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Bullshit. Here it is, gratis:
http://explorer-1.ins.cwru.edu/pub/ISO/rhel-server-7.0-x86_64-dvd.iso

... Since this person is not making any scientific argument anyway, but simply attempting ad-hominem, and saying "so-and-so is wrong" without ANY evidence (which is all he can do, because he doesn't have any), this was a completely pointless exercise on his part. He was simply making another attempt at dragging my persona through the mud. I can only conclude that was his only purpose, since he didn't make any actual, substantive arguments. [Jane Q. Public, 2014-07-25]

A real skeptic would be checking my calculations but Jane can't even acknowledge them. If the Slayers are right, why is Venus hotter than Mercury?

Mercury's daytime surface temperature is 350C while Venus has a nighttime surface temperature of ~470C.

... despite the fact that Venus is 87% farther away from the Sun than Mercury, implying sunlight 3.5x weaker.

... and despite the fact that Mercury's albedo is ~0.1 and Venus's albedo is ~0.65.

... and despite the fact that a "night" on Venus lasts ~58 Earth days, during which the temperature barely changes from that at "high noon".

... Since all atmospheres must get colder with altitude as kinetic energy is transformed into potential energy in a planet’s gravitational field, the lower atmosphere must be warmer than upper atmosphere, even if there is no radiation involved. This follows from the perfect gas law, PV = nRT. ... [Dr. Latour, 2011-11-06]

Riiiight. That's why the stratosphere doesn't exist. I've explained that long-term equilibrium surface temperature is determined by conservation of energy, not the ideal gas law. (If scientists were wrong, basketball players would have to dribble with gloves because the pressurized ball would have to be very hot.)

Many Slayers blame equilibrium surface temperature on pressure, which I call the basketball player glove fantasy. None of the Slayers at WUWT would answer this question: would Venus have the same surface temperature if its atmosphere were pure nitrogen, which isn’t a greenhouse gas?

I've even seen a Slayer convince himself that all objects have the same albedo, which I call the gray Oreo fantasy.

Will Jane explain the fact that Venus is hotter than Mercury using basketball player gloves, gray Oreos, or truly original groundbreaking science?

True. But compare this with:

"Venus is the case of a runaway greenhouse effect. The temperature and pressure of the atmosphere decrease with height, so water vapor rises in the atmosphere and encounters conditions that cause it to condense back into liquid water and fall back to the surface - a region called the "cold trap." On Earth, this is at a height of 9-15 km (5-9 miles) above the surface, but on Venus it lies at an altitude around 50 km (31 miles) due to the planet's closer proximity to the sun.

On Earth, the ozone layer is several kilometers above this, and the ozone prevents ultraviolet light from destroying water in our atmosphere. On Venus, there is no ozone layer, and the atmosphere doesn't become opaque to ultraviolet light until a depth is reached below the cold trap. This allows ultraviolet light to destroy water between this height and the cold trap's.

So, as water rises in Venus' atmosphere and reaches this region, UV light dissociates it into two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. The hydrogen is much lighter than the water molecule was, and so it easily escapes Venus' atmosphere. The water will usually quickly recombine with a carbon or carbon monoxide molecule to form carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. This is probably one reason why there is so much carbon dioxide in Venus' atmosphere today.

Heavy water, however, which is composed of one oxygen, one hydrogen, and one deuterium (a proton and one neutron), cannot reach the requisite height as easily. If it does, it can still be dissociated just like normal water, but this happens at a much slower rate. Thus, a measurement of how much deuterium compared with how much hydrogen today shows that Venus has much more deuterium in its atmosphere for each hydrogen atom than Earth does. This is the strongest evidence that Venus has lost a massive amount of water in its history."

From http://burro.astr.cwru.edu/stu/advanced/venus.html

It sounds there are at least two ways to have Venus water disappear.

http://burro.cwru.edu/JavaLab/GalCrashWeb/

The mass of the earth cancels out, use slightly better estimates on the distances, reverse the ratio since we want moon:sun. Then the only mistake is that tidal forces are inversely proportional to the distance cubed. This gives us the expected result.

There is no gap between stars. By the time you get close to exiting our solar system, you will already be closer to a neighboring star then you will be to Sol.

