PIERRE S

It's everywhere and it's sickening: it's on TV, video games, schools (Christina Hoff Sommers' book THE WAR AGAINST BOYS), discrimination against men is viewed as a joke and is laughed at.

I'm hoping to write a little science fiction where spaceship power is easily available to accelerate to near the speed of light. But as you accelerate, your apparent mass also increases so it dampens the acceleration for the same constant force.

I make it as a differential equation to solve:

dv/dt = [F/m(0)]*sqrt[1-(v^2/c^2)]

where v is speed, t is time, m(0) is the mass at rest, F is a constant force expenditure from the rockets, sqrt is "square root of" and c is the speed of light. What is the solution for the time needed to achieve a certain percentage of light-speed?

What is the surface area (not counting the circular top) and the volume of a solid extending vertically along the z-axis from 0 to R, where the surface is bounded by a sphere of radius R revolving around the origin, with the center of the sphere always in the xy-plane at a distance R from the origin? The shape resembles a cone but with a circular boundary, tapering to a fine point at the origin and enlarging to a circle of radius R (equal to the sphere) at z=R.

Most of my weapons are Ultra by now, but I find it hard to upgrade the Spider Mine. Pressing the buttons, I found it shoots bullets (square) and fireballs (X) as well as exploding (circle). But do all these attacks gain you Nanomites when defeating an enemy? Where is the best location to build up nanomites for this weapon quickly?

"Suzie Smartypants" is a mock segment made up by a German guy, where a kid talks about evolution and resists the Creation/Bible story some old geezer is telling the kids in class, and explains why.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cgJgnG9YzY

This is awesome, transcendental -- but it's in German. Should we have kid's programming like that, for Americans, for real? Why, or why not? Is there anything like it available already?

The Soviet Union had a constitution saying everybody was free to use the public media for spreading Atheist and anti-religious propaganda. This was an amazing freedom! There were mandatory school and university courses on Atheism. But all this was in the Russian language. Is it worth bringing this material into the United States' schools and universities, or those of other Western nations plagued by religion?

I would like to start a leaderless movement to defeat Islam the way the "Anonymous" organization is working to defeat the Church of Scientology. I believe that both religions have fascist and evil intentions towards anybody else. How would you translate the English word "Anonymous", in this sense, into Arabic? How could it be represented in both Arabic characters and Latin letters?

Those things cost a million bolts!

Has anyone bought it? Are the rules hard? What is your review of it?

Some French spelling reforms were introduced in the 1990s. Old and new forms are currently accepted side-by-side; the old forms are not to be considered wrong. For example "oignon" (onion) is going to be "ognon". What are the new rules?

In the news, a new Osama bin Laden videotape says there will be no war in Iraq if Americans simply convert to Islam! He says this will show the U.S. leaders that the people have no faith in democracy any more, and choose Islam instead. There is a belief in the Middle East that Islam is a "third way" better than democracy or Communism or any of the big political systems you care to name. Of course, the liberals who are most against the occupation of Iraq would have to give up their WEED, their FREE LOVE and much else if they convert to Islam, so I don't know if the American intelligentsia will go for that!

Hey, have you heard the news? Mother Theresa had spiritual doubts which she shared only with her spiritual advisers. She even pronounced the words "I have no faith." She was in doubt about religion for the last 50 years of her life.

http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/south/0...

Hmm, could it be that Atheists like Mother Theresa can engage in charitable works too, that you don't need religion or faith to be good?

At work I am involved in charting individual performance of call-center employees on an Excel chart, on a weekly bar-graph. The parameter is time spent on a call. I can make the bars easily based on a data table, but there is a certain maximum average height of these bars for recommended performance. I wanted to add a level line at that value, in a color such as red, but I don't find any easy way to do it. Do I have to switch to a line-type or point-type chart in order to add a level line? This is not a data series, but separate results for individuals.

We KNOW bodies are made of molecules, our brains, our thoughts, all molecules. When we die, those molecules are RECYCLED. Some even end up in other people. You yourself contain a few molecules of Julius Caesar, or Napoleon, however you are not yet one with Elvis Presley...

How can a God re-make somebody without UNmaking people who lived earlier? Yet the Bible says ALL have to be resurrected at once for this farcical Judgment Day! And if you say, "Oh, God will just pull new molecules out of his butt to make people" it begs the question: we know now the photocopy is not the original. You can't cash a photocopied cheque. Just because God makes an exact copy of me in the future, doesn't mean it's really me. If he's all-powerful, he's still powerless. I already died. He can make 500 me's, toss all into Hell, it won't matter to ME. *I* already died!

And don't answer based on unproven things like souls and unseen spiritual realms. My molecules make me conscious, nothing else.

I was looking at an episode of HORIZON (the British version of the PBS show NOVA), and it talked about Michael Drosnin, the author of THE BIBLE CODE. Apparently he claimed that the Jewish year corresponding to 2006 would be a year full of world disasters and nuclear holocaust. You can have a look at at least the first few minutes of this show. This is of course an illegally stored episode of a copyrighted series, so if you are an ethical person you must never, ever, ever click this and run it:

http://www.tv-links.co.uk/link.do/9/5252/7831/5065...

Michael Drosnin must have egg on his face now. Or does he now change his tune and "reinterpret" the holy word of God?

http://skepdic.com/bibcode.html

It seems to make sense to do immigration cuts as part of an overall carbon-reducing strategy to comply with the Kyoto Accord. So why does immigration continue? We need the developed, Western world to shrink, don't we?

Okay let's try a hard question for a change.

What is the volume of intersection of two pipes whose center axes intersect each other at a perfect right angle, and whose inner diameters are 1 meter? That is, what is the total volume of the set of points which are enclosed by both pipes at the same time?

Hint. Consider the pipes as the equations z^2+x^2=0.25 and z^2+y^2=0.25 .

The religious live in closed societies divorced from reality and the 15% or more people in the world who are Atheist. What myths have you heard against yourself?

As a guide I offer the classification of various myths you can find at http://atheism.about.com/od/atheismmyths/p/Atheism...

These myths, of course, are not valid, but are bigotry, and I will be pleased in 20 years to see full civil rights for freedom FROM religion, and religious actors who diss their Atheist colleagues, make teary apologies on the talk-shows and go into re-hab...

Who? Here's your answer to your question. I deleted my answer and found I was locked out; couldn't add an answer again.

A 30-degree slope, by vectors, means the pull of gravity resolves into two vectors: a vector pulling the box onto the ramp at a right angle (the normal force pushing down on the ramp perpendicularly) and the remaining component that makes the box slide down the ramp, a vector oriented parallel to the ramp.

Working out the vector diagram by trigonometry, the acceleration vector on a 30-degree ramp is exactly half the acceleration of gravity, so

a = g sin 30° = 9.805 m/s^2 * sin 30­° = 9.805 m/s^2 * 1/2 = 4.9025 m/s^2

Moving at a certain acceleration for a certain distance results in a final speed, which you can calculate from the time spent to slide to the bottom. In a frictionless case, it's:

d = 1/2 * a * t^2

20 m = 1/2 * (4.9025 m/s^2) * t^2

t = 2.856 4 seconds

so the velocity can be calculated.....