npts2020

I remember my 8th grade science teacher demonstrating manufacture of hydrogen and capturing a test tube full to explode on a bunson burner. Usually it just makes a loud pop with a flash of light but that time the test tube exploded with enough force to send pieces to every corner of the room. Fortunately everyone was wearing lab coats and safety goggles and she was the only one to recieve a small cut on the cheek. You really need something hot like a flame to cause an explosion though.

John Carter meet Tars Tarkus........I think it has been fairly conclusively shown there is no Barsoom on Mars tho.

I dont. Even glass well over 100 years old has a greenish tint.

What about chemical potential energy? Unexploded ordinance for example.

The market was not nearly as diversified in 1929 so I would think the same shock now would not be as noticible or sudden.

big314mp...the idea would be for those asking for citizenship have a job lined up i.e. working in their cousins dry cleaning business, opening a widget making plant, professorship at M.I.T. etc. This should displace few jobs. ecoli...part of being "eligible" could be to collect nothing for at least some period of time say 25 years just for sake of putting a number on it Pangloss...it is a limit with each country assigned so many spots as Jackson33 describes (thank you Jackson33). I am sure if you google and go to the Immigration and Naturalization Sevice website you can find out what the limit for each country is. No country that I am aware of has fewer applications than slots allotted. What I meant by "recently exhibited xenophobia" was the behavior covered in the mass media over immigration reform and the apparent victory of xenophobia over logical reform and in no way is meant as a commentary on the midset of any majority (imo few people even think about it much anyway). As you yourself point out, the vast majority in this country has a recent forefather from outside of the Americas. This gives me hope that those xenophobic tendencies can be overcome, at least enough to give a subject like this rational discussion. Your last sentence actually gave me a pretty good laugh. Which partisan side are you talking about? I only gave what I thought would be the effect and asked what others thought the outcome would be. BTW I failed to note what you thought the effect would be.

I like paper only because I am more adept at using it. If there was such thing as personal computers or cell phones when I was growing up or in school I am sure those would be my choice.

JohnB: So you are saying that even though more energy "is trapped and reradiated" (quibbling over words imo) by greenhouse gases, more energy is not put into the lower atmosphere thus causing warming? Where exactly does all that energy go? If we could replace our atmosphere with methane the surface temperature would stay the same or not change significantly? Or are we only talking degree?

Pioneer: I think your objection about being too fast is not valid. it may have easily taken millions or more years for the relatively ideal conditions of the lab to occur in nature. Furthermore, it could have started, got wiped out by a volcano, solar flare, meteorite, etc. many times before successful propogation ever occurred.

Hydroelectric power is usually from a dam with a turbine that is turned by water falling from the top to the bottom. This converts the potential energy of the water (at rest on top) to kinetic energy (water falling) to mechanical energy (turning the turbine which turns a generator) to electrical energy (output of the generator). I believe that is about as simple as I can state it.

Yes but then the objects are no longer identical except for mass. Pradeep has it correct now.

America has long been idealized as a place where oppressed people could go to begin a new life in freedom, recently exhibited xenophobia notwithstanding. The recent problems, if economists can be trusted, are in no small part related to real estate values falling. If America was to not have any numerical limit but were to allow any qualified individual to become a citizen, what would be the economic effect? IMO it would not take long to both increase real estate values and raise tax revenue to a level closer to what we are spending.

Pangloss: "and pretty soon you're talking about some real money." I think that's the biggest part of the problem, the money isn't real until you have to give it back. The prevailing attitude seems to be that so long as I can get mine now it doesn't matter who has to pay it back in the future.

I don't see what difference it makes anyway, the gap can't be much even if it exists. The only relevant question is whether the individual involved is "intelligent" enough.

I would like to see you explain that to a first grader;)

lucaspa: "You don't have to "think" and throw out an off-hand opinion. Darwin's notebooks have been published and you can go look to see where the ideas came from. He wrote it all down." I am not sure what you mean by this. It has been about 25 years since reading nearly the body of Charles Darwin's work, so I could be wrong. Are you telling me that he didn't arrive at the conclusion his ideas were correct from observation of moths and finches (at least in part) or that you would just rather I didn't take part in the discussion?

Both managed to pretty much avoid sustantively answering the questions asked. What little was said seemed pretty similar from both, my opponent is a rascal and only I can fix what is wrong. These candidates are the extremes of the two parties? If I didn't have the tv to tell me differently, I would think they were both from the same party.

They can probably get the $5 billion from the U.S. government since they are such good "allies in our war on terror".

Just heard some more great news, not! Now the Fed is going to start doing unsecured (not asset backed) loans to non-financial corporations. Was on NPR so not sure where it might be in print, sorry.

Well the physicists and mathematicians were hired to be "experts" in a particular matter, if you are a CEO do you ignore your own experts' advice? It is probably true that not enough questions were asked for clarification, but the fact of the matter is that many if not most made their money anyway and will never have to give any of it back. IMO many knew the whole thing was untenable from the start but didn't really care because it was too complicated for more than a very few to understand and they would be gone before things collapsed.

IMHO the best thing to tell them is that it is currently a matter of scientific investigation but that our best explanations at this point are those presented above, i.e. there is nothing so far as we know......

JohnB: Yes the upper atmosphere will also radiate into space faster but not as much faster as surface upwards. (remember the temperature in space does not significantly change so the difference will be less). The main effect, however, is caused by greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane that tend to congregate in the lower part of the atmosphere. Higher energy photons pass through the atmosphere to be absorbed by the earth and re-emitted as lower energy photons (usually infra-red). One of the properties of both mathane and carbon dioxide is to allow high energy photons to pass through but reflect infra-red ones, causing temperature increase at the surface of the earth as the amounts of those gases increase from more reflections back toward the source (earths surface in this case).

Definitions are supremely important. That is one reason scientists like math so much, the terms are well defined and consistent from one person to the next. A leprechaun is not defined by a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow so not finding that pot is not going to disprove the existence of leprechauns. Leprechauns (like God) can be defined in such a way as to be unfalsifiable with 100% certainty. Yes we can show that nobody has ever found a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow and that no other creature on earth can turn invisible and therefore deduce that Leprechauns are highly unlikely to exist but those alone do not make it impossible, just seemingly impossible. As has been mentioned on this forum more than once, it is very difficult if not impossible to prove a negative. Likewise, I can make up a definition for a word that fits reality, such as saying a leprechauns are no more than an Irishmen in a green suits and funny looking hats (not the standard definition I am aware), but something I have seen with my own eyes. The same can be said for "god". If I simply define "god" as "anything greater than myself" who would have enough hubris to claim to be an athiest? Back to the topic at hand, I think Darwin got his ideas from finches and moths.

I wonder if any of those physicists and mathematicians were named Ponzi?

None of the properties of the metal will be effected unless the surface coating is somehow incorporated into the crystaline structure of the metal, a process i am not even sure is currently possible. The object so coated may be stronger, less brittle or whatever but that is from adding the properties of the coating to those that are already in the metal, not from changing any intrinsic property of the metal inside. What does change is the average of those properties for the whole object. Think of it like an egg. The inside of the egg is no different whether the shell is there or not. The yolk is still soft, its only the shell (the coating) that is harder, more brittle, etc.