Recent content by The Geoff

OpenCV is the place to start, it's a collection of libraries, mostly in C++, for recognising and tracking objects. Be warned though, for this kind of thing you're generally going to need a fairly powerful machine for anything other than a proof of concept. I've managed to get my netbook...

Bananas are about the closest you can get to a single food that will keep you alive for a long time. Whatever you go for though, you'll suffer some kind of malnutrition, no natural food supplies everything you need. In the 1800s explorers were sometimes found dead of starvation while...

As far as protection goes, you can mail it to yourself in a well sealed package and don't open it. The postal mark registers the date of creation. More formally, you can hire a lawyer. You give it to the lawyer, s/he signs for it and locks it away in a safe somewhere, so if there's ever any...

My point was that with kinetic friction, there's a certain, special coefficient that will balance the acceleration due to gravity and leave the crate with a constant velocity down the slope. But the washer is hanging at an angle, so there's an acceleration. We're not at the special, balanced...

Nope, right first time. The frictional force is there as well as the force parallel to the ramp. One counteracts the other. It's the difference between the two forces you need to look at. You've got a mass for the crate, you've got an acceleration for the crate (or, at least, you've got a...

The forum rules say you have to make an attempt before clues can be posted...got any ideas at all? Doesn't matter if they're wrong, the whole point of science is that being wrong is just fine as long as you can work out why you're wrong.

If the crate was moving at a constant velocity then the washer would hang straight down relative to the world outside the crate, or at 34 degrees to the roof of the crate. It's not, however, so the crate is accelerating in some way. Note that the question doesn't make it clear in which...

The force in each cable can also be represented as an up/downstream force, plus a cross stream force. Once you've found those they're a lot easier to add to each other.

Aurora are usually too faint to see in the day - although I'm wondering if you've seen a noctilucent cloud (essentially a cloud of ice crystals in the upper atmosphere that catches the sun). They're also very faint, but you generally see them around dusk...and they certainly sound a little more...

The graph has both spacelike and timelike directions (fig 1, showing a analogue of a traditional light-cone), so the CN is defined as something very similar to Minkowski spacetime, and from this they derive SR. In effect, it seems to replicate Einstein's original work, but from a different set...

Back to the original post, if I found a strange device attached to my car I'd call the bomb squad, let them fight it out with the FBI :D

I came across this recently: http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.4805v1" Whilst it's mostly beyond my level, from what I can grasp the suggestion is that SR and Minkowski's spacetime can be derived simply by looking at the universe as a network of discrete causal events (a granular universe on the...

Another series rather than a movie, and another one from Joss "Firefly, Buffy" Whedon: Dollhouse. Proper classic science fiction where you bring in a single groundbreaking technology (in this case, the ability to treat the human brain as a re-writeable drive) and run with it. It looks at...