Questions of a weird mind

[factotum]

Not to mention that the ones which DO allow dual citizenship might start getting suspicious when you turn up as a citizen of 23 other countries already...

[Doomboy911]

Dang it now I have to become a man of the world through more symbolic means.

[Karoht]

If I wanted to become a citizen in every part of the world what would I have to do and what could possibly stop me from reaching this goal?

Here is a step by step guide I found on the interwebs. Seems legit.
The following is complete satire and should not be taken even remotely seriously. Really, not even a little. No, not even that much.
Step 1: Buy some land that no one cares about.
Step 2: Go through all the paperwork to recede from your current nation and have the land declared its own independant nation. Yes, this has been done before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Molossia
Step 3: As supreme ruler of your new nation, draft and ratify some official document to declare that all citizens of your nation are permitted multi-citizenship. You may have some trouble getting it through your 1 party review and approval system, just buy everyone off with lavish gifts.
Step 4: Become recognized by the United Nations. Previous advice to get the paperwork passed may have less than desireable results.
Step 5: Apply for citizenship everywhere else on earth at the same time. Do NOT attempt to buy people off with lavish gifts at this stage, too easy to follow the papertrail. Stick to modest or even cheap gifts. I hear fruit baskets and chocolates do help.
Step 6: Any nation which denies your citizenship, you simply unrecognize as a nation.
If you are currently drafting a serious reply to explain in detail how this would not work because of X, you are doing it wrong.
Sounds pretty easy right?

[Yora]

Has anyone else noticed getting sleepy from closing your eyes and sitting still?

I have my pair of sunglasses mostly for driving. Not because I can't see anything, but when I squint my eyes, I get very sleepy very quickly. With sunglasses I am completely awake.
And today the dentists light was shining at my eyes, so I closed them and shortly after dozed off on the chair. While having my wisdom teeth removed.

[Qwertystop]

How fast must something rotate to appear to be rotating slowly in the opposite direction?

[Douglas]

How fast must something rotate to appear to be rotating slowly in the opposite direction?

If you're talking about watching a video or TV show, it depends on the frame rate. If you're talking about real life, it doesn't work that way.

[Qwertystop]

If you're talking about watching a video or TV show, it depends on the frame rate. If you're talking about real life, it doesn't work that way.

No, I've seen little toys that have a row of lights on a bar that spins really fast and eventually it looks like the lights stop spinning and then start spinning slowly in the opposite direction.

[thubby]

No, I've seen little toys that have a row of lights on a bar that spins really fast and eventually it looks like the lights stop spinning and then start spinning slowly in the opposite direction.

oh, thats a function of how often the lights blink.

[Elemental]

Damn you... I was about to say that!

[Qwertystop]

oh, thats a function of how often the lights blink.

Is it? I never noticed the lights blinking.

[Elemental]

Is it? I never noticed the lights blinking.

It really depends on what kind of light they are then.
They could be blinking, but at such a speed that you aren't aware of it, a known feature of incandescent lights.
As a result, when it shines on a rotating object, that object is most strongly illuminated at certain points in it's rotation. And it can thus appear to be moving slower or faster than it actually is, sometimes even appearing to be still.

[inky13112]

I seem to recall seeing this same effect in spinning car wheels? Maybe I'm mistaken, but if not how does the blinking light explanation work here?

[thubby]

I seem to recall seeing this same effect in spinning car wheels? Maybe I'm mistaken, but if not how does the blinking light explanation work here?

on tv and movies it's framerate. IRL it's an optical illusion caused by your eyes derping because of the small radial lines all moving.

your eye tries to track the spinning but can't, instead grabbing tiny bits and pieces as it wiggles (your eyes just do that). your brain has a fit, gives up, and resolves the bits as "going backward"

also yes, the toys blink. I've taken 2 of them apart in my life and they definitely blink. they just do it insanely fast.
(btw, the motors in those things are impressive for the size and cost)

[sktarq]

How much of the actual heat of the sun makes it all the way to earth, and how much of what we recieve is actually just radiation heating up matter here on earth?