Are you SERIOUSLY this clueless about distances? The closest neighbor star is 4.2 light-years away http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/extra/nearest.html. The edge of the Sol system http://burro.astr.cwru.edu/stu/solarsystem_edge.html is approximately 17.6 billion miles (120 A.U.) away.

There are about 63115.2 AUs/lyr. That means the edge of the solar system is: 120AU/63115.2 = 0.001901 light years in distance. Oh - you bet that's closer, 0.001901 is "almost" the same as 4.2 light years.

There is also GalCrash.

The Chinese did this thousands of years ago with their astronomers. If they failed to predict a solar or lunar eclipse, they'd be executed.

Citation

The optical SETI people are interested in using solar arrays at night (as light buckets), and at least some of them can be pointed accurately enough to point at a given star, so I think that the answer to your question is yes. This is discussed further in SETI 2010.

I'm not worried, though. If this little friend hasn't destroyed the biosphere already, nothing will.

This does not affect the users directly, but it is a major pain for integrators/porters. OO.o has a terrible habit of bundling all of the 3rd-party software packages, that it uses, into its own source tree. I'm talking about (probably missed some):

• agg
• bash
• bitstream-vera
• bsh
• bison
• boost
• curl
• db42
• dmake
• expat2
• freetype
• icu
• jpeg
• firefox (or some other Mozilla-based browser)
• libmspack
• libsndfile
• libtextcat
• libwpd
• libxslt
• neon
• nss
• nspr
• python
• sane-backends
• STLport
• unixODBC
• unzip
• vigra
• xmlsec1
• xt
• zip
• zlib

If they could, I'm certain, they would've bundled Java too, but — fortunately — Sun's license prohibits that... Now I realize, that this is done to offer "a single package" to those, who build it on their own, but nobody does. Everybody gets these from their OS' integrators. And the pain for us is enormous, because to force OO.o build to stop its silly ways is a serious undertaking. For some of the above packages there is --with-system-foo configure-flag, but not for all, and the default is to always use the bundled one, so support for the external ones bitrots quickly...

Most of the local builds don't bother and so end up wasting disk space and CPU-time rebuilding packages, which are external to OO.o. The end results are also bloated, duplicating stuff, that's already installed on the users' systems and without bug-fixes, which have already gone into each of the respective package since its most recent "bundling" into OO.o tarballs.

Download a source tarball and see for yourself... Something like: tar tjf OOo_OOG680_m9_source.tar.bz2 | grep 'z$'. No other software project does this on this scale and for good reasons — it is Just Wrong[TM]. OO.o better clean up their act in this respect...

It's old fashioned fatigue, and it isn't new. This paper quotes (2nd para) 1992 work that demonstrated fatigue in micron-sized silicon specimens.

Silicon is a typical low ductility material that does not tolerate cracks very well because there is very little plastic deformation at the crack tip (the process zone). Fracture mechanics is based on an energy balance, when the amount of energy absorbed by the creation of the fracture surfaces (the surface energy) plus the amount of energy required to do that plastic work in the pz is equal to the amount of strain energy in the structure that's released when the crack gets bigger (the strain energy release rate), the crack becomes unstable and the part goes bang.

The strain energy release rate varies with the load and crack size, for a given crack size at loads lower than the critical load, pre-existing cracks (there are always cracks even if they are microscopic) open a bit and the pz deforms. When the load is released, the pz doesn't go back to it's original configuration. Repeating the apply-load remove-load cycle progressively grows the pz which causes the crack to get bigger in some complicated ways. But think of it this way, the crack tip is theoretically infinitely sharp (the limit is the inter-atomic distance of the material). This discontinuity causes infinite theoretical stress which causes the atomic bonds to break at the tip. Process zones have been the subject of countless PhD theses.

In a low ductility material the energy absorbed by the pz is small compared to the energy absorbed by the surfaces created when the crack grows. Remember the pz is responsible for fatigue growth, the pz plus the surface energy is responsible for unstable crack propagation. So a small pz means you have to load the material close to the crack instability load to get fatigue growth. With a small enough pz it's impossible to load the material accurately enough to grow the crack without breaking the part. So THATS what they mean by silicon being immune to fatigue.

