big314mp

Buffers are for acids and bases. Acids and bases generally involve ions (Arrhenius and Bronsted-Lowry acids/bases do, at least), so they do in a way. A buffer is a solution that is resistant to change in pH. It does this by having a base and an acid in solution that won't react with each other. Something along the lines of sodium acetate and acetic acid. If an acid is added to a buffer, some base is consumed, bringing the pH back to normal. and vice versa.

AFAIK, your choices look solid for announcing/scores/etc. It will be quite weak for music however. I would be careful about overdrawing the amp while playing music. The people at PE are quite good, and if that is what they recommended to you, then I would be quite confident in it. I was just up there on friday, getting some parts for a new speaker, and they were extremely knowledgeable and helpful.

Ah, thanks for the clarification. I hate to disappoint, but this is moving out of my area of knowledge, so I will address these as best as I can. We don't really know what causes the expansion of the universe, although scientist posit something known as "dark energy" to be behind it. Of course, we know nothing about it, and have no evidence of it. Gravity cannot affect a vacuum, so there is no effect of gravity on the expansion of space. Where gravity plays a role is in holding together things in the universe. The milky way, for example. It is held together by gravity, so there is no observed expansion of the milky way. Galaxies far away from us are to far to be held by our gravity (or us by them) so we move away from each other. Vacuum is kinda hard to describe, as it is a seething mess of quantum particles known as virtual particles. To say "there are no particles at all in this space" implies a little too much knowledge of things, so there are particles that pop in and out of existence in the vacuum. On the issue of the ether, it simply isn't needed. Ether does not show up in any equations of physics, and there are no experiments that show its presence. Therefore, it either doesn't exist, or it does exist and doesn't affect anything, in which case it is irrelevant. Most scientist would say the ether doesn't exist, and justify that position using occam's razor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occams_razor

Oil on water burns very smokily, and is quite incomplete. A thin layer of relatively nonvolatile oil would probably not even light.

I see a giant mylar sheet, majestically circling the earth...and then hitting the ISS and giftwrapping it.

You could do it while pouring liquid nitrogen over it, as that keeps it cold, and under an inert atmosphere all in one fell swoop. What could be interesting (since I'm on that train of thought) is chucking the cesium powder in a small vat of liquid oxygen. On a side note, if you use a concentrated, strong acid instead of water, does the reaction progress significantly more violently?

I had thought about an oil slick, then realized that was just substituting one problem for another. I hadn't thought of a biodegradable oil, but combined with a biodegradable detergent, that may be viable. Of course, that very heavily depends on the cost of the oil, as large quantities will be needed. Your best bet may be rebuilding the bayous around coastal regions, as that provides a relatively permanent solution to some areas.

What exactly do you mean by “carboxyl functionalized glass spheres” and what are you trying to do with them? I think that information may help the people here help you. Best of luck, and welcome to SFN!

Well, I play around with speakers and amps a bit, so I may be able to help some. The more relevant advice I can offer you is to try diyaudio.com, as they have been very helpful to me.

Unless I'm missing something, there could still be a whole mess of different ages. [hide]6-5-2 would be just as likely as 7-5-1 or 8-4-1 etc. There is an oldest child, but that doesn't narrow the range down by much.[/hide]

Ions tend to be involved in bonding with salts (NaCl for example is Na+ and Cl-). This type of bonding is referred to as ionic bonding. It is involved where one atom gives up an electron to another atom. The two ions then stick together due to electrostatic attraction. With other molecules (such as water), the bonding is covalent. In this type of bonding, the atoms share electrons. There are no ions involved. Ionic compounds tend to be soluble in water, but other things are also soluble in water. Sugar, for example,dissolves in water, but isn't an ion. So, in the end, ions are just...rather boring I guess. They don't really have any hallmark beyond their charge. Ionic compounds share certain characteristics (hard, brittle, generally water soluble, high melting points, solutions will conduct electricity, etc.), and these characteristics are derived from the fact that they are made of ions, but that's as far as I would go in talking about the "hallmarks" of ions.

Well...you write up your findings, how you did the experiment, background info, etc into a paper, and then submit it for publication.

Unless you are doing this on a rather large scale, you don't really need 48A. You will probably need more than 3V though. Get a small transformer, pass the output current through a bridge rectifier, and connect the output of the rectifier to your electrodes. Connect some large smoothing capacitors in parallel with the electrodes. And an inert gas atmosphere may help if you can find one. You will need to separate the oxygen electrode also.

What code are you talking about? The video game computer code? As in the stuff programmers have on their screens? If so, how can that go anywhere, let along go there faster than the speed of light? How can it take 3D form? And I'd look forward to seeing that video

I was feeling rather anti-religious at the moment, and the first thing that came to mind when reading your post was the Bible I suppose the mantra of "Buyer beware" applies here, although that sounds a little to harsh to me.

...this doesn't make ANY SENSE! You know how this reads in my head? I was writing code for my video game physics engine. I wrote the code in perfect squares. I then took the data output from the physics engine, and scribbled it all over the code I had just written. I did this an infinite number of times, so I had this HUGE stack of paper. I then threw the code, one sheet at a time, at the steering wheel of the car that I happened to be driving, that was now skidding all over the place (probably because I was writing code instead of driving). I kept doing this, and I consciously decided to speed up. Eventually, I was going at light speed and crashed and died and saw god. The End. 0 cents. Absolutely bankrupt.

