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Imagine this simple, granted exagerated, scenario: You park your car somewhere on June 5th 2003, someone comes and says there's a special leap day on June 6th, and it becomes June 7th...

All of a sudden your car seems like it's been there for two days on paper.

Imagine how difficult it will become to measure elapsed time (just strictly from a computational POV) if we start adding and removing seconds here and there.

This problem is a huge one.

In fact, the earth is slowing down to the point that:

The slowing rotation of the Earth results in a longer day as well as a longer month. Once the length of a day equals the length of a month, the tidal friction mechanism would cease[...] That's been projected to happen once the day and month both equal about 47 (current) days, billions of years in the future. If the Earth and Moon still exist, the distance will have increased to about 135% of its current value.... from link.

So what's the principle we abide by? Our measurement of a day, or hour stretches? or we change what time we wake up at? What happens if we colonize Mars?

It's a crucial problem that requires lots of foresight.

centripetal force is quite real. so-called "centrifugal" force is imaginary.

oh i suppose a link is in order.

coriolis is also an apparent (re: imaginary) force along the same lines - the way i understand it, we perceive it because any movement on earth happens with respect to a non-inertial frame of reference (not just relative to surface, but to orbit and rotation). it's not a real force, but it's a very real part of accounting for motion. i think i remember hearing about a gemini splash-down being off by miles because a programmer didn't account for the coriolis effect.

All digital versions of books that publishers have should be requested and maintained in a safe place till their respective [copyrights] expire so that they can be easily integrated into the public domain.... especially if OCR or speech recognition doesn't get any better any time soon.

So the formula isn't standard, but the effect of increasing mass to reduce velocity but retain the amount of recoil energy as oppossed to dropping the powder load is still right.

Working Link

they should just wrap the whole plant in a faraday cage.

Well, here's a conservative estimate.

Planck time is "the time it would take a photon travelling at the speed of light to across a distance equal to the Planck length. This is the 'quantum of time', the smallest measurement of time that has any meaning, and is equal to 10^-43 seconds."

24 hours therefore contains approximately 9 x 10^47 Planck units of time.

Assuming the 1.3 megapixel business is in fact fluff, and that each image only contains about 300K (24-bit color) pixels, this camera should have a storage capacity of 1.8 x 10^53 bytes--or, more conveniently, 1.8 x 10^29 yottabytes--if Logitech is to be sure of making good on their claim.

Especially since time is not contiguous, but quantized (ala Planck's Time). We are all in God's computer, with a clock tick of Planck's Time. :)

Firstly it's planck time, not plankt. Secondly, it's 1x10-43 seconds. See What is Planck length? What is Planck time?.

You really got me thinking about this one and you are perfectly right. Given the right explanation, it's now quite clear.

While you've provided some interesting practical examples, please explain to me exactly where my misunderstanding about faraday cages, and waveguides lies.

As far as I can tell, in order for a waveguide to be functional, it has to have a diameter that is a multiple of the wavelenth (I say again a processor pin won't cut it as a waveguide for 2.4GHz), and faraday cages are generally effective at blocking wavelengths down to about 10x their aperature size (none of the shields on those 802.11b cards looked like they had gaps >.2 inches).

Could you please try a real explanation and not just anectdotes? If there's somthing I'm missing I really do want to understand it and I'm not just being argumentative.

If you want a real experiment, measure the speed of light using Jupiter's moons. This was how the first accurate measurement was made. At least they'll be playing outside.