It seems like the reason this is not the case in microscopic silicon specimens is another PhD topic, the explanation is complicated. Oxidation caused by humidity in the air is a factor, as well as loading in the compression mode.

Again, all this has been known for many years.

http://electrochem.cwru.edu/ed/encycl/art-n01-nose.htm

And that was a miniaturized, improved one of one that they had built in the 1970s that was about 3 meters long. From what I remember from that tour, what's happened over the years is increasing miniaturization, better sensor arrays and better algorithms for identifying substances. Basically, this is an old technology; a gas chromatograph can be considered an "E-Nose" in the larger sense and CO detector in your home is a specialized form of E-Nose.

Do we know this? I'm no astronomer, so I don't. Just how much can an orbit be altered by a collision? (Or at least, one that doesn't pulverize both objects).

I'm no astronomer either, but we can run some numbers found a la Google and give ourselves some reasonable estimates. Anybody who IS an astronomer is free to correct my numbers, but my intention is merely a "back of the napkin" class estimate.

How fast does an asteroid travel? The average speed of an asteroid is 25km/second. Since I'm am American, to me that's about 15 miles per SECOND.

Earth is 7,926 Miles across. For these figures I'll use 8,000 miles.

Asteroids are somewhere between 1.8 and 4.5 AU from the sun. The earth is 1 AU from the son. Since both orbit the sun, and the average distance of earth from the sun is 0 AU (orbit being roughly circular) let's say that the average distance of an asteroid from Earth is about 2.2 AU. Since earth is 1 AU and that is 93 Million miles, we'll say that the average asteroid is about 93 million * 2.2 miles from the Earth. That's 204.6 million miles from the Earth.

So let's assume that two rocks hit. What are the odds that the asteroid goes out and whacks the Earth, straight away? Well, we'd end up with a 204.6 MILLION MILE RADIUS on the inside of a very large sphere. Using the formula for calculating the surface of a sphere, we get 261,348,480,000,000,000 square miles of area that the asteroid could potentially hit. Compare that to the actual area of Earth to hit (a circle 2*pi*r) =~ 50,000 miles.

In short, you have a 50,000 in 261,348,480,000,000,000, or 1 in 5,226,969,600,000. (one in about 5 trillion)

These are very VERY VERY small odds, even if my back-of-the-napkin calculations are off by several orders of magnitude. Let's give you some idea just how BIG 5 trillion is. There have been about 1 billion seconds since Jan 1, 1972. To wait 1 trillion seconds is to wait about 30,000 years. If asteroids were to collide every SINGLE SECOND it would STILL take over 30,000 YEARS for one to hit the Earth directly.

Now, these figures are rough. They do not take into account orbital mechanics, etc. But even so, the numbers are very small (large as odds against?) indeed.

Is this actually true? I would like to ask Mr. Lutz for a cite or three to back this assertion.

It seems reasonable at first blush, after all, unless you just LOVE sitting in your car idling down the freeway for hours a day, you probably want to live somewhere close to work. The average distance from home to work in Los Angeles is 8.2 miles (pdf), which includes claims that this is "consistent" with census data (except that it looks like the Census doesn't report distance, they report travel time) and compares with other metropolitan areas. This (another pdf) says that the average first job for people going off welfare is 6.5 miles away. This PDF claims that work causes people to drive an average of 12 miles per day. This site says that over 1/3 of workers in the 100 largest cities drive more than 10 miles to work.

A spatial map wouldn't do as much good as you think. The spiral arms of the galaxy are dynamic features, not static ones. Our solar system has passed in and out of all the arms many times. It wouldn't be useless, but for any given system of interest, it's orbit around the galactic core would have to be determined before the map would be useful.

You Can't Patent Software: Patenting Software Is Wrong

So writes Peter Junger (successful appellant in Junger v Daly which
effectively overturned the US Export Cryptography laws. The court
held "Because computer source code is an expressive means for the
exchange of information and ideas about computer programming, we hold
that it is protected by the First Amendment.")

Peter writes in his argument in the URL below...

