...except that there are LAWS against drinking and driving, but no laws against using your cellphone in the car, thus legally giving yourself the right to drive just about as badly as being intoxicated.
Actually it IS illegal in many european countries, if not using a hands-free phone.
The issue is not clear. The deviations observed are a fraction 1/100,000 of the fine structure constant, and it could be due to statistical error with a probability of 10%. Interesting stuff though...
the 1st one is called parallax (or triangulation) and consists on measuring the position of the star from different points of the earth's orbit (i.e., at different times of the year). The differences in the angular position are then used to calculate the distance of the object.
For objects (stars) that are too far away to give a measureable parallax (more than 400 light years), an indirect technique is used. It is known that different kinds of stars have different emission spectra (colors), and every kind of star has a characteristic brightness. This has been proven by observation of close stars. This way one can analzye the spectrum of a given star and guess how bright it should be. Since the light emission of a star is a spherical wave, the theoretical attenuation of its intensity can be used to calculate the distance. This does not mean that single photons lose energy on their way: they don't. A photon's energy is related with light's frequency (color), while the apparent brightness of the star is related to the number of photons that get here. Since thay propagate as the surface of a sphere, the further you are the fewer photons you get per unit area.
No one's closing any pages, they're just changing the homepage with a reivindicative one, and then link that to the usual homepage. Not such a big effort, IMO.
First of all, there are not "unnatural" elements. They are all natural, because they can all be found in the nature, given the proper conditions. I guess you should better talk about stable and unstable elements, and even then you should specify the conditions under which the element is stable or not.
Stable elements are that way because the energy required to bind together the protons and neutrons is smaller than the energy gain that comes from binding them, so there is an "energy wall" that has to be surpassed in order to break the atom.
Unstable elements don't have such a barrier, because the energy required to keep them together is too high. This means that if you leave them alone they will decay into a nuclei of another element by losing one or more nucleons (neutron or proton), and will keep decaying until the new atom is stable.
This doesn't mean that these elements cannot be found in nature, it only means that you have to be very lucky, or know very well where you have to search them, or wait a long long time to see one of these atoms form (and dissapear) without human help.
Someone has said here that it is impossible to find more "natural" (stable) elements. That seems a very risky thing to say, since most of those affirmations (in the line of "we know it all 'bout this, we won't find anything more here") have proven false in the past. I'd better say that we cannot know for sure, but some think it is possible to find stable configurations at higher atomic numbers (ammount of protons and neutrons).
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Actually it IS illegal in many european countries, if not using a hands-free phone.
The issue is not clear. The deviations observed are a fraction 1/100,000 of the fine structure constant, and it could be due to statistical error with a probability of 10%. Interesting stuff though...
There are 2 main methods:
the 1st one is called parallax (or triangulation) and consists on measuring the position of the star from different points of the earth's orbit (i.e., at different times of the year). The differences in the angular position are then used to calculate the distance of the object.
For objects (stars) that are too far away to give a measureable parallax (more than 400 light years), an indirect technique is used. It is known that different kinds of stars have different emission spectra (colors), and every kind of star has a characteristic brightness. This has been proven by observation of close stars. This way one can analzye the spectrum of a given star and guess how bright it should be. Since the light emission of a star is a spherical wave, the theoretical attenuation of its intensity can be used to calculate the distance. This does not mean that single photons lose energy on their way: they don't. A photon's energy is related with light's frequency (color), while the apparent brightness of the star is related to the number of photons that get here. Since thay propagate as the surface of a sphere, the further you are the fewer photons you get per unit area.
No one's closing any pages, they're just changing the homepage with a reivindicative one, and then link that to the usual homepage.
Not such a big effort, IMO.
First of all, there are not "unnatural" elements. They are all natural, because they can all be found in the nature, given the proper conditions. I guess you should better talk about stable and unstable elements, and even then you should specify the conditions under which the element is stable or not.
Stable elements are that way because the energy required to bind together the protons and neutrons is smaller than the energy gain that comes from binding them, so there is an "energy wall" that has to be surpassed in order to break the atom.
Unstable elements don't have such a barrier, because the energy required to keep them together is too high. This means that if you leave them alone they will decay into a nuclei of another element by losing one or more nucleons (neutron or proton), and will keep decaying until the new atom is stable.
This doesn't mean that these elements cannot be found in nature, it only means that you have to be very lucky, or know very well where you have to search them, or wait a long long time to see one of these atoms form (and dissapear) without human help.
Someone has said here that it is impossible to find more "natural" (stable) elements. That seems a very risky thing to say, since most of those affirmations (in the line of "we know it all 'bout this, we won't find anything more here") have proven false in the past. I'd better say that we cannot know for sure, but some think it is possible to find stable configurations at higher atomic numbers (ammount of protons and neutrons).
I hope this makes some sense...
Try the CCEVS home page... Here you can find the Validated Products List.
but that they are not out to compete with Microsoft
so, will they install Ximian on XP?
With cows or other large animals, larger devices with more power would be possible
But who wants to play pinball on a cow anyway?
common sense is not just rare, as we see every day. It is exotic, almost nonexistant.