CPL.Luke

how would light translate into two dimensions, it was my understanding that light required three dimensions for the electric field oscillation, the magnetic field oscillation, and travel

does anybody have the textbook vector calculus: linear algebra, and differential equations by hubbard and hubbard? if so, do you have any suggestions for the best way to work with it/ the rigor of it etc.

also the population difference between the US and pretty much any country that we would be in a war with makes it so that its relatively easy for us to field an all volunteer army that can deal with them.

I think spaceship 2 is supposed to be a competitor in the bigelow contract, among a few others that aren't of any special note.

showing your age phi showing your age

rocketman you can have the axis curve as they move out from the origin ie. general relativity. the only requirement is that the vectors are perpendicular at the origin, and I'm not sure if thats a real requirement or not, as I believe that you can have a dimension that is not represented on an axis

how can we know that pluto and charon are tidally locked together? it was my understanding that we could barely make ut any of the features on pluto.

well it seems that in order to sufficiently sepperate wisci from wikipedia it should be made to a technically very high standard, and that there should be articles on experiments with exact procedures and possibly sample data. This section could be expanded to include experiments from the highschool level on up so that science teachers at all levels could come to wisci and find fun demonstrrations, labs, and explanations for their class. We should allow a bit more personality in the articles as well as long as it helps illustrate the point a bit better, after all were explaining facts here, were not trying to provide an encyclopedic balanced view. an example of this would be the way feynmann used to lecture, just the right amount of wit to make it interesting and not to much as to obscure the point. We should really be trying to advertise the project to people who are already at the university level ie. by hitting science boards where their is a high percentage of undergrads (not that we want to pass over any other boards however). We should advertise it as something where if someone just completed a lab than they should write an article about it. Since alot of these undergrads are going to be doing a lab write up a week we could get alot of very useful articles out of such a pattern. in order to make wisci a worthwile project that would eventually be actively used, we have to look at things wikipedia can't do because of its encyclopaedic nature. I think the above are just a few of the things that we could be doing to make wisci a resource for the science minded, a one stop shop for labs, experiments, common discussions, explanations, shortcuts, anything that would be useful for a scientist. We should also work on making a few general templates for how an article about an experiment should look, or how an article about a common explanation for some phenomena should look. If we can make a few of these templates and then make a few good articles (one for each general article type) combined with a good introduction to what wisci is and who its for (its for scientists and the science minded, it should be highly technical) then all we have to do is spread the word around, principally to as many skilled people as possible. note: wikipedia has pretty much covered all of the introduction articles one would ever need, one of the principal things that wikipedia can't do like wisci can do is get highly technical and highly informative, to the point of to much information. We can have data tables and graphs and all of that, wikipedia can't do that. Wikipedia also can't really have an article on how to explain phenomena to students like wisci could, wisci can have analogies and diagrams and whatever else you can think of to help illustrate the point.

you know I wonder if we know a few people who could post on the university boards about this. Most technical schools have some sort of forum system where people can discuss various topics related to their fields. If anybody here has access to one of these boards then we could try and get some of the undergrad crowd in on the editing

"We model and predict reality, then choose from possible futures. Prediction is what gives way to choice, not non-determinism." -bascule thats the very definition of non-determinism, you just said there were multiple futures that could exist, in a deterministic universe there is only one future

how can they be compatible? strong determinism in its purest form clearly states that if you know the position and momentum of every particle in the universe, then you can predict the motions of every particle exactly. how does that leave room for us to do whatever we want?

I personally like indeterminacy, because an inevitable result of a deterministic universe is that we ourselves would have to be completely predictable, and while there is no denying that there are predictable properties of any collection of people. The behavior of a single person can never be precisely predicted. (at least in my world view) if one decides that the universe is deterministic than you have to conclude that no person has free will, and that every action that you make is the product of the way the atoms distributed themselves (of course in a pre-determined fasion) at the big bang. Whereas if one takes the position that the universe is non-deterministic then its up in the air if humans have free will or not, it becomes a matter if one takes the position that its all random chance based on the near infinite number of probability waves interacting around you. OR that your moment to moment choices are real decisions, since in a non-deterministic universe your present actions are in some way seperated from the past its possible that you do make moment to moment decisions. so anyway, once again I'm posting while I'm far to tired to write coherently so I hope the above makes sense, and if not then I may edit it in the morning so that it does. one last point however is that in order for the deterministic universe to work, and still have originated at some point in time, then at that first point in time "something" would have had to chose where everything went and what the original pattern was going to be. Whereas if the the universe is non-deterministic than the big bang could be a purely random event with everything falling into place based on a probabilty rather than by "somethings" choice.