"In the twenty-five years since the decision of the Supreme Court in Diehr the
Court has not considered a single case in which there was a challenge to a
software patent. Instead, until very recently, it has left issues of patent law
to the Federal Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, a specialized Article
III Court created in 1982 that now hears all appeals from the Board of Patent
Appeals in patent cases as well as most such appeals from the federal district
courts.111
Over the years since then, the Federal Circuit has tried to wriggle its way
around the Supreme Court's holdings in Benson, Flook and Diehr and now acts
as if it had overruled those decisions. "

http://samsara.law.cwru.edu/patart/
http://samsara.law.cwru.edu/patart/patartpdf/patla w.pdf

You Can't Patent Software: Patenting Software Is Wrong

So writes Peter Junger (successful appellant in Junger v Daly which
effectively overturned the US Export Cryptography laws. The court
held "Because computer source code is an expressive means for the
exchange of information and ideas about computer programming, we hold
that it is protected by the First Amendment.")

Peter writes in his argument in the URL below...

"In the twenty-five years since the decision of the Supreme Court in Diehr the
Court has not considered a single case in which there was a challenge to a
software patent. Instead, until very recently, it has left issues of patent law
to the Federal Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, a specialized Article
III Court created in 1982 that now hears all appeals from the Board of Patent
Appeals in patent cases as well as most such appeals from the federal district
courts.111
Over the years since then, the Federal Circuit has tried to wriggle its way
around the Supreme Court's holdings in Benson, Flook and Diehr and now acts
as if it had overruled those decisions. "

http://samsara.law.cwru.edu/patart/
http://samsara.law.cwru.edu/patart/patartpdf/patla w.pdf

I thought that the Boomerang Project from 1998 and 2003 proved that beacuse the background radiation in space was spread out the way it is, that this disproved that Space-Time was curved? Check out http://cmb.phys.cwru.edu/boomerang/. Not that I wanted this to be true, but what I watched on NASA TV in 2003 said that it was the facts. So if his General Theory is 99.95% accurate, is this the .05% variance?

The simple fact is that we cannot find enough qualified people in Cleveland

It's not like you couldnt tap from some of the talented graduates that come from your own backyard.

If you still have the urge to play the zero-sum game known as offwhoring, try sending it out to the people down I-71 (Columbus, Cincinatti).

This is hardly cutting edge;
Case Western Reserver University started a program like this 5 years ago using Lego Mindstorms kits, and I'm sure they weren't the first. This is seperate from the higher-level Autonomous Robotics (aka Lego Lab) course that's been going on since 1995 and is based largely on MIT's 6.270 Autonomous Robot course that created the Handy Board.

This is hardly cutting edge;
Case Western Reserver University started a program like this 5 years ago using Lego Mindstorms kits, and I'm sure they weren't the first. This is seperate from the higher-level Autonomous Robotics (aka Lego Lab) course that's been going on since 1995 and is based largely on MIT's 6.270 Autonomous Robot course that created the Handy Board.

This is hardly cutting edge;
Case Western Reserver University started a program like this 5 years ago using Lego Mindstorms kits, and I'm sure they weren't the first. This is seperate from the higher-level Autonomous Robotics (aka Lego Lab) course that's been going on since 1995 and is based largely on MIT's 6.270 Autonomous Robot course that created the Handy Board.

By the way, you must read Goldstein and A. Tom Grunfeld 's books & articles about modern Tibet history.

Does the atmosphere somehow leak away on geological timescales through the Lagrange points somehow? I've got no idea. Does anyone know?

Some gases escape like H and He. Heavier modecules like N2, O2, CO2 do not. This talks about the process. The moon plays absolutely no role in helping earth retain atmosphere.

According to the impactor theory of the moon's origin, the moon's creation was a very improbable event.

I don't see why it is so improbable. Pluto has a much larger moon relative to its size than Earth in Charon, and it orbits in extreme isolation in the outer solar system. Many Kuiper belt objects that may be larger than Pluto also have moons. Saturn/Titan and Neptune/Triton are significant planet/moon pairs. Jupiter has tons of moons. Binary pairs are an extremely stable configuration. Nature likes them.

As someone who is considering lawschool in the future....what is your take on the horror stories of first year law? Do you really spend every waking minute doing research and studying?

