/sci/ - Science and Mathematics

It would if your blood vessels passed through the bagginess. But otherwise I think the effect will more likely be to interfere with your skins ability to radiate heat away by trapping a layer of air.

>>2820

Did I say radiate? Derp, convect.

Frilly metal pants will do the trick.

>>2820

What about very lightweight fabric? If it was lighter colour than your skin, it should actually cool you down, right?

Is this why Arab men wear those silly white ghost costumes?

>>2825

They wear white because it reflects the most sunlight instead of absorbing it and making them hotter.

>>2827

they still make their women wear all black though, lel

Y is Biology not of hard science.

>>2835

Biology is a study of living systems or, worse, systems of living systems. It's not a hard science because all living systems are based on very complex Chemistry, and only a fraction of biochemistry is properly characterized and even less of it can be used for prediction.

Biology is (or should be) so absurdly complex that humans are excluded from all but the most narrow analysis of it. Biochemistry does a decent job of this. However, because biology is unfathomably complex, scientists studying it are very tempted to take a tertiary view or quaternary view of living systems and generalizing them in incorrect and incomplete ways.

tl;dr: people treat biology as a simple science when it's perhaps the most complex one.

Imagine a simplified form of economy, represented by resources and machines that cost resources to install, take inputs and produce other resources, like a mine costs x money and y men to build, takes in gas and produces x tantalum day. Given starting resources and the posibility of building some of these, I wish to optimize the least-time plan to reach a goal. I understand this isnt a trivial problem, and may require a time-division wide search, but I wish to read some on this. Is there any resource I could find to learn about this?

Would there be any practical reason for a mechanical power grid, as opposed to an electrical one?

I'm having some fun designing a fantasy world of robots sent by humans to precolonise Venus, which means industry growing exponentially heavier; and I was thinking that such a heavy industry might welcome the possibility of temporarily connecting mechanical systems to one insanely huge gear to give mechanisms as much physical power as the components can survive.

On a related note, would metallic gears be too soft on the scale of hundreds of metres, and require crystalline ones to be used in their place?

>>2869

a free market

If you mean to ask about optimization algorithms, it depends how much math you know. Combinatorics is a good place to start.

>>2871

Just use 'muh graphene' and wave your hands if you want to use mechanical power.

Realistically though, electricity and phenomena such as the Lorentz force are so robust and efficient that there's very little need to innovate mechanically.

>>2873

What if you need to deliver a stupidly huge amount of raw physical power to one component though?

An electrical system would probably just fry, a mechanical one could go harder and harder until you somehow manage to break something.

>>2874

For most substances, a "huge" amount of force is going to fuck it up (or, if repeatedly applied, heat it up) too badly to use without frequent repair (that might not be a problem for robots, but it's a big fucking issue in modern industry). Look into 'space-age' synthetic materials like graphene if you're looking for exceptions.

As for electricity not being sufficient, you're partially correct, electricity is limited by internal resistance of the conductors. That said, you can always just use a bigger power line, as heavy-handed as the solution sounds.

>>2872

This is not a free market question, rather a planned economy one. Its more about production flow, though. There is no supply/demand value, machines produce, buffers store, other machines consume. Ill check combinatorics, thanks

also fuck free market :-^)

How would an explosion work in space?

For the purpose of this comment let's say that it's a plastic explosive that traps enough of it's own oxygen to ignite, it isn't surrounded by anything that could turn into a projectile, and the detonator is irrelevant.

There's no air to create a shockwave, so it seems like you could theoretically stand a foot away from it and be unaffected. However, it still generates energy, in the form if mostly heat, and the particles of the explosive itself have to go somewhere. And since they can't loose heat as quickly they would be hotter for longer. But the matter is in such a small concentration that it doesn't seem like it would have much force very far out due to losing concentration.

So basically it seems to me that it will blast anything relatively close with a wave of very hot dust, but won't push any thing very far that wasn't touching it, and after a short distance compared to in an atmosphere, it will cease to be a serious concern at all. Am I correct?

Is it possible to convert multiple powers in succession to some formula I can use in wolfram alpha? Basically I want to input this but using variable to tell how many times.

n=1, 2^2 = 4

n=2, 2^2^2 = 16

n=3, 2^2^2^2 = 65536

n=?, 2^2 … n

>>3147

What you're looking for is called tetration or power towers.

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PowerTower.html

I tried using the Knuth notation a^^k, didn't work. I tried using PowerTower[a,k], didn't work. But apparently Nest[a^# &, 1, k] works. What Nest[f, expr, n] does is it repeats the function f n times on expr.

Take note though, 2^^1 = 2, first number in your sequence is already 2^^2.

You can also use Table[expr, n] to get out a table of values;

Table[Nest[2^# &, 1, n], {n, 1, 5}]

>>2977

>you could stand a foot away from it and be unaffected

Common misconception. The explosion would create it's own gas, a fluid medium, which would exert pressure.

The explosion will actually be more 'powerful' in space though the energy release is identical; in an atmosphere, the exploding gas produces pressurized gas which collides with the 'still' air of the atmosphere. Momentum is conserved, so a shock wave can actually be thought of as a loss of energy, as it takes energy for the still air in an atmosphere to be pushed out from an explosion.

An astronaut who blew up a pound of C4 in his hand on, say, the moon would still be blown away. He's less likely to go deaf though I suppose?

also I feel compelled to point out that many explosives don't 'burn', just decompose into gases

>>3195

Also if the explosive creates shrapnel that is moot anyway.

>Experience gained in existing segmented mirrors (for example, the Keck telescope) suggests that the mirror proposed for the OWL is feasible. However, the projected .cost (of around €1.5 billion) was considered too high

>More than two-thirds of the UK public believe the £8.77bn cost of the London 2012 Olympics was worth the money

I need a scientific explanation for this bullshit. Is this because there are 20 people on Earth who can understand how to get this stuff working, so money is not really the ceiling?

>>3288

The fucking Pluto mission cost about the same as the Hobbit trilogy. And Pirates of the Caribbean and Spiderman weren't much cheaper.

New Horizons

>The cost of the mission (including spacecraft and instrument development, launch vehicle, mission operations, data analysis, and education/public outreach) is approximately $700 million over 15 years (2001–2016)

The Hobbit trilogy

>“The Hobbit’s” staggering $745 million price tag would make it the most expensive film trilogy ever produced.