Recent content by Night Owl

I believe Ki Man has made the best contribution to this thread so far. "Darkness" is the absence of light. I suppose you could think of the "speed of darkness" as being the speed with which light leaves a particular region of space, but it's not like darkness is a physical entity independent...

I thought this topic was beaten to death. Twice. Right?

Apart from what has already been said about writing \frac{0}{0}, you made another important mistake that nobody has mentioned so far, quetzalcoatl9. It deals with the following, which we've already asserted is an incorrect statement (because \lim_{x \rightarrow 0} g(x) = 0): \frac{\lim_{x...

You could make a solenoid/electromagnet. All you need is a DC power supply (= batteries hooked up in series), a rod made of a ferromagnetic metal (iron is probably the easiest to acquire), and a lot of wire. If you get enough current, you'll see noticeable effects. There are equations that...

Here's an interesting question that fits into this thread. If I freeze water in my freezer, like in an ice cube rack, is the crystal structure completely random, somewhat organized, or truly crystalline in the sense of one overriding pattern? I've never seen an ice cube break clean like...

maybe you could restate the second equation that you'd like help with? I agree with OlderDan with regards to everything else. If you clarify the last part of your post, perhaps we could help more.

Whoa. The babylonians used...base 60? That means they'd need 60 individual symbols for the numbers 0 through 59, right? O_o

Wouldn't another way to say this be that, for any given finite number less than 1, the number 0.\overline{9} is greater than your chosen finite number (yet still less than 1)? Couldn't you just make the same statement with an epsilon-delta argument?

I'll assume that was directed at me. Why so hostile? I apologize for not reading your intimidatingly long block of text, but frankly, I figured it would be a better use of my time to simply indicate that I hadn't and then include my own short reply. If you find this offensive, then ignore...

No offense, mathwonk, but I didn't read that long page of notes that was just posted above this. I have my own pile of notes to review for finals... However, it seems that a lot of confusion has arisen over this problem when it really shouldn't be necessary. 0.9999 "recurring" (or better...

I see how you got it, now. For future reference, it's usually easier to follow if you show your steps and not just the end result...even if it seems like a simple thing to you. Anyway, your way also works, and it gives the same result for the area. It's always nice to see another way to do...

Alright. The first part of your last post didn't quite make sense to me, but that's just because I haven't really learned a whole lot about how to do operations with complex numbers yet. I still need to finish deriving the taylor expansion (I might have the name wrong...the thing where you...

Huh. I see. Kind of like how you can't solve for -1 = x^2 using the reals alone, maybe... But I mean, suppose that you had, in general a = \cos\theta + \cos^2\theta + \cos^4\theta Supposing that "a" were a number for which you could find a theta which would satisfy the equation, how...

Err...what? I don't understand that expression.

Really? :( That would make me a very sad owl. Why are there no roots? I haven't heard of this "Maple" character yet...! ;) I'm only in Math 126 Honors (current material includes things ranging from taylor polynomials, maclaurin series, vectors in three-space, parametric equations for all...