Hmmmm. I can only speak from my personal experience, of course, so bear with me. I am going to a small, tier-4 lawschool for a variety of personal reasons/priorities. It's a good school. I have professors with terminal degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. I think they, like me, enjoy the more laid back, rural atmosphere and like to *teach*. That said, I don't know how a top-ranked program at a big school would differ. (I did get into a top school...and decided there was no way in hell I was going $150,000 in debt, among other things.)

As I said, there is certainly work involved, but I find it easy to keep up with most of the time. In fact, when I treat it as an 8-to-5 job, I find myself free most evenings and on the weekends. That is 45 hours/week after all. Right now's a little hectic with a trial in Civil Procedure, legal research/memoranda, filling out my outlines and preparing for finals, and so forth, but it isn't killing me. Just pace yourself and keep up.

On the other hand, some people are freaking out. Completely. The people who were psych majors, especially. Compared to the liberal arts, law is a pretty drastic increase in workload. You can't just blow off the reading and such, like they may have done in undergrad. I get a tremendous amount of insight out of the lectures, but without the reading beforehand, you might as well not go to class. And the lack of grade-feedback is a bit daunting. We had one midterm, in Property, just to prepare us for the format of the finals. I felt confident enough in what I had learned to just review my outline a bit beforehand and I did pretty damn well.

Mostly, I find it terribly amusing that I'm enjoying myself in law school, having prepared myself for the worst.

Also...as somewhat of an odd question....as a very experienced D&D dungeon master and self-professed "rules lawyer", do you think any of that experience might help give me a leg up? If I was a natural at understanding D&D rules and their abuses/loopholes, do you think I have the right mindset for lawschool?

Oh, probably. I was a DM way back in the day too :-) I'm used to problem-solving as an engineer and I find my analytical skills invaluable in law. You need to be able to see the different facets of an argument and try to resolve a given case for both sides, and with varying fact patterns.

Consider U.C.C. 2-207. Probably one of the most ambiguous and argued about sections of the Uniform Commercial Code. I've read a couple of cases now where both sides cited it when they presented their case. Who made the offer? Who was accepting? Do both parties meet the definition of merchant? (Under the UCC, a person who has a specialized skill, such as a PhD in something, may meet the definition.) Lots of ways to turn it to your favor. ProCD v. Zeidenberg is a good case about 2-207, EULAs, copyright, and so forth. (I agree with the district court more than the later appellate decision though.)

So I'd say yeah. If you're a pedant like me, you'll probably like learning the law. Just remember that 'black letter law' isn't sacrosanct. The real point is the reasoning behind it and the impetus/need that created the law in the first place.

Also, graduate school in general is different in that your classmates want to be there. The people who go on past undergrad tend to be more hardcore; the ones who aren't get weeded out quick enough. It's kinda neat to hear people walking by, arguing about points of law as much as they talk about "who's having a party that weekend." Nothing like an animated discussion with smart people about

Never buy brand new high-tech toys before they've actually passed major consumer testing.

It's the same for everything technological! Only through trial and error, consumer brute force sort of do they get the best product after 1-2 years for most products such as Dell's, i'd cite motor companies too but bah. Well, considering electrolytic caps were invented in the 30s, I'd think we've given them enough spin-up to get that newfangled technology under control. The problem here is just poor quality control and cost-cutting. Luckily in the free-market, this type of things tend be a short-lived trend... it just requires the spotlight.

Is not that bash or python are bad, but bash-like shells are 30-years-old unchanged technology.

Now, where have I heard that before?. Bob, is that you?

To steal the response from Nick Petreley: I'm using 30+ year old technology to post this respose. You might have heard of it, it's called "Ethernet".

And you're right, bash hasn't changed one bit.

I'm waiting for a PC port... or maybe someone will get to work on an open source clone.

Didn't they just have a review about this not too long ago - like late summer? I remember reading something about this on Slashdot, and it wasn't any more clear then. I had to google it to figure it all out. But, anyway, there's an awesome sort of flash-based game that's similar in concept at http://home.cwru.edu/~jnt5/Katamari/ - it's really interesting, but doesn't go very far, and there aren't any actual levels to it.

Here you go, everybody: here's my Grandma's response to the elderly protector of young minds: (small video file) http://home.cwru.edu/~amk26/videos/gamergrandma_6. wmv She has a WHOLE different take on the situation

Not sure how close it is to the original, but I'm certain the original one is much better if folks are liking it so much.

