 ton boulder, known as the Thunder Stone, was moved six kilometers from the Finnish marsh where it was found, loaded onto a boat, and sailed to St. Petersburg. According to the wikipedia article:

It wouldn't be hard to experimentally verify (assuming you have access to the equipment). Measure the speed of light across a vacuum chamber of known size, and compare it to a measurement taken by bouncing a laser pulse off the moon. I'm willing to bet they're within the experimental margin of error of each other. And if a 9-5 computer programmer can come up with that idea, I'm pretty sure professional scientists can too. My guess is, someone already did that. That said, even if you're right, the speed of light in the Earth's atmosphere is only about 90km/s slower than the speed of light in a vacuum. That's a difference of .00003002% (30 millionths of a percent). The solar system, which is a heck of a lot less dense than our atmosphere, as I am sure you'll agree, would produce an even less measurable effect. With tolerances that close, on a macroscopic scale, I think we're justified in saying they're the same number. Also, what StringJunky said above.

While I admit Inigo's message was a bit terse, I don't think that was what he was implying, since Ramjets obviously work just fine (the first was flown on a working aircraft in the 1950s).

Ramjets have the same issue illustrated above. They can't produce thrust while they aren't moving, so how do you start the vehicle moving in the first place? Also, ramjets tend to need to be going above the speed of sound to operate with any kind of efficiency, which isn't really conducive to normal highway speeds for a car. See Wiki - Ramjet for more details.

While I think JMJones addressed most of the points in the OP well, I wanted to touch on this question: Why shouldn't our society, or any society, be able to achieve "moral excellence"? Unless you are implying that without some kind of divine guidance, we cannot hope to discern right from wrong. Why do we have to assume some supernatural bringer of morality is required? And if we do make that assumption, which supernatural entity do we choose? God? Allah? The multiple deities of Hindu or Shinto? Why is any one of these supernatural entities better than the rest? It is far less incredulous to accept that men and women make their own decisions over right and wrong within the moral backdrop of their society - if they choose to go against the grain of that moral backdrop, their actions are deemed "wrong" or even illegal. The fact that many societies may find the same acts wrong or immoral is not an indication of some supernatural ultimate moral authority; rather it is evidence that humanity has learned, over thousands of years of civilization, that some rules just make sense. We have no need to invoke a supernatural cause for morals - like humanity itself, they evolve to meet the changes in our society. Indeed, assuming that morals are absolute, unwavering, and universal leaves no room for them to change and adapt as our societies change in the modern world.

There's nothing magical about it. That's what the math says. If you think the math is wrong, you need to provide math of your own (or link to some) that refutes the accepted math and indicates where and why it's wrong.

The only person being hysterical is you. The hyperbole and exaggeration is coming from you. You're resorting to ad hominem attacks rather than providing the confirmation we've asked you to provide. No one is treating this like a life or death event; we're simply asking that you supply enough information to decide if your theory has merit or not. If you cannot, or will not, do that, then the default position is to reject it in favor of the established theory and model which already accounts for the observed experimental data.

What you're describing is called a three dimensional torus. And it does mathematically describe one possible shape of the curvature of space-time - it's a variation of the infinite flat space-time geometry, which allows space to act like it's infinite, without edges or borders, while still being finite in total size. However, it is not the only possible shape of space time. You should check out Brian Greene's book The Fabric of the Cosmos (which is where I got the above). He spends some time talking about the curvature of the universe (in physicist speak, whether it is positive, negative, or zero) on pages 238 - 243. As an aside, the jury is still out on which curvature is actually taken on by our universe, but Greene says this on page 243: He notes, however, that on the subject of which of the two possible shapes of zero curvature is more accurate - the infinite plane, or the 3d torus - the question is still open.

While it looks a lot fancier, your second axiom, as was explained to you repeatedly here: Original Thread on This is not supported by experimental evidence, and you still haven't explained your equations fully, or provided derivations for them. In other words, you've wrapped your previous pseudo-science in a shinier wrapper and dressed it up to look more sciencey, but it's still the same bunk it was before.

I don't know if you meant to link something else, but what I got from that link specific to the CMBR is this: Which seems to me to indicate that the CMB is the reference against which the motion is being measured. Is my understanding incorrect? That being said, I agree that things can appear blueshifted in reference to the CMBR, or in reference to our observational position here on Earth, but things are not coming at us on a line from the CMBR. The CMBR is the background of the observable universe - it doesn't exist at some fixed point in the sky that you could draw a line to and say "It came from that way."

Considering the CMBR is everywhere around us, there is no line from the direction of the CMBR. And while we do see, as I said, certain blueshifted objects, these are the exception, not the rule.