big314mp

Gravitational lensing? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_lens

Opposite ends of what? A black hole is a sphere...

What exactly would you use to prove that light got sucked in by a black hole? It's not exactly something that can be directly observed. There is plenty of info out there about black holes, as iNow has posted.

Light that is beyond the event horizon (i.e. the edge) of a black hole is not sucked in.

Metric, Phi, Metric!! This is the best I could find on skull crushing: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=23646 In any case, how the pressure is applied is more important than how much pressure is applied.

I understand (and am quite surprised) that the iridium will significantly compress, but I don't follow the math: Change in volume = pressure applied / bulk modulus 360GPa/320GPa = 1.125 This doesn't make logical sense, as the iridium can't decrease in volume by more than 100%...so what's missing?

2-3 times as dense seems a bit much...how exactly would you calculate such a number?

http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/free-video-editors.shtml Lots of good stuff there.

I haven't taken much of an active role in this election, but my roommates have a few good stories: One had his girlfriend break up with him over politics. Kind of sad, I guess. The other is a devout republican, and decided to vote early at possibly the shadiest poll in the state. Obama supporters were actively campaigning inside. No ID was required. You could register to vote, and then vote, with no ID presented, all in one sitting. The woman handing out the ballots asked if he was voting for "that one candidate that all of the other college students will vote for *wink*."

I'd say they wouldn't be crushed, because the balloons on the bottom will pop well before the person was harmed in any significant way.

It is impossible to convince people like these, because to them, there are no inconsistencies in their faith. They do not accept any outside evidence, and the belief is internally consistent. Therefore, they are impossible to convince. It could be a Poe's law though.

Just for the sake of being a wet blanket: My mom works at the Main Library in down town Cincinnati. The kids from the inner city schools will cut class, but have no real plans of doing anything with the time. Instead, they wander to the library and generally create a slightly quieter version of ParanoiA's mall. So every ~3 weeks or so, police surround the library, and do a raid to send all of the truant kids back to school. They used to hang around outside as well, but one of my mom's coworkers had the brilliant idea of playing classical music around the outside of the library. It cut down on the loitering by an impressive amount.

Global Mean Surface Temperature?

http://t14web.lanl.gov/Research/TDAC2000/shaw.00.pdf Searching on google for a while gave the above research, which seems to suggest that they do in fact bond to stuff in the air. Thanks!

You would think that it would have SOME effect though... Perhaps it bonds with adjacent surface carbons via highly strained bonds?

Well, I think the OP wanted to go in the other direction. For a given surface gravity, calculate the mass.

Well, when a diamond grinder (the guy who shapes gem) is grinding the diamond, he must be breaking lots carbon-carbon bonds, that are then reforming rather rapidly with something else. It would seem that this would lead to unpredictable reactions at the surface of the diamond, possibly impacting the color/hardness/etc characteristics at the cut face. And yet the cut face looks just like any other face of the diamond.

Well, if we are going to take that into account, we should also take into account that the gravity at the surface of said Iridium sphere will actually be significantly higher than 1g, due to being closer to the center of the sphere. I figured I'd make a few assumptions in the interest of simplicity (read: the math to take all of those factors into account is beyond me). Hold up...wouldn't a different density not actually change the gravity (assuming a point source), as it is mass only in the gravitational equation?

Diamonds are a lattice of carbon atoms, each bonded to four other carbons. This leads me to two questions: First, what happens at the surface of a diamond? How would the carbon atoms at the surface of a diamond bond? Second, when a diamond breaks, carbon-carbon bonds have to be broken (assuming it doesn't break along an internal fault). This seems like it would be virtually impossible to do, and it also raises the question of what happens once these bonds are broken.

Diamond doesn't actually have a hexagonal structure. Graphite does, and that might be what you are thinking off. Diamond has a tetrahedral type structure, where every carbon is bonded to four other carbons at 109.5 deg angles to each other.

I figured the atoms would be trading electrons with each other, rather than there being large numbers of free electrons traveling significant distances. The air pressure is too high for that. I figured that the behavior of the arc would be similar to the behavior of a wire. If he tried blowing the arc with something, it might get the ionized air moving at appropriate velocities to be deflected by a field.

I calculated that a sphere of Iridium, with the same mass as the Earth, would have a radius 62.6% the size of Earth's radius. It works out to a radius of roughly 4000km. Basically: Set mass of iridium sphere equal to mass of earth. Use density of iridium to calculate the volume of this sphere. Use the sphere volume equation to calculate the radius of this sphere. Compare to earth's.

Yeah, its the only one I can think of off the top of my head (read: I haven't looked too hard). Its one of those textbook example things that you just memorize.

With HBr + Alkene, the reaction usually follows markovnikov's rule. This is due because MA favors the more stable carbocation. Now when a peroxide is added, the mechanism changes. The peroxide acts as the initiation step for a radical chain reaction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_radical_addition

What was the alkene? And was there a peroxide present?