Of course, a search on "car manufacture energy consumption" would have turned up this page which shows that manufacture accounts for about 10% of life-cycle energy; fuel accounts for nearly 75%.

(I can't believe someone rated you "Insightful".)

I have written an extensive article on how to set up HTTHost + HTTPort (in conjunction with VNC, putty, and SSHd) on client/server side to be able to get past a restrictive firewall. I have tested this set up successfully.

Here is a link

...and not Star Trek, but in this vein, The Physics of Star Trek is one of my favorites. It's written by Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist from Case Western Reserve University. Beyond Star Trek was another good one from him.

He dissects, from a scientific standpoint, some of the common plot elements and familiar staples (such as warp travel, transporters, phasers, etc.) to determine whether they'd be physically possible. An example of some interesting diversions along the way are demonstrating exactly how much data is contained in a human body, and how much bandwidth would be required for a "transporter" to work. It's a fun and interesting read, and includes content that would satisfy anyone from laymen to scientists. Being a fan of Star Trek is a prerequisite, though...

Since aluminum manufacturing consumes a notoriously large amount of energy, let's assume cars are made of 100% aluminum.

The energy required to produce aluminum is about 15 KWh/Kg.

Assuming the average car weighs 2 tons, that's 1814 Kg of aluminum.

1814 Kg * 15 KWh/Kg comes out to 27,210 KWh. At 5 cents per KWh (industrial prices), that's $1500 worth of energy to smelt our aluminum. As far as materials costs go, that sounds about right.

Fine, now a gallon of gasoline contains 125,000 Btu of energy. That's about 37 KWh.

If your car's getting 40 mpg, and if you're driving it 10,000 miles per year, you're using 250 gallons of gasoline a year. 250 * 37 KWh is 9,250 KWh per year.

Drive your car for three years and you've used more energy than it took to build. If we wanted to compare the "theoretical maximum" amount of energy that can be extracted (at 50% efficiency) from gasoline, you're only looking at a year and a half. Any car built in the last ten years should last five to ten times that long.

The problem isn't so much that people can get your SSN. The problem is, rather, that banks and other credit companies treat obtaining credit or changing your identifying information (your address, especially) so cavalierly. The government could do something about it, though.

but I'll bite. Taking your closing line at face value:

"When someone says the curve should go down in a particular way (without dark matter), ask why they assume that."

Why do you assume that real galaxy models neglect the stars in the visible disk? The plots of theory vs. observation for a number of spiral galaxies that I'm looking at right now don't make this mistake.

Why do you assume that real galactic rotation curves stop at the edge of the visible disk? The ones in front of me go out to 2-3 times the edge of the disk.

Why do you assume that varying the distribution of mass in your model can match the observed data? So far your only model is a qualitatively very bad fit, and not even remotely quantitative.

But it's good that you want to play with this. Here's a java applet that will let you play with the parameters of a simple model and match the results to real galactic rotation curves. You can adjust the central dark matter halo density, the halo core radius (how big the halo is), and the disk mass to light ratio (how much matter is in the disk). There's also some information on how it all works. Note that the contribution of the disk falls off when you get outside the disk, but the total flattens out and may even continue to increase a little.

I made some "drop-in replacement" gimp packages for debian sid (i386 and amd64). I just built this modified source using the package rules from the "real" debian gimp. Because I didn't change the name, if you install these and then apt-get upgrade in the future, they will be replaced by the stock debian packages. You can get them here:

http://cmb.phys.cwru.edu/kisner/gimpshop/

Anyway, at least it is an easy way to install and check it out.

-Ted

...here's a play-by-play recap.

Speaking of the Michelson-Morley Experiment, there is a fountain on my campus near the site of the experiment commemorating their achievement:

http://www.cwru.edu/menu/sciencecenter/mmfountain. htm

A common occurrence during winter is the sight of two large snowballs rolled up right next to each other at the base of the fountain.

There is also a boulder with a plaque nearby commemmorating the same experiment, but it is much less prone to desecration.

The successful utilization of a carbon host to store lithium ions in the rechargeable negative electrode has led to the commercial development of lithium-ion cells. In commercial cells, the positive electrode is primarily a lithiated metal oxide, which also contains graphite to improve the electronic conductivity of the electrode.

