Recent content by Bigman

Really? I know this doesn't count, but at the moment I make somewhat physically accurate game engines in my spare time, though I've been thinking about making realistic physics simulators from scratch. If I have a portfolio of simulators that I've designed, how would it help, and what kind of...

I'm about two years from completing a mech engineering degree, and I've realized that the thought of having a 9-5, 8 hours a day / 5 day a week job doesn't appeal to me. What I'd really like to do is work as a freelance programmer (ideally as a game designer, though realistically I'll only...

For any given human muscle (the bicep for example), are there any other factors that determine the amount of force it can exert besides the amount of muscle and the "type" (red vs white, or slow-twitch vs fast-twitch)? Say, if you had a person who had .5 kg of muscle in his bicept that was 60%...

what if instead of a treadmill, you just have the person get into a harness type thing (like the ones you put babies in where their feet can still touch the ground) and have them wear omnidirectional roller skates? It'd probably be easier to make, and if you had sensors in the harness that...

I've been going through my (crappy) textbook and i still don't really "get" what's actually happening in a circuit. The whole voltage thing is beginning to make a little more sense to me, though now i have a few more questions that the book doesn't really explain: is the current constant...

This makes me think of something I was wondering about the other day, when my physics professor went off on a tangent and started talking about how you could produce a crapload of energy using water(though not through the methods the OP described!)- i THINK he said that by seperating the...

I've heard this definition before and i get it, but when applied to points with charges it confuses me because isn't the voltage AT a point of charge infinite?

Thanks for the response :) What do you mean by the voltage between the two terminals? is it the difference in charge (which should be twice the charge of either terminal, right?) divided by the distance between them? and does this mean that if you took the terminals of a battery and pulled...

I'm a little confused about "voltage". We learned that voltage is somewhat similar to electric field: a way to refer to the potential energy of a charge A when put near charge B without actually knowing the charge of charge A. That made sense to me, but then suddenly in class (this is college...

currently I'm a student at the City College of New York, but New York City is expensive as hell to live in, I plain just don't like the city, and the reason I've been living here has been to be with my girl friend, who I'm breaking up with. So, I want to transfer somewhere, some place that's...

a few years ago i was pissed off about nader's actions in 2000, but after talking about third party candidates in the U.S. in political science i think I'm going to vote for him this year :D of course nader knows he has no chance in hell of winning, but his running does have some real...

ooh so virtual particles aren't some sort of undetectable particles, they simply aren't real? so when someone refers to virtual particles, is it along the same lines as referring to distance, velocity, or force; words(or numbers) which refer to changes or properties rather then actual "things"...

wow... so if someone in the ship were somehow able to instantaneously observe light, they would observe that the light hit the station's front sensor first, then the ships two sensors, then the stations back sensor(and someone in the station would observe everything i just said, with the words...

god, there's a lot of background i don't have (and i still can't get over the whole "they both observe each other as aging slower" thing!), but this is starting to make more sense to me, especially after reading some of the article in that link(which is really helpful, thanks!). i just finished...

that can't be possible, can it? let's say you had two sensors attached to the spaceship, one out a mile in front of the ship and one out a mile in the back (imagine long mic booms sticking off the front and back), and you had two more sensors attached to the station in a similar fasion, and...