thegreatbeyond

This took so much research, but I think I finally got the right answers.

The match was invented before the cigarette lighter. According to ThinkQuest, the match was invented in 577 AD by the Chinese who needed some way to start a fire due to a war taking all the resources. The lighter was invented in 1910 by Louis Aronson. Sources: http://library.thinkquest.org/23062/match.html and https://www.ronson.nl/pages_en/ronsonhi ... _lite.html

Yup. Polar bear fur is translucent. It reflects the color of the snow and sky around them, making them harder to see. Source: http://www.tmmc.org/learning/education/ ... arbear.asp

I can't find a definitive source, but all over the internet, I've found the phrase, "25 miles per year" associated with Heinz Ketchup. Here's one page that says it: http://www.curlydavid.com/useless.html

A specific study does say that men blink more than women. Here's a link to an ABC news report that quotes the study: http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s959559.htm

According to Dictionary.com, the English word with the most number of meanings is set, followed closely by run. This is all according to the Oxford English dictionary. Source: http://dictionary.reference.com/help/fa ... s/set.html

Since the definition of an accent mark is "a diacritical mark used to indicate stress or (in some languages) placed above a vowel to indicate a special pronunciation", (From Dictionary.com) the dot above an i would not be an accent mark. That's because it doesn't indicate stress placed on the word, nor does it modify the pronounciation of the original word.

The common reasoning behind "Throw the baby out with the bathwater" is that, in old times, "Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of having the clean water first, then all the other sons and men, then the women, then the children, and last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it." Source: http://www.rootsweb.com/~genepool/meanings.htm However, history doesn't support this ritual of bathing, so another view is that the phrase originated with Thomas Murner's "Narrenbeschwörung (1512) which contains as its eighty-first short chapter entitled "Das kindt mit dem bad vß schitten" (To throw the baby out with the bath water) a treatise on fools who by trying to rid themselves of a bad thing succeed in destroying whatever good there was as well." Source: http://www.wordskit.com/language/legend ... ater.shtml

Companies like H&R Block stay in business because they charge a fee for doing your taxes and finances. The commercials just advertise the amount of money that they can save you by finding deductions that you may have missed. They don't quote the fees, but you can find out what they are by visiting a store or setting up an online account.

Does a text input in an online form have a default value?
(IE: IF you don't specify a value in the coding such as "<input type="text" name="name">") I'm trying to figure out how to make the following work:

if($name != <insert value here>) {
Execute this code
} else {
Excuete this other code
}



And I'm not finding how to make it work... I try specifying a default value in the form and it still doesn't work ;_; Ah well.. Any help is appreciated.

There are a couple of functions you might want to look at.

isset($name) will return true if $name isn't undefined.
empty($name) will return true if $name is defined, but empty (eg: "").

I'm not sure what gets sent if you leave a field empty, whether it sends nothing or it sends an empty string. Chances are you'll want one of those though.


...this is assuming, of course, that I've understood your question correctly.

Thanks DT ^_^ *glomps DT and also glomps chromus*

The functions that DT provided should help you out, but in my experience, a browser sends all data to the script, even empty text boxes. The value that comes in is just an empty string, so you should be using the empty function that DT described. More information can be found in the PHP documentation at: http://www.php.net/manual/en/

What's the highest percentage of blood one can loose and still live?

I think Ayana might be planning something....

Why is it that when I sleep more I feel more tired than when I sleep less?

After researching the blood question for days, I think I came up with a good answer. The page with the formula states that it may not be accurate, since the page is a test of JavaScript more than anything else. However, I've seen some medical sites link to this page, so it's probably a good approximation. Source: http://www.oyston.com/anaes/mabl.html

Here's the formula (simplified):

Maximum Allowable Blood Loss = (1 - Minimum Hemoglobin Concentration / Current Hemoglobin Concentration) * Volume of Blood

The default values of these took me a while to find, but here are my sources:
Minimum Hemoglobin Concentration = 7 g / dL.
Source: http://www.psbc.org/medical/transfusion ... _v2_n3.htm
Average Hemoglobin Concentration: 34 g / dL.
Source: http://medicine.creighton.edu/medschool ... guide.html
Average Blood Volume = 6000 mL.
Source: http://medlib.med.utah.edu/kw/derm/pages/anet_2.htm

Notice that I'm using average hemoglobin concentration and average blood volume instead of current hemoglobin concentration and current blood volume. What this means is that the numbers I come up with won't fit everyone. The only true way to find out is to ask your doctor about these statistics.

For the average, adult human, the minimum allowable blood loss is 4765 mL. Remember, this would be the maximum amount you could lose and still live (almost always requiring a transfusion to say alive).

I've done a lot of research on sleep, and it's easy enough to find proof that not sleeping enough causes sleepiness throughout the day. However, finding proof on how sleeping too much causes sleepiness is much harder, and explaining how it works is close to impossible right now. The main problem is that we still aren't quite sure why we need to sleep. We only notice what happens if we sleep too little or too much.

is the moon ever red?
what does vitamin e do for you?
I forget the third question... oops

The moon never actually turns red. The moon's red color comes from looking at it through the haze on the horizon. It's the same effect as what makes the sky blue. Blue light is scattered the most, which is what gives the sky a blue color when the sun is up. Since red light is scattered the least, it's the only light left when the light from the moon, when it's close to the horizon instead of overhead, reaches your eyes. Here's a webpage that explains it in better detail: http://home.hiwaay.net/~krcool/Astro/moon/moonorange/

Vitamin E is one of the more powerful antioxidants used by the body. Antioxidants are molecules that protect the cells in your body from free radicals, damaging leftovers from metabolism. Source: http://www.cc.nih.gov/ccc/supplements/vite.html

so why is vitaman E in Aya's kleenex?

Since the nose is one of the most prominant places on the body, it absorbs a lot of radiation from the sun, which is why it sunburns so easily. The vitamin E in tissues is believed to repair damage caused by the sun, as well as assist in moisturizing the face.

Zornak sent me an IM earlier today about an old question and the bad answer I gave then. It was the whole "Does .99999.... equal 1" bit. After some information, and Zornak's help, I have the right answer.

Yes, 0.9999.... is equal to 1. In order to understand why, I need to talk about geometric series. A geometric series is a series of numbers which have a common ratio with each other. For instance, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 is a geometric series because each term is the previous term times 2, which means 2 is the common ratio. For infinite geometric series, there is a formula to find the sum. S = A1 / (1 - R), where S is the sum, A1 is the first term in the geometric series, and R is the common ratio. We can rewrite 0.9999... as 0.9 + 0.09 + 0.009 + 0.0009 + .... As we can see, the common ratio is 0.1 and the initial term is 0.9, so S = 0.9 / (1 - 0.1) = 0.9 / 0.9 = 1

Using this formula, you can also prove that 1 / 3 = 0.33333....

interesting, did you ever figure out proving 1+1=2.. or was that you? could of been someone else, I remember debating it....
darnit, now I've gone and forgotten what I was gonna ask again...

I hope that was a typo, Phred

If computer 1 sends a SYN packet to 2... and 3 sends the correct corrosponding ACK packet to 1.. what happens?