The electrochemical reaction at the negative electrode in lithium-ion cells is the intercalation of lithium ions into graphite: the lithium ions in the electrolyte enter the space between the layer planes of graphite during charge. The distance between the graphite layer planes expands by about 10% to accommodate the lithium ions. The resulting material can be chemically represented as LixC6. When the cell is discharged, the lithium ions are removed from the graphite structure and return to the electrolyte. The maximum amount of lithium ions that is stored in graphite is equivalent to x = 1 (LiC6). Other carbons have been used which yield values of "x" that may be greater or less than one. One of the attractive features of this electrode is long cycle life that is observed when the reversible insertion and removal of lithium ions occur without mechanical degradation of the graphite structure. Currently, lithium-ion technology represents the most rapidly growing (in production volume) rechargeable battery system in the world.

So, it doesn't appear to be a true ionic salt, in the sense that something like lithium chloride would be. This sort of intercalation is a good demonstration of how while "chemical bond" usually conjures up an image of solid spheres connected by a rod, like in those plastic model sets, in actuality a bond can be delocalized. In particular, there is a fascinating group of substances known as the metallocenes which feature a metal ion sandwiched between planar carbon rings. Not bonded to a carbon, but instead complexed with the entire aromatic ring structure. Graphite consists of planes of these carbon ring systems fused together to form a planar sheet (graphene). While strong covalent bonds hold carbon atoms in a graphene plane together, far weaker forces hold the planes together, so that lithium ions can squeeze in between and take up residence. As such, lithium ion batteries are quite different from, say alkaline batteries in that rather than the production of current by a reduction/oxidation reaction between a pair of substances. In Li-ion batteries, the potential is provided by lithium ions themselves shuttling out of the graphite lattice- as the grandparent noted, they are sometimes referred to as "rocker" or "swing" batteries because of the back-and-forth movement of Li ions through use and recharge cycles.

In general, carbon has some rather limited and screwy ionic chemistry, owing to its place on the periodic table- there's a distinct preference for covalent rather than ionic bonding - even carbon halides are generally considered covalent. Carbocations and carbanions are both important species in organic chemistry reactions, but in most cases are not very stable- they tend to be transition states that end up as an uncharged final product. There are of course many known organic ion compounds- acetate ion, from acetic acid (vinegar) is a familar example- but generally it ends up being other atoms in the compound, usually oxygen or nitrogen, which can actually be said to carry the charge most of the time. Even in organometallic compounds, generally the metal-carbon bond has covalent character- there are some important exceptions though, usually brought about using very strong nonaqueous bases like sodium amide. Even "carbide" compounds are generally network solids, which is to say, covalent. Calcium carbide, CaC2, might qualify, though if you try to dissolve it in water, you do not get carbide ions in solution, but rather acetylene gas. You can of course make ionic compounds out of any element- just provide the

Either that's a bad example, or compiler optimization has come a long way, baby. Or maybe I just don't get what you're getting at. But a quick test using gcc reveals this:

http://sokar.cwru.edu/multidim.html

Note that the code that calculates the offset into the x array (italicized for convenience) is one instruction shorter for x[i][j] rather than the code you listed.

Am I asking too many questions or thinking too deeply in this?

No! It's impossible to think too deeply :)

I haven't studied this stuff in 10 years, but now I'm looking all over for information on this again.

I found that this article had a good summary which explains Electrochemistry in plants.

Is it some funky electromechanical system?

They describe some of the mechanics in the parent article...

when an insect lands on the leaf and triggers an electrical signal, it takes only a tiny change in pressure to push the leaf over the brink, slamming it shut.

Although it doesn't explain how the electical impulse causes the change in pressure. But plants change the amount of fluid in cells all the time in response to light, and all plants have the ability to transmit electrochemical signals. The flytrap is just way more specialized in dealing with elecrochemical signals.

Does this mean a Venus Fly Trap requires certain minerals in the soil so it can absorb the electrolytes and thus carry the electrical impulse inside the plant?

