Recent content by Kracatoan

Taken from the BBC website - good news though :)

A blind swipe perhaps, but maybe not entirely untrue, as the recent decline in teacher authority in Britain certainly has a correlation with the Labour Party being in power, a problem the current government wish to correct. That said, the blame does not lie entirely with Labour, instead I...

For me, the blame lies in the breakdown of the British Education system under labour this last decade. Teachers have lost the right to discipline unruly behaviour - thus eradicating the respect for authority - and non-academic children have been forced to follow an academic style education which...

I would recommend https://www.amazon.com/dp/0716760290/?tag=pfamazon01-20, written by the British Astronomer Royal is gives an excellent description of many areas of astrophysics - not just black holes.

One of the big problems with nuclear power often quoted by critics is the enormous cost and danger of waste disposal, but I just can't see it. So, why can't we simply bury nuclear waste in the ground, the moment we've finished with it in the reactors, without vitrifying it at great expense...

Don't be so sure, quite recently I was lucky enough to pay a visit to the Joint European Torus at Culham and was fascinated to learn that their smaller experiment (MAST) would have been capable of producing a steady, albeit small, output of power if only they had taken the trouble of fitting it...

Its the fact that the further away it is, the faster a galaxy appears to be travelling, and this points towards space-time itself expanding, rather than the galaxies moving away and nothing else.

There is a difference between maximum possible population and maximum sustainable population. Naturally a population can exceed the limit of its sustainiblity for a short while, however the length of time such a large population can last for is definitely finite.

A most interesting point, I'd never thought of that perspetive before. Indeed, it is most irritating that politicians are butting much emphasis on biofuels, when that land could be put to much better use growing food.

I know there have been many threads discussing the ethics of population control, but none seem to have any actual estimates, apart from 1 a couple of years ago. I started this thread just to see if anyone had any good, referenced numbers, rather than opinions.

Sustainable, as in, has no net effect upon world resources and can be maintained indefinately, using current technology. I think Lovelock's estimate was based upon average, developed country lifestyles.

Climate change and environmentalism are some of my favourite areas of science and from both reading around and going to lectures I've got two figures for the maximum sustainable population of the earth, those being: 1 billion - from James Lovelock (one of his Gaia books) 1-2 billion - from...

No it doesn't. Remember, the reason we get zero gravity at the centre of the Earth is because we have an equal attraction from the bodies of mass on all sides, in a black hole however, the mass in concentrated in a singularity with 0 volume and 0 radius, and so you cannot have a point inside it...

http://www.ehow.com/how_5717773_remove-dried-plaster-paris.html or this thread gives acid based suggestions: https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=139990 but if it is on a house, perhaps vinegar is not a good option.

Although it would be nice to travel near the speed of light, I think it is more likely that any trips to other stars and their planets would be strictly one way affairs. I.e something along the lines of a "city, or seed, ship" which would travel at classical velocities, take a very long time to...