I think the entire story is possible, but the more I look at the picture the more is does look like someone is trying to play a perspective trick. Most hunting pics I've seen have the guy standing right next to the kill with their hand on it and there is no doubt. Having him placed behind it with that motorcycle looks really suspect. I'll have to agree with ozman on this one....
"And this guy is going to have the nerve to stand his ground and pick off a big leaping agile cat"
Some people do actually have the nerve to do it. Here's a video of people shooting a charging lion. Of course it didn't really work so well and it took more than one shot.
http://www.big-boys.com/articles/huntlion.html
(it was the first place I found the video...I don't know if they can handle the banwidth)
"I mean a whopping 80 gigabytes of storage for just pictures and music. What's the point of that?"
I'm all for buying the latest and greatest gadget, but I also agree and don't see many uses for these players with tons of storage space (and I do acutally own one of the smaller capacity ipods). You now have a device that can hold almost 6 months worth of music (assuming you listen 8 full hours every day), but only has a battery life of about 12 hours. I'm not sure I could find that much quality music in the world that's even worth listening to. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the average music collection is about 100 CDs. I suspect that the percentage of people that would actually take full advantage of that space is fairly small. Maybe I'm wrong...
I'm not sure I'd recommend the community college approach to begin engineering. I went to an undergrad that was predominately engineering and found that people coming from CC had a lot of problems. I believe that CC's tend to water down the basic courses (e.g. chemistry, calculus, physics) too much and it really hurts the engineering students. I can't tell you how many times that I saw people come from CC with 4.0's end up failing out because their basic skills just weren't developed enough to handle the work. It's hard enough to learn the basics at a sufficient level if your high school program was "deficient", but to jump into Junior/Senior level engineering classes and have to relearn the basics while also learning the class material is just a recipe for disaster. I think CC can set some people up, who are otherwise talented and capable, for failure by giving them a false sense of understanding. Just my 2 cents.
Excellent...I had a little free time on my hands and a religious war about glass will consume that nicely!!!
On the other hand, we actually we don't have to look for a brilliant physicist to answer this question - Ceramic Engineers figured it out a long time ago. Unfortunately, a really good answer can't be given without introducing some new and very specific terminology and writing more pages than anyone would care to read (a term like flow isn't really used for the very reason we see here, it isn't very precise and can be interpreted in different ways). These days, glass science is a fairly obscure field and you won't find much in-depth information from a web search. However, here's a good book that gives a nice introduction to the area.
"Fundamentals of Inorganic Glasses" Varshneya, Arun
Looks like you got I post in before I responded, but here's the basics of want I was going to say.
There are acutally many families of glasses other than silicate based. There are borate based glasses, germanate based glasses, phosphate based glasses, etc.
I think where we differ is in the definion of flow. If something has a viscosity it means it moves when a force is applied - which all glass does (otherwise it's a crystaline solid). So I'm not claiming that any glass flows freely at room temp in the sense that you can pour it....just that it is technically moving. It's more of a gradual creep (e.g. windows will widen at the base over time...but it's been calculated to take millions of years for typical window glass, not the few hundred in the urban myths).
The glass with roomtemp flow I was referring to was just a general mixture of potassium silicate and sodium silicate. Melt those components together and cool. It flows when exposed to humidity. You can break it and get a sharp edge that will dull over a short period of time (kind of like a jolly rancher in hot, humid conditions). Of course there are probably some glass experts out there that can argue that it's not the best example of true room temp flow.
In the spirit of keeping everyone honest, there are millions of different glass compositions. Just saying "glass" is like lumping gold, stainless steel, aluminum, tungsten, iron, and copper together and calling them "metal". Listing properties of an unknown glass is like listing the strength of an unknown metal - generally not very useful since the properties of glass vary so widely. I can mix up a composition that will turn from a cube into the shape of a puddle within a day of just sitting on my desk.
So, yes, almost by definition, all glass flows at room temperature. It's just a matter of how much. Although for most compositions in use, it could take millions of years for visible changes to occur (visible to the naked eye).