All plants have the ability to transmit electrochemical signals. The flytrap is just way more specialized. The Flytrap gets most of the minerals from the insects (which are probably high in electrolytes?), not from the soil :)

The rest of the ecosystem would probably not be so flexible.

"your outrageous claims that the planet will be turning into another Venus,"

Lets chalk that up to a failed attempt to catch your attention about what a runaway greenhouse effect looks like. You quickly forget I didn't say Earth "is turning in to another Venus". All I said is its one of the many possibilities and it is both the worst case and quite possible.

You see the problem with you and all those like you is there is NOTHING that will convince you that its possible human activity is having adverse effects on the Earth's climate. The only thing that will apparently convince you is when Earth becomes uninhabitable and at that points it a little too late. Most of us just want to explore all the possibilities and if possible refrain from choosing the paths that will wipe out, our seriously degrade life on this one and only planet of ours.

The catch in all your talk about natural climate change is the Earth has never had 6 billion mammals with tool skills covering nearly every inhabitable nook and cranny. The dynamics of today's earth is COMPLETELY different from anything in its history.

"Unfortunately, that is not the case for virtually any other country in the world."

Actually you are wrong, AGAIN. There are geothermal resource available all over the planet, there are places all around the Pacific Rim's ring of fire that have them. Yellowstone is rich in it. Pretty much anyplace where there is an active or even dorman volcano is sure to have it. If you drill deep enough you can find them anywhere, our planet has a molten core in case you didn't know.

You are once again just being dense. My point isn't that the entire world should do exactly what Iceland is doing. The point is every country should be working hard to move to alternative and renewable energy sources that they have the resource for and that aren't going to dump vast quantities of carbon dioxide in to the air. Hydroelectric, solar, wind, tidal and carefully done nuclear all work especially if you do a mix of them all. Fossil fuels and nuclear aren't the only two options, they are just the two American's big corporations want to do because they have the best profit potential(assuming the U.S. government eliminates all the regulations that currently hamstring them).

The point about Iceland is they've set a goal to eliminate dependence on fossil fuels and they are working to achieve it. Most of the rest of the world isn't even trying. American and China are two of the worst offenders for clinging to burning coal until it wrecks the climate and at present it appear no one is going to talk them out of it.

obese patients are more likely to experience sleep apnea, which can decrease quality and length of sleep considerably. I find the obesity/sleep apnea link easy to credit for the sleep/BMI link. Here's the first google result I got, there are many many more.

The sender is wrong with this process being "electrolyzing", electrolyzing is process of turning hydrogen and oxygen into water, and in doing so creates electricity, done with technology called fuel cells.

Using carbon electrodes with water to create hydrogen that feeds fuel cells has, and is being done by some universities in America and even by NASA as a pollutant free alternative to powering low current lab devices.

The carbon in those electrodes has to come from somewhere. It is NOT a renewable resource or anywhere close to a renewable energy source

According to this site
"Carbon is one of the most abundant elements found on earth" which is what the sender stated not "renewable".

This "miracle device" makes use of a very old concept, and there is much work going on with coal gasification, and no need for the use of electricity. Very useful and legitimate, and it is by no means on the "fringe", just don't tout it as something that it isn't!!!

I'm not aware of some of the new technologies being looked into by energy board but I've seen a car powered from the process of using carbon electrodes and water to create hydrogen and it's works, not only that it didn't cost much to do. It might not be the most efficient technology to power high current devices but if it can power a car, why isn't it being used to power cars?

http://toxsci.oupjournals.org/cgi/content/full/77/ 1/126
http://nanopedia.cwru.edu/NanoPage.php?page=lung.t oxicity
http://www.ece.neu.edu/edsnu/mcgruer/nano/nanotoxi cityscience0304.pdf

Which would be safer? A Carbon Nanotube vest, or an asbestos sweater? ;-)

Have you ever bothered to read ProCD v Zeidenberg and it's appeal, or perhaps even the volumes of work written about it. This is the defacto case law on the subject of shrink wrap licenses, and it clearly says that so long as there is a means to return the product and receive a refund, then the party need not be able to read the license prior to purchase.

Before anyone jumps down my throat about not being able to return the copy of Windows that comes with an OEM PC, you can. You have to return the PC with it, though. While you might not like that, it is an option, and thus meets the criteria set by the appeals court.