Greg H.

Of course I have, and my first response was not a) miracles or b) malfeasance by the forum admins. It's usually "Why the hell did I do/say that?"

I don't disagree. I'm in favor of both body cams and gun cams, in additional to the dashboard cameras most departments already have.

The really sad part of the whole thing, is I find the BBC's reporting of incident in America to be more accurate (or at least more journalistic and less sensationalist) than many of the American news outlets.

Or, if what you really care about is the discharge of firearms, you attach them to the actual firearms. (he said, for the third time)

I'm not entirely sure why your consideration of the event didn't start there.

Thus the gun cameras.

Or you could just make it mandatory for police to have body and gun cams. Unless you have one homeless person per cop, you'd still miss some incidents.

Here's a hint. If your idea to produce energy includes the phrase "over 100% return" then it violates the laws of physics and you can assume it will not work. Leo more or less sums it up:

Geology.com has an article about it, including a handy chart. http://geology.com/articles/near-earth-asteroids.shtml They list Global Catastrophe at 2km. In comparison, they estimate the Chicxulub asteroid at roughly 9km.

To your point, I see what you mean about the "cake" now. I think. It wouldn't end up so much a rectangle as a trapezoid because each layer gets longer as you move outwards. Right?

I'm now curious enough to know if it matters enough to be significant. I wonder if my wife would yell at me if I bought a digital caliper and started cutting up rolls of toilet paper.

Then to get an accurate value for the actual thickness of each sheet, we have to eliminate the roll - otherwise we risk corrupting our result. Also, you would have to compress the sheets before you do your thickness measure anyway - toilet tissue is manufactured to be fluffly, not flat.

You could also simplypull the sheets apart one at a time and stack them up. Each sheet is a standard size (according to the packaging), so you end up with a rectangular solid, and the volume of each sheet becomes [latex] V_{sheet} = \frac{V_{solid}}{sheetcount} [/latex]

The problem is one of economics. Right now, it would probably cost more to go up and fetch the material than the material would be worth once you had it - and most of that cost is down to how much it costs to put someone (or something, if we use robots) in space, then bring the whole lot back to earth for processing. Let's say (for the sake of argument) it costs you $100 to recycle a ton of aluminum. That includes only the actual recycling process from old aluminum to shiny new aluminum. You still have to pay to recover the aluminum, and a ground based system can do that much (think orders of magnitude) cheaper per ton than your space recovery can - which means you can't afford to sell your products at a price that's competitive. The real rub, is that you have to bring it back to the surface for processing - if you had a way of collecting it and processing it in space that didn't involve a round trip to and from the surface, you could could probably do it and make money - especially if you could turn around and use the material in orbit, meaning you never have to fight Earth's gravity well. The initial investment would be high, but once you got up and running, you could probably recycle materials at a profit, and for less than comparable materials shipped up from the surface. Now, if powered space flight reachews a point where putting something in orbit is (relatively) cheap, you may have something.

Tch. It's so obvious. The Earth is blue (except where it isn't).

I looked at this list(pdf), and the lowest values they list are also .02, for polished silver, polished gold, cadmium, and unoxidized aluminum.

Building on imatfaal's work, we can rewrite the equation in terms of thickness: [latex](500*3)*thickness= \pi \cdot r^2_{outer} - \pi \cdot r^2_{inner}[/latex] [latex](1500)*thickness= \pi \cdot (r^2_{outer} - r^2_{inner})[/latex] [latex]thickness= \frac {\pi \cdot (r^2_{outer} - r^2_{inner})}{1500}[/latex] I think. Edit - plugging my formula in terms of thickness into wolfram, gives a similar answer to imfataal's. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=t%3D((pi*(2.5^2+-+1.5^2))%2F1500) As a side note, this is reasonably close to the thickness this guy got on his roll.

I will refer you now to a snippet from the Wikipedia article on black holes, which addresses this objection. Once an object reaches suitable density to overcome the Pauli exclusion principle, simple chemical processes are not going to be powerful enough to stop it collapsing - the gravity is literally crushing the disparate parts of the atoms into the nucleus itself. In fact, the only reason neutron stars exist is because it takes so much more energy to break the TOV limit, that there is a discernable mass difference between that and the C limit before it. Keep in mind that Neutron Stars are already collapsed stellar objects much smaller than their masses would suggest, so your argument that these masses should remain the same size as the star that created them is a non-starter.

I once heard a radio dj compare the presidential election in the US to a game of pick your favorite serial murderer. When none of the choices are good choices, you try and choose the option that can do the least damage.

Infinity is also not a defined value, so the answer undefined is more precise, since it could also be negative infinity, or 2(infinity) or any other "value" that includes an infinity.

My argument wasn't based on the solution, my argument was based on the fact that a value x cannot be equal to itself plus a constant. It literally isn't an equation; those two things cannot be set equal for any value of x.

The fact that you can write an equation does not make it a valid equation. And if it's invalid equation, the answer is meaningless to begin with.

To approach this from another tack - if we found life on a planet so unlike the Earth that humans couldn't survive there, it would be a final indicator that we're really not that special in the grand scheme of things. It might also help give us more insights into how life originates, and the conditions that are required to kick start living organisms on a newly formed planet.

My question is, though, if we're using operators, aren't we now dealing with expressions, not numbers? I mean I can express 81 as 99, but 81 is the numeric representation of that expression. Edit: Wrote this before I saw dejmar's post, above. I'm not sure I agree with the gist of the idea, but I can't fault the logic. If you look at numbers in that fashion, then a certain amount of operations would be permissable to write a "number".

[math]A = \frac{(3.45 * 1200000)}{1,000,000} = 4.14 [/math]