I would have thought that they would show a fairly consistent diurnal variation, Upon thinking about what you have said, however, I realized that the water wouldn't get much sunlight during the day, anyways, due to the cloud cover. So the difference in radiative heating is considerably less than what I had originally thought. Many thanks!

Could space be what is created when a photon or subatomic particle finally "dies" when it loses all of its energy? Particles don't die, and photons don't lose energy (barring red shift effects). Photons can be absorbed, but that is different. The mechanism might be well understood by someone but that is not me. I will accept this for now but would be interested in how the speed of gravity was figured out. Gilded can probably explain this better than me, but imagine the solar system, using the "rubber sheet" analogy of space time. The sun sits in the middle and creates a depression, and the planets circle the sun. Now let's say the sun vanishes. Einstein calculated that the speed of the resulting "gravitational wave" moves at the speed of light. I dont like it. You are creating something (space and at a prodigious rate I might add) from nothing (universal acceleration?). You can hardly call a vacuum "something". But the idea that the universe has to expand into some space, is merely a limitation of the human mind. While what you say about the spots on the ballon might be true for those spots, it is not true of the entire system. Does the system operate with different rules from the spots? Clarify this please.

It would look cool, I guess. Great news footage. Storms are driven by heat from water condensation. The storm only dies when there is no more water to evaporate (i.e. over land, cold air drafts, etc). So the only way you could really kill the storm would be to stop the water from evaporating, or cool the storm down somehow. On a related note, do storms noticeably weaken at night?

The problem is known as synchrotron radiation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_radiation By accelerating a charged particle in a magnetic field (here the acceleration is from going around in circles) the particles produce radiation, and therefore lose energy. ILC is an electron-positron collider. Since the particles used are lighter, the speed to get the proper amount of energy is also higher. Thus, radiation losses become excessive, and it becomes easier to just build the thing in a straight line. I read that LHC would eventually use lead ions (currently using protons) to get all the way up to 14 TeV, so they may use that to look for the higgs. http://lhc-commissioning.web.cern.ch/lhc-commissioning/commissioning-ions.htm

I think that the difference you are objecting to lies in the motive of the ban, rather than the ban itself. Palin was banning something in order to enforce a sort of mindless group conformity (and then punishing those who stood up to her, which is a blatant abuse of power). Nobody is arguing whether that is good or bad here. Clearly we all see that that is a huge overstepping of bounds by government. Where the ambiguity (and therefore, opinions) come into play is whether there are materials that should be banned for the public good. There was a story in the news a few years ago, where the FCC (or some government agency, I don't clearly remember) took a pornography studio to trial on obscenity charges, citing that the work had "no artistic merit" (that being the excusing factor for nudity). That sort of "ban" is highly objectionable as "no artistic merit" is purely a matter of opinion. If it isn't something that is broadcast to the public, the public shouldn't be in the business of banning it (as Johnny Public can choose not to acquire such materials). Which brings us back to the libraries, if you consider that broadcasting and "making available" are two different things. I can agree that libraries should be bound by certain restrictions, as they do spend public dollars. Where to draw those lines is something that regulators can't be too careful about. While I am not entirely comfortable with the position that all books and/or media should be available in libraries, I do see a certain amount hypocrisy in that position. I need to throw in the fact that since libraries freely exchange materials, the question of "Whether tax dollars can be better spent on other materials?" is moot since as long as there are enough copies floating around to meet demand (and one would think the demand of objectionable materials would be rather low, or they wouldn't be objectionable), then the available materials can move to meet that demand.

Voodoo, the issue with your "science" is that it is entirely subjective. Explain to us how someone could peer review your "findings" or somehow verify your work. You think you saw something, and you can't even accurately describe it to us. Of course we are going to be skeptical of something like that. It's what we do. It's what science does.

I think that is what waitforufo was talking about with his point about national selection criteria for libraries. To me, banning books conjures the image of nazi Germany book burnings. I think only certain fundamentalists would support such a view. Banning books in libraries, IMO, is something similar, but of very different scale. Libraries need to have certain standards, as they are paid for by the public.

Dang. That sucks. I'm somewhat confused as to how an orphan has an estranged father, though.

Well, you don't really "drag" the blanket the way you are imagining. The closest I can visualize it is that you have a tangled blanket, and then you are punching holes in it. So, you aren't really "folding" the universe. The folds are already there, as are the holes in the blanket (which are thought to be black holes). This is a bit hard to visualize, but imagine the balloon universe again. If you are on the surface of it (since this is a 2D universe) there is no "above" or "below" the surface of the balloon. Such an point is nonsensical, because the place doesn't exist. Measuring the distance to such an imaginary point is equally nonsensical, as such a distance doesn't exist. Extend the analogy to a path through this "imaginary space", and it is equally nonsensical to speak of the distance that one travels through a wormhole. As Gilded said, when a wormhole is made connecting two points in space, the two points are, quite literally, right next to each other.