What do you mean by "actual heat"? If it is energy that leaves the sun causing the average solar KE to drop and causes the earth's average KE to rise then it is actual heat, no mater what the carrier. There are really only two main ways to get energy from the sun to the earth. One is the vast, strange, and totally fun EM spectrum. Basically photons of various energies. The other is the solar wind in which bits of the sun blow off from the corona and fly out and hit the earth. Which is comparibly minor in terms energy delivery. There are good arguments for magnetic field variations leading to internal friction here on earth but the amount of energy is dwarfed by the photon delivery meathod. And for those looking to quantium effects like tunnelling, sorry, it doesn't happen enough to really matter.

[Yora]

I think I was thinking of heat transfer by convection, like when you are standing next to a fire and can feel it's heat. But since space is empty, that would be the case only for hot material ejected from the sun that hits earth, which probably wouldn't be much.

But that begs the question, if any other factors were as with a simple ordinary fire on earth, how hot would it be to stand next to to a fire of the size and intensity of the sun, where "next to" means the actual distance to the sun?

[factotum]

I think I was thinking of heat transfer by convection, like when you are standing next to a fire and can feel it's heat.

Actually, if you're standing *next* to a fire (rather than on top of it) most of the heat you feel will be radiation--convection will be mostly heating the air above the fire.

As for how hot the sun would feel at Earth's distance, there's an equation which determines how hot a planet should be depending on its distance from the sun and its albedo (e.g. how much heat gets reflected into space). If you perform that calculation for the Earth, I believe it comes out with a figure of -23C--the greenhouse effect means it's actually warmer than that in reality, of course.

[Yora]

Okay, makes sense. So the heat one feels when standing in the sun is mostly the energy from absorbing uv-radition?

[Matthias2207]

If we were just to fill the space between the sun and earth with matter, it really depends on the sort of matter and the behaviour of the matter. Take normal air for example: the air closest to the sun heats, gets lighter, goes 'up' (away from the sun), but when it gets too far from the sun it hasn't any gravity (or cold air that goes down) to have a direction and it just spreads. I don't think it's really going to work.

[Eldan]

Woudn't rather a lot of that air collapse into the sun's gravity well?

[sktarq]

Okay, makes sense. So the heat one feels when standing in the sun is mostly the energy from absorbing uv-radition?

UV, Some IR, Some micowave, Some Visible, but basically yes. Much of the heat we get from the sun (most actually) comes from the ground absorbing the radiation and passing it on to the air by conduction instead of the air absorbing it directly (which then gets spread to the rest of the air by convection.

If there was an atmosphere from the sun to the earth then it would carry heat by convection, conduction, and radiation. And yes there would be all sorts of convection currents as the atmosphere would heat up close to the sun raise away from the sun go out toward the edge of the heliosphere and then fall back. Just like the majority of the sun's plasma does here in the real world.

Woudn't rather a lot of that air collapse into the sun's gravity well?

yep actually all of it. Since that is what actually happened. Made the sun grow, eventually it started a fusion reaction

[Matthias2207]

Woudn't rather a lot of that air collapse into the sun's gravity well?

Yes, but we need something to fill the empty space, so we're just going to ignore that.

[Eldan]

So we would need some kind of interstellar medium with no mass, but the ability to conduct heat...

Yup, ladies and gentlemen, we need Aether for a physics experiment.

[Elemental]

So we would need some kind of interstellar medium with no mass, but the ability to conduct heat...

Yup, ladies and gentlemen, we need Aether for a physics experiment.

But wasn't that discontinued due to budget cuts?

[Brother Oni]

Since there's nowhere better to put this and I feel the need to ramble:

As every school boy or girl knows, if you want to improve the dissolution of a solid in a solvent, the first step you take is either heat it up or stir it.