Slashdot Mirror
I think the entire story is possible, but the more I look at the picture the more is does look like someone is trying to play a perspective trick. Most hunting pics I've seen have the guy standing right next to the kill with their hand on it and there is no doubt. Having him placed behind it with that motorcycle looks really suspect. I'll have to agree with ozman on this one....
Here's another link to the video if the first is slashdotted.... http://www.yourdailymedia.com/media/1118649845
"And this guy is going to have the nerve to stand his ground and pick off a big leaping agile cat"
Some people do actually have the nerve to do it. Here's a video of people shooting a charging lion. Of course it didn't really work so well and it took more than one shot. http://www.big-boys.com/articles/huntlion.html (it was the first place I found the video...I don't know if they can handle the banwidth)
"I mean a whopping 80 gigabytes of storage for just pictures and music. What's the point of that?"
I'm all for buying the latest and greatest gadget, but I also agree and don't see many uses for these players with tons of storage space (and I do acutally own one of the smaller capacity ipods). You now have a device that can hold almost 6 months worth of music (assuming you listen 8 full hours every day), but only has a battery life of about 12 hours. I'm not sure I could find that much quality music in the world that's even worth listening to. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the average music collection is about 100 CDs. I suspect that the percentage of people that would actually take full advantage of that space is fairly small. Maybe I'm wrong...
I'm not sure I'd recommend the community college approach to begin engineering. I went to an undergrad that was predominately engineering and found that people coming from CC had a lot of problems. I believe that CC's tend to water down the basic courses (e.g. chemistry, calculus, physics) too much and it really hurts the engineering students. I can't tell you how many times that I saw people come from CC with 4.0's end up failing out because their basic skills just weren't developed enough to handle the work. It's hard enough to learn the basics at a sufficient level if your high school program was "deficient", but to jump into Junior/Senior level engineering classes and have to relearn the basics while also learning the class material is just a recipe for disaster. I think CC can set some people up, who are otherwise talented and capable, for failure by giving them a false sense of understanding. Just my 2 cents.
Uh....a quick google search says that the LD50 of caffeine in rats is 192mg/kg...or about 15+ grams for a 180lb person......
Yep, it was. http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Heat-shie ld
Excellent...I had a little free time on my hands and a religious war about glass will consume that nicely!!! On the other hand, we actually we don't have to look for a brilliant physicist to answer this question - Ceramic Engineers figured it out a long time ago. Unfortunately, a really good answer can't be given without introducing some new and very specific terminology and writing more pages than anyone would care to read (a term like flow isn't really used for the very reason we see here, it isn't very precise and can be interpreted in different ways). These days, glass science is a fairly obscure field and you won't find much in-depth information from a web search. However, here's a good book that gives a nice introduction to the area. "Fundamentals of Inorganic Glasses" Varshneya, Arun
Looks like you got I post in before I responded, but here's the basics of want I was going to say.
There are acutally many families of glasses other than silicate based. There are borate based glasses, germanate based glasses, phosphate based glasses, etc.
I think where we differ is in the definion of flow. If something has a viscosity it means it moves when a force is applied - which all glass does (otherwise it's a crystaline solid). So I'm not claiming that any glass flows freely at room temp in the sense that you can pour it....just that it is technically moving. It's more of a gradual creep (e.g. windows will widen at the base over time...but it's been calculated to take millions of years for typical window glass, not the few hundred in the urban myths).
The glass with roomtemp flow I was referring to was just a general mixture of potassium silicate and sodium silicate. Melt those components together and cool. It flows when exposed to humidity. You can break it and get a sharp edge that will dull over a short period of time (kind of like a jolly rancher in hot, humid conditions). Of course there are probably some glass experts out there that can argue that it's not the best example of true room temp flow.
In the spirit of keeping everyone honest, there are millions of different glass compositions. Just saying "glass" is like lumping gold, stainless steel, aluminum, tungsten, iron, and copper together and calling them "metal". Listing properties of an unknown glass is like listing the strength of an unknown metal - generally not very useful since the properties of glass vary so widely. I can mix up a composition that will turn from a cube into the shape of a puddle within a day of just sitting on my desk. So, yes, almost by definition, all glass flows at room temperature. It's just a matter of how much. Although for most compositions in use, it could take millions of years for visible changes to occur (visible to the naked eye).