thegreatbeyond

[Twilkitri]

...right...

Ya know, I'm really starting to rue the decision to keep complaining at you to come back here, ER.

[chromus]

Sorry about the long delays. Work and outside activities keep me away from the cult.

First off, Kamui's question was half-answered in a private chat, where the answer will stay. All I can say is that I don't know what a DOE defendant is, due to my lack of legal knowledge.

Pez is right that I can't answer that question, simply because the answer doesn't exist. Yet.

There is a chamber in our ears that is connected to a passage that exits into the nose. Normally, this allows our eardrum to maintain itself whenever the air pressure changes, since air flows on both sides of the ear drum. However, this passage is almost never clear, and sometimes it's totally blocked, so the air pressure on both sides isn't equal. Once the difference comes to a point where the eardrum can't handle it, one of two things happen: either you get a nosebleed because material is being forced out of the passage into the nose, or your ears pop. Now, technically, on modern airplanes, the cabin is pressurized so that doesn't happen, but nothing is totally airproof, and the slight difference in air pressure is enough to cause it.

I don't have a cell phone because I can't afford one and don't really need one.

[Phred]

can you solve rubriks cubes?
and why is it called a rubriks cube?

[chromus]

Yes, it is possible to solve a Rubik's cube, though I have not yet done it myself. A solution to the cube can be found at my source. It's called a Rubik's cube because of it's original inventor, Erno Rubik, a Hungarian lecturer at the Academy of Applied Arts and Crafts at Budapest. Source: http://www.rubiks.com/cubesolution_new.html

[Phred]

O_o who would pay money for a video on how to solve a rubriks cube?

[ayana]

I know what I'm saving up for!

[Chewi]

lol

[chromus]

Hey, they make the videos, so obviously there's someone out there who buys them.

[ayana]

I wanna star in one.

[chromus]

I'm sure you would make a beautiful Rubik's cube solver, if you ever got it into your mind to become a world champion on solving the Rubik's cube...

[ayana]

The sarcasm hurts..

[Phred]

why are some shows shot in front of a live studio audience? what if someone sneezes

[chromus]

Filming shows in front of a live audience is another way shows make money. They sell tickets to the show, which is a free form of advertising, as the people who saw the show live tell their friends about it, and so on. The practice has recently fallen out of practice as security has been beefed up and more camera angles are needed, which would get in the way of the audience.

If a member of the audience sneezes, it's not likely that the mic would pick it up. It only gets what the actors say, and the occasional loud applause.

[Vorpy]

Nonflammable is a word. It means "not flammable". If something is not flammable, it should be labeled as nonflammable. The word inflammable means the same as flammable and is generally avoided since it can be confusing.

"Could care less" is now an idiom, but it was created as an inexplicable variation of the phrase "couldn't care less" which is an idiom that actually makes sense. Lots of idioms make sense, but then their use leads to people mishearing them and saying and writing things that don't make sense. For example "toe the line" can be miswritten as "tow the line". And I've actually heard people say "for all intensive purposes". The phrase is "for all intents and purposes", people!

In theory (and sometimes in practice) an operating system should be able to recover from a protection fault. Modern hardware is designed to allow the operating system to maintain control of the system and restrict the access allowed to other programs. One of the ways it does this is by allowing the operating system to designate which areas of memory a program is allowed to access. This way a program can never access memory outside of its designated space, so it can't interact with other programs or disrupt the system in any way that it shouldn't be allowed to. If it tries to access memory it isn't allowed to, the operating system is informed so that it can terminate the program (a program shouldn't try to access memory like that, so it is a bug that it probably wouldn't have been able to recover from). In theory, the operating system should be able to keep the system stable. But in practice, Windows is terribly buggy and somehow a single program can crash the whole system quite easily.

On artificial gravity: this may be referring to the way a spacecraft could be made to spin to create artificial gravity, as in many works of fiction. The spacecraft could be shaped like a wheel, and the people would stand on the inside of the outer surface. Objects tend to move in a straight line (Newton's laws of motion) so the surface of the spacecraft must exert a force on the person to keep them moving in a circle. On Earth, the ground exerts an upward force on us. The spacecraft would exert a force towards the center of the wheel (centripetal force). Just like on the gravitron ride at carnivals, or the force that keeps you in your seat as a roller coaster goes around a loop.

A live audience is nice because canned laughter and applause sounds fake, and it allows the acting to flow with the audience reaction more easily. there could also be the psychological factor of acting in front of an actual audience. And the audience appreciates being able to watch the production too.

[Pez-Man]

Errr.... Vorpy, if Chromus provides a perfectly good explanation, don't explain it more. Don't answer here, unless Chromus can't.