On a more technical thermodynamic level, what you're doing is increasing the energy in the system to overcome the enthalpy of solution, which is directly related to the solubility of the powder.

However I've worked with enough powders and liquids to know that if the solvent is added in such a way as to not overly disturb the powder, you end up with a large lump of powder in the bottom of your nearly full flask.

Presumably this indicates that the solvent is locally saturated around the powder, and depending on the properties of the wet powder, it can be a right [redacted] to get it into solution (oh lactose, how I loathe you).

Now going back to the original fix of stirring or heating, if you heat the mixture, you both raise the solubility of the material in the solvent and introduce convection currents that shift the saturated solvent away.

If you stir it though, the primary method of dissolution is removal of the localised saturated solution, which leads me to my question: is there a threshold point where it's better to stir something or to heat it up, to make the solid dissolve?
Presumably the cut off point is the boiling point of the liquid, or it's so violently stirred/shaken that the solvent is dispersed into spray, but there must be an optimal point somewhere at a sensible level.

Thoughts? Or do I just need to stop daydreaming while putting sugar in my tea?

[Elemental]

Since there's nowhere better to put this and I feel the need to ramble:

As every school boy or girl knows, if you want to improve the dissolution of a solid in a solvent, the first step you take is either heat it up or stir it.

On a more technical thermodynamic level, what you're doing is increasing the energy in the system to overcome the enthalpy of solution, which is directly related to the solubility of the powder.

However I've worked with enough powders and liquids to know that if the solvent is added in such a way as to not overly disturb the powder, you end up with a large lump of powder in the bottom of your nearly full flask.

Presumably this indicates that the solvent is locally saturated around the powder, and depending on the properties of the wet powder, it can be a right [redacted] to get it into solution (oh lactose, how I loathe you).

Now going back to the original fix of stirring or heating, if you heat the mixture, you both raise the solubility of the material in the solvent and introduce convection currents that shift the saturated solvent away.

If you stir it though, the primary method of dissolution is removal of the localised saturated solution, which leads me to my question: is there a threshold point where it's better to stir something or to heat it up, to make the solid dissolve?
Presumably the cut off point is the boiling point of the liquid, or it's so violently stirred/shaken that the solvent is dispersed into spray, but there must be an optimal point somewhere at a sensible level.

Thoughts? Or do I just need to stop daydreaming while putting sugar in my tea?

You need to stop daydreaming when putting sugar in your tea is the short answer.
And anyway... In my humble opinion, one should not look for the method that is more efficient, and instead the method that is more easy to enact.

Also, from another angle, stirring is more effective when it's sitting in a lump as the lump is dispersed.

[Doomboy911]

Shouldn`t the easier to enact method be the more efficient method on the grounds that the more efficient way is harder to do.

[Castaras]

Might as well ask this here...

Why do girls feel softer than guys? And no, the answer can't be moisturiser or female products, because I don't ever use them and am still apparently "Made of Softs!".

[factotum]

Why do girls feel softer than guys?

I'm no expert, but I'd say it's a combination of having less skin hair and a higher percentage of body fat than a male. (Please insert your own joke about more experimentation being needed here ).

[Brother Oni]

Depending on what exactly you mean by 'Made of softs'.

If you mean roughness of the skin, then it's different testosterone levels causing the difference between males and females, and weathering/environmental conditions.

For example, highly exposed parts of your body like the face and hands/forearms roughen up in response to UV light, wear and tear, etc. Your underarms and other *cough* less exposed areas will undoubtedly be softer.

Testosterone causes the additional body hair roughness as mentioned by factotum, but also causes the skin to thicken to a degree.

If you meant just softer overall, then it's a little more complicated with body structure, muscle tone, body fat percentages/deposition, etc and all the involved biology.

[Castaras]

Hehe, thanks for the concise answers Oni & Factotum.