CPL.Luke

Lifters are real and do do lift off the ground and all that. However unlike what mr. Naudin says it is a well understood phenomenon where by air molecules are charged upon contacting the top wire and then are drawn to the bottom plate. The ionic breeze air filters made by the sharper image use the same basic principles as the lifter. and yes JLN's work is very suspicious and most of it is utter garbage.

Nobel was correct when he said that, the combination of tnt and the machine gun made war an exercise in futility, as noted by the first world war. however later advances in the warfare (namely mechanization) made it so that it was once again "useful" to wage war. Nuclear weapons just set the clock back on war and made it so that it is no longer "useful" to wage war. The only way for nuclear weapons to take on the role that TNT has would be if someone were to make a missile shield, which I sincerely hope never happens. But even if it does I still think that because a single nuclear warhead can devastate an entire country (unlike a single TNT bomb) that war between two large countries both armed with nuclear weapons can never be "useful" and because everyone knows that by the very rapid devastation that nuclear weapons bring that no one will ever engage in a nuclear war (where both sides are armed with nukes).

the pebble-bed reactor is supposed to be very safe, China went so far as to turn off its cooling system to prove it can't melt down. Last I heard China was planning to build over a hundred of them. smallispower, did you notice that uranium is a naturally occuring element? ie its all over australia and the world already. in fact there are places where its at such a high concentration as to allow people to mine it. furthermore the stuff that comes out of a reactor has already been turned into some pretty short lived isotopes that pretty rapidly decay and become safe.

yeah the program in question was just an attempt to make a bunker buster that would be far more effective than the ones used in iraq (which didn't work to well), The DOD was only requesting permission to change their nuclear policy in order to use the weapon. There was never going to be a change in international law, or even the laws of the US. Jim, The US has already used the threat of nuclear weapons against states that did not have them (see the korean war) in order to ensure a rapid termination of conflict on US terms. The fact is that any country would use nuclear weapons in the face of defeat (israel was about to when the 6 day war ended, and again in the first gulf war if a single WMD landed in Israel), and why shouldn't they? what good are the weapons if even in the face of defeat a country can't use them. also note that nuclear weapons have saved far more lives than they've ever taken, by having the duel effect of stopping wars between large powers, and reducing military spending as a country can just sit back and say that if their attacked they'll use the bomb. Everyone knows what the effect of a nuclear war would be so it never happens. In fact a nuclear war negates the purpose of war as it would set both countries back by decades and no additional resources can be gotten out of it.

the light doesn't actually travel faster than c, what happens is that the leading edge of the wave gets turned into a peak, so the detector on the other side picks up the peak alot sooner than it should of.

the german autobond has no speed limits, its just like any other limited access road, except you can go as fast as you want. lucky for me america still refuses to videotape our roads

the rule is 15 over, so 55 turns into 70, 65 to 80, but alot of the roadways that allow 65 were really designed to be taken at 100, so really the increase in speed would lower the number of accidents due to a lack of awareness by the driver.

neonblack, I don't think that I'm all that familiar with how you were able to re-write the sum, could you possibly elaborate on that?

this is a wierd limit, its the first time I've ever seen a limit of a function involving a function of a series I think it diverges to infinity, but I don't know how to get that mathmatically, so if someone could tell me how to take the limit of a function such as this it would be greatly appreciated. heres the function [MATH]\lim_{n\rightarrow \infty}\frac{n}{\sqrt{\sum_{n=1}^{\infty} n^2}}[/MATH]

that depends on whether or not you live in the uk

^the jury is still out on that one, however the game seemed to have pretty good physics in terms of the way everything should fall, I did like the two portals that put the drone into simple harmonic motion

sometimes I just want to kill myself

sysiphus I don't think there's anything wrong with stem cell research, like I said in my first post in this thread.... My point is that a number of people in this thread have said things like that kind of logic is what I'm critisizing, the idea that sacrificing a few for the good of the many is a very very poor bad idea, as has been proven by history countless times in the past (see my first post) PS don't you love it when people don't read your whole post

Nevermore don't be to quick to forget your history, there is a reason why those names conger up such fear and hatred. Ignoring the obvious parellels between the past and present will very soon have you repeating the same mistake.

I wonder what the long term effect of that trend is on our ability to make sudden learps forward in science, I know that back in the 19th and early 20th century a relatively small group of people was able to make a large number of major advances in math and physics. maybe this was a side effect of having people who really got the big picture.

a though occured to me the other day, 200 years ago the highest level of mathmatics any mathmatician was educated to was calculus 100 years ago we started having to educate young mathmaticians to the level of linear algebra and vector calc (probably a couple others that I am unaware of) Learning these additional subjets requires several additional years of training. today a mathmatician requires 6-8 years of schooling in order to be trained to the level where they can do real work that actually effects the field that their in. My question is what will we do in anouther 100 years when it takes 8-10 years of training to be an effective mathmatician? or even further down the line when it requires 15 years of training to understand all thats been done up till now in your field. what are your thoughts?

about the whole ensuring that the flame doesn't back up into your reaction vessel thing, do make sure that it doesn't, although entertaining as the explosion may be, the rapid burning sensation felt afterwards as the HCl hits is not. trust me I think my chem experiment was zinc something and HCL to produce hydrogen gas.

reddaiah check out the introduce yourself thread to introduce youself, otherwise welcome to the forums! I agree with pangloss that the best way to beat the religious right on this issue is to sepperate it from abortion. One interesting parellel on this issue occured to me today, In the middle ages doctors faced similar opposition over the use of corpses as cadavers for teaching aids and research purposes. People found it to be morally unthinkable to open a dead body. After the benefits of the research (that was carried out albeit illegally) started to trickle in the ban was lifted in most parts of the world. So maybe all we need is to start seeing the benefits of stem cell research trickle in from europe and china for the US to switch. Be careful how you rank your morals though, using dead things for research is one thing but "sacrificing" a few for the good of the many has been used to justify the actions of a few notable historical figures, namely Chairman Mao Stalin Hitler and on the science side there was a nazi scientist that did alot of brilliant work that eventually led to the creation of medical procedures in the event of hypothermia. However on the way there he killed a few dozen jews, heck they were on their way to the gas chamber anyway

speaking of matlab, mathmatica, and maple. are they all roughly equivalent or is one superior?

are there any programs out there that draw vector fields for you?

that problem isn't solvable without some more information, you either need to give the width of the river, the height of the tree, or the distance from the observer to the top of the tree.

That would seem like the logical thing to say, except for the fact that israel has pursued such a policy for the past 30 years and things have continued to deteriorate over there

the policy of every country to my knowledge when faced with a terrorist group has been to not negotiate with them for fear of inviting more terrorists. My question is this, is this policy correct? While I understand the reasons behind not negotiating with terrorists, particularly the fear tha it legitimizes their actions as an effective means of protest. However when faced with terrorists groups on the scale of hesbollah and hamas, is there any other option than to negotiate?

how would the classical definition of light be able to transfer over to two dimensions

I grazed over some of it and found that a number of the equations were poorly understood by the author and or dead wrong. the main one I noticed was the equation E delta t =h /4 pi its supposed to be delta E delta t > h/4pi I double checked the explanation given in the website to make sure it wasn't a typo (it wasn't)