You can haz your acids, but all your base are belong to us!

Also rumored to include a subscription to Amazon Prime - free shipping and the movie streaming service. Not a bad deal if the look and feel is good.

Prediction: In 2 years they'll give you a tablet when you subscribe to Amazon Prime.

Matt Wood
Melbourne, FL

I watched the press conference, and they suggested it likely had about half of it's mass as a solid rocky core, the other half as gas.

I've got sitting on my desk a few quotes from this week along these lines: 32 cores, 32 GB ram 2 TB Raid 1, 23" monitor. --> $8k Matt A. Wood, Professor FIT Physics & Space Sciences

The Book by Taylor and Wheeler "Exploring Black Holes: Introduction to General Relativity" is very nice, and roughly at your level. http://www.amazon.com/Exploring-Black-Holes-Introduction-Relativity/dp/020138423X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1314560336&sr=8-2 Matt A. Wood Physics & Space Sciences Dept Florida Institute of Technology Melbourne, FL 32901

It's nearly always phrased this way. It was discovered within hours of the initial signal of the explosion reaching earth. Matt Wood

The sun's radius is about 100x Earth's radius, and Earth orbit is about 200 solar radii. Our unmanned spacecraft have gone about 40x this distance. Shrink the sun down to the size of a softball and typical interstellar distances scale to about 3500 km. The energy requirements to make such a trip are extraordinary (if not prohibitive). The time to make the trip is also quite substantial, even accelerating at a constant 1g. Short answer: If they have the tech to get here, they can do whatever they want, and we'd have no defense. Easiest: raise enough dust/soot in the atmosphere (nuclear weapons in remote areas, or just targeted asteroids) for a few years to block the sun. Sagan's "nuclear winter". Clean up, move in, or move on. Matt -- "Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati" (When all else fails, play dead)

Science News is good if you like printed material. It's bi-weekly and gives moderate detail. http://www.sciencenews.org/

I'd appreciate an invite: matt.wood61(gmail)

They are analog, certainly. They can have any energy. Even energies of photons emitted by a laser have some small dispersion in energies.

At my university, computer purchases over $1500 are capital equipment, and so not subject to overhead charges. Under $1500, the grant gets charged 44% for indirect costs. So, purchase a $1k PC or a $1500 Mac - same cost to the researcher's grant.

EAperture Science

Oil will have a far higher heat capacity than air, so the heating rate after pump failure would be far slower than after an air handler failure.

Bhutan? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhutan#Government_and_politics

Does this broad line region make my butt look massive?