Quick Questions, Short Answers - No Debate

No, this isn't right at all.Space propulsion has nothing to do with gases being pushed off of anything, or pushing on anything. As Dwise says, it's all about conservation of linear momentum.On an object in space with no external forces acting on it, linear momentum is conserved. That means it has to be the same both before you fire your engine and afterwards. So, if your engine is shooting hot gas particles out that way at a certain velocity, then your space ship has to gain a velocity in the opposite direction, such that the momentum of the gas particles (their mass times their velocity) is canceled out by the momentum of your spaceship.It's conservation of momentum. It doesn't have anything to do with pushing. If you were to find the center of mass of all of the particles of gas you expended plus your spaceship after you fired your engine, you would find that it was exactly identical to the center of gravity of your spaceship plus its fuel before you fired your engine. Generally we're not concerned about this because the point of space travel is to move spaceships and their occupants to a specific place. We don't care about what happens to the fuel exhaust products once they've been accelerated away from the ship, so the fact that the total center of gravity isn't actually moving is just a bit of trivia.Rocket engines have a bell-shaped nozzle not because that's necessary to be "pushed" against, but to keep the gases from expanding too quickly. There has to be some pressure in the engine nozzle to ensure combustion of the gases. Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

How, for instance, would your model be different than this?

I spent about two minutes trying to figure out how that was analogous to space travel before I realized you were burning me. It's a slow brain day.

If I designed a rocket engine that had no combustion chamber at all - let's say a pair of hollow tubes delivered propellant and oxidizer to a location well aft of the rocket where it was ignited - would it be able to move? Or would it move simply as a function of the fuel and oxidizer it was spraying out, with the energy of combustion lost?Thanks for the correction, though. I was hoping you'd arrive to explain how wrong I was.

I think that was my favorite part of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "Footfall."But now that I think of it - since you asked - why is there a shock-wave at all in the vacuum of space? It's easy to imagine a longitudinal wave through an atmospheric medium or the hot gases of chemical combustion, but how does the mechanical energy from the nuclear detonation actually reach the blast plate of an Orion-type spacecraft?

I've noticed, especially on Vista/Win 7 platforms, a lot of network-related weirdness caused by the IPv6 drivers (Toredo IP Tunneling, etc), up to and including random BSOD's. I'm recommending that everybody experiencing persistent internet weirdness uninstall their IPv6 drivers (which is a bit of a complicated process, since you have to both uninstall the drivers and disable IPv6 support with a registry key, otherwise they just reinstall at next bootup.)These drivers are just abominable and they solve a "problem" that nobody has, yet.

The Gnu Image Manipulation Program - the GIMP - has both batch processing (via "Script-Fu") and what you want to do, which is called "changing the color space." http://www.gimp.org/There's probably a script out there for doing this already. Apparently you can do it from GIMP's console: http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Basic_Batch/Working with command lines may not be something you're very familiar with. But the GIMP is definitely free, does about as much stuff as most people know how to make Photoshop do, and is super-useful. I've used it for years.

If you set two plumb bobs a substantial distance apart - say, opposite ends of a very long bridge - and then use a telescope from a vantage point where you can see both, you'll see that they aren't parallel.It's a convenient experiment for those of us who are landlocked.

Not all that far, I think. I couldn't find any information on it but I'm pretty sure a guy did this on a bridge in England a hundred years ago. I could be remembering wrong, of course.

Oh, maybe that's the experiment I was thinking of. Thanks, Dr. A!

If you protonate sulfuric acid (and you'd have to use a hell of a strong acid to get it to accept a proton) you get trihydroxyoxosulfonium, a cationic species.Technically sulfuric acid is amphoteric but in practice I've never heard of it used as a base. Strong acids are weak, weak bases. I suspect the dissociation constant of that third proton is too high to be accurately characterized (but I could be full of shit.)

It may be the worst answer yet, since you asked a question about hydrogen sulfide and I told you all about sulfuric acid. Sorry. But the answer is mostly the same: With a strong enough acid you can make hydrogen sulfide act as a base and form hydrogen sulfonium; it's an analogous compound to the hydronium that water forms when it acts as a base. It's a lot less stable than hydronium, apparently. Sulfoniums are more easily formed with larger, electron-donating substituents that stabilize the sulfur's positive charge. (I think. To tell the truth, I'm shit at organic chemistry.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_that_%CF%80_is_irrationalHow's your calculus?

The existence of civilizations with continuous records all the way back to well before the flood supposedly happened, and they somehow never noticed?

Buz, it's "unknown" because it didn't happen. There was never any global flood and you've never at any time been able to substantiate that there was.