insane alien, without the heat the core would cool and both A: slow down (it currently spins faster than the earth rotates), and B: become less conductive this would have the total result of removing the earth's magnetic field. It still hasn't been determined why the earth's magnetic field has remained intact whilst mars's died out hundreds of millions (if not billions) of years ago. I forget if venus and mercury still have there's but its a good bet as they still have their atmosphere. there is some circumstantial evidence for the earth having a uranium core a few miles wide at its center based on asteroid composition and the continued existance of a hot molten core. besides if there was alot of uranium around when the earth first formed it would be logical that a significant portion would sink to the center of the earth along with most of the iron. Yt while the earth technically orbits around the center of mass of the solar system, and not the sun, the sudden removal of that much mass would make the earth run off at a near tangential path to its current orbit for a very long period of time, (all the orbits would be extended by billions of miles)

unfortunatly when israel pulled out of palestine it looked to the majority of people living there like hamas had played a critical role in forcing the israeli's out of palestine, and hamas being the only political party with any semblance of legitamacy in the eyes of the palestinians was a logical choice to be elected. We also have to face the unfortunate fact that without hamas the israeli's would never have pulled out of palestine, while I'm not neccessarily saying that what hamas did was the only way to oust israel, it obviously did work and if the terrorism had stopped then it would have succeded and created a palestinian state. I can't be certain on what would have happened if the palestinian's had engaged in a non-violent protest, but I would bet even money that the israeli's would have just called in the riot control in order to breakup the protests, and in the eyes of most palestinians America will support Israel no matter what Israel does (who could blame them for taking this point of view when faced with Israeli tanks shooting at kids in the west bank). Also I believe that in the late 80's and early 90's there were a number of non-violent protests that didn't accomplish anything. The only way to ensure that terrorism isn't seen as the only option for groups seeking equality is to show to the world that non-violent protest can work in the middle east. The only way to do that is to show that the US will not allow Israel to do whatever they will and cut military aid if the ISraeli's abuse their power. The civil rights movement would not have succeded in the US if the average american didn't care when protesters were sprayed with fire hoses

venus also has alot less mass so there would be less heat present. as for the earth, if you believe the theories about a uranium core at the center producing the heat necessary to keep the core spinning, then we could still use geothermal energy to keep ourselves alive with or without the sun.

to make the wiki more popular it would be wise to talk to other science forums and get them to make some commitment to it. as it stands there are only going to be a few dozen editors on wisci and thus you will never get a large enough user base to even come close to a notable reference work.

the people on the pseudoscience forum are welcome to come back here as long as they don't try to disprove einstein (it gets tiresome after the first fifteen threads of convuluted examples)

^ that was good It probably was the switch to bipedalism, because I imagine that if you did have a 6" bone sticking out of you, it would be liable to get brocken if you ever fell over, it also would make for a tempting target by any sort of animal that may be attacking, and finally in competition between males of that time if one male ever wanted to "disarm" his opponent then he wouldn't have to look very far.

or a bunch of nukes targetted to nudge the meteor a few thousand miles off course

martin it seems you misunderstood my tone, I was asking why he was biased out of general curiosity, not to antagonize.

well there is a new version of mond that is supposedly compatible with GR, and predicts gravitational lensing. MY reason for posting this is that I just read about the theory in discover magazine (it was on the front cover) and apparently the theory breaks down like this F=Ma is an approximation and the real version is F=Ma^2/a_0 where a_0 is a constant. This original idea was created adhoc in the 80's and used to some success in getting the proper rotation curves for galaxies, however it was rejected by the main stream for its adhoc nature and that it wasn't relativistic. however recently a version of it came out called tensor vector scalar gravity or TeVeS which is relativistic and has a lower end limit of the above formula and turns into general relativity at the upper end. note: I don't have the mathmatical background to say that it looks promising and I also think that the F=ma^2/a_0 is to adhoc to be really considered without some mechanism for a_0 being what it is. and on the particle end, I could buy it if the dark matter was strewn throughout the galaxy and just didn't have an electrical charge and thusly we wouldn't see it glow in the electromagnetic range. However now that its been revealed that the dark matter would have to form halo's outside of the galaxy I can't buy into it. I simply can't buy that that much matter is out there without having attracted enough charged particles to it for us to see the halo glow. PS atheist why are you biased on this issue?

I agree that its a better idea, all that you'd have to do to show that the iris imprint is superior is show the number of unique features available for checking on an iris, and then look at how many unique features there are available for checking on a fingerprint whereas showing how easy it is to fake a finger print takes more effort and is more fitting of a science project

is it just me or does dark matter (and dark energy) seem like a way of fudging a theory in order to make it work? personally the idea of some mystical dark matter keeping our galaxy together is reminiscent of the concentric circles model of the solar system, add to that the fact that the dark matter models keep on becoming more and more complex as new observations remove possible sources of dark matter. I've been starting to think that the entire problem rests on our own incorrect view of gravity, and that some other theory like modified newtonian dynamics is where the real solution lies. This also got me thinking that black holes may also be a relic of an incorrect theory of gravity. Which would explain why alot of the mathmatics surrounding them gets funky (we still can't explain why there's a giant beam of particles streaming out perpendicular to the accretion disc near the speed of light). at the very least a new theory of gravity that describes some of these phenomenon would make for a far more elegant view of the universe and as history has shown the more elegant and simplistic views in science are most often correct sory for the bad grammar and writing, but its late and I've had to much coffee

why would the sun make the earth uninhabitable in a few thousand years? maybe in a few billion when it turns into a red giant, but I'm not going to worry about whats going to happen in a few billion years also keep in mind that it is very difficult to wipe a species off the planet, let alone humanity. In the worst case scenario we would be reduced to a few million lonely soles who would then go on to repopulate the earth.

so essentially what your saying is that while you can have more energy departed directly to the rocket if the velocity of the propellant is very low, but the rocket can gain a much larger velocity out of its given mass of propellant if it expends more energy and sends the fuel off with a larger velocity so then the choice is with the designer of the rocket as to whether they want greater mass efficiency or greater energy efficiency, and I'm ignoring thermodynamical efficiency alltogether as it doesn't really effect this discussion. am I getting what you mean right?