click me

Again, WRONG.
I don't know mi/hr, so I'm going to present you with something in m/s.
Gravity on the earth's surface is 9.8m/s.
If you have a payload on the ground of arbitrary weight and a motor that can provide enough thrust to lift it at 10m/s, in second 1 it will have .2 m/s of speed. In second 2 it will have .4 m/s of speed, second 3 .6 m/s of speed and so on, until the motor runs out of fuel.
A rocket that would provide 9.8m/s of thrust would provide constant upward velocity, so it would hover, or if you threw it straight up at 1m/s it would maintain that 1m/s until it fell sideways.
Let's say for arguement's sake that our payload makes it into orbit, and it's a stable orbit. Once it is there, it is traveling around the earth at a very high speed in relation to the ground.
The space shuttle does about 17,500 miles an hour in low earth orbit. Last time I checked it doesn't fly off into the sun when it reaches that speed.
Why? Because earth escape velocity at sea level is 11.2 kilometers per second. That's somewhere around 40,000 km/h, or around 25,000 miles an hour. Now, escape velocity for the shuttle in a LEO would be less than it would be at sea level, but it would still need to reach it to leave orbit. In fact, by firing their engines and accelerating, they could achieve a higher orbit. They would also be going faster. Keep in mind that the moon is in orbit - So an object 'about as far away as the moon' is still in orbit of the earth, and will remain that way until it reaches a velocity that will remove it from orbit.
That aside, back to the inital arguement.
Nothing can go faster than the speed of light.
The gravity around what has been described as a 'black hole' is so intense that there is a point around it at which light can not escape.
What this means to you is that the acceleration at this point around the center of the 'black hole' is equal to the negative value of the speed of light - translation? You need a rocket that can produce 299,792,458 m/s of thrust, and not only produce that amount of thrust, but to simply maintain its position on the event horizon, it must continue to maintain that thrust FOREVER.
At any point, if the rocket stops producing that thrust, it will be pulled farther into the 'black hole' and will will need an even higher amount of thrust to stop 'falling in.'
If, by some magic trick you could go FASTER than the speed of light, then you could escape, but seeing as we can't even reach that speed yet, let alone exceed it, I don't see how your 10 mi/h rocket is going to do the same trick.
Here's a link for you that might help explain escape velocity for you, but you'll need a calculator. What is escape velocity?
Oh, and stop wasting my time.

This makes no sense... if NASCAR cars were more efficient at 55mph, they'd sure as heck put more gears in them. If an Lamborghini Diablo is more efficient at 55mph, please explain why you're in second gear (of six) at that speed.
"Optimum fuel efficiency should be experienced somewhere just above the speed at which the highest gear becomes useable."
Anecdotally, I track my fuel efficiency at each fillup, and I get a lot more efficiency at 80mph than at 45-55mph (highways vs local roads).

(Nd) atoms have something to do with it. Perhaps they can handle the light energy

That's what I was thinking. Nd is a pretty dense atom. After the p-orbitals, I could never visualize how metals properly filled, an the lanthanides don't help make it any easier.

I fail to see how this sort of energy storage is the breakthrough ... quantum computing

Yeah, it does seem awfully binary to me, but then again, I supposed if I were a physicist there would be more possibilities than 1 and 0. I think journalists can get away with saying stuff like the above quote b/c no one cares enough to call them on it.

Actually, you can built shielding in the form of a Faraday Cage, which need be nothing more than a metal screen or a sheet of metal...indeed, a screen like material will work just fine, so long as the open spaces aren't more than about a wavelength (or the minimum wavelength you're hoping to block) in any of their dimensions. If you don't believe me, grab a college (or even a high school) physics book...or see an online resource such as physlink.com

Since:
A. the universe is getting larger
B. Matter/Engery cannot be created or Destroyed, only covert states

Therefore, We are we infact destine to Heat Death or Cold Death of the Universe?
now THATS depressing :P

Couldn't tell if you were serious, but anyway, that argument ignores the fact that the earth is really, really big.

Several years back, I read an idea which was far more to my liking. It was based on a theory by Roger Penrose(1), which states that the fabric space-time, as we know it, is comprised of much smaller, multi-dimensional space-times. These building block space-times are incredibly small; in fact, they exist on the order of the planck length(1.6161x10^-35 m). The idea proposed was that collapsing stars would get "stuck" in this fabric and would never possess any measurement smaller than that of the planck length. In essence, they become *really* tiny ECOs.

(1)This is a bit ironic, given that Penrose gave the first "proof" that singularities *must* exist.

If I understood his question correctly, RedLaggedTeut asked if the space-time curvature around a black hole would make it impossible to view.

The nature of a black hole is such that it cannot be viewed. It is an absence, not a presence, so there is nothing to view, hence it is black. I cannot provide any information regarding curvature rate, but if I had to conjecture, I would say that space-time does not bend more quickly in the presence of increased gravity. If I remember correctly, two supermassive stars, but of different masses, will collapse at the same rate. This would indicate to me that collapse is regulated by the structure of space-time. However, someone from
http://www.physlink.com may be able to provide a more accurate and far more knowledgable answer.