Recent content by Redingold

Enemy Within is a huge improvement over Enemy Unknown, I definitely recommend that. Long War is excellent, but quite different to the vanilla X-COM. It also gets way more difficult than vanilla, so I'd only recommend if you're fairly competent. If you can handle the increased difficulty, though...

Long War's great, though personally I found the progression to be very slow. There are just loads of missions to go on and I found it a bit draining. Still, when I'm in the mood for it, it's fantastic. I highly recommend Beagle's Long War Ironman Impossible playthrough...

Whales, and water deep enough that you can't see the bottom. These kind of go together. Whales freak me out because they're terrifyingly huge and they can appear from deep water unexpectedly, and deep water freaks me out because I can't tell what's down there and it could be whales. I was...

My first tabletop campaign was in Pathfinder, with a homebrew campaign. We started by retrieveing a magical amulet that caused temporary insanity when someone tried to use Detect Magic on it (boy, that was fun finding out) and then we learned that dragons were going to try to use it to wreck...

Why not just call it something that is neither 9 nor 10? They don't actually need to number their OSs sequentially. Just give it a name that is not a number, like XP and Vista.

The obvious answer is no. The forwards momentum of the trains will have no effect because they have no relative velocity. As for air resistance, imagine if the trains were sitting still and the wind was blowing at whatever speed the trains were travelling at. This is a physically equivalent...

I must say that I greatly prefer the cover system in games like Half-Life 2, that is to say, no cover system. You take cover by simply standing behind things you want to use as cover. There's no button to glue you to a wall. That said, in stealth games like MGS, wall hugging mechanics are...

The cool thing about the Novikov self-consistency principle is that you can use it to do very difficult computations very easily. Simply set up your problem, then receive an answer from the future. If it's correct, send it back in time unaltered. If it's not the right answer, alter it, then send...

Ah, I see the problem. The statement on Wikipedia is somewhat misleading. It's true that the Biot-Savart law predicts that two moving charged particles don't necessarily exert equal and opposite forces on one another, but this is a case of misapplying the Biot-Savart law, which only holds in...

You can't just multiply mass and velocity together to get momentum when you're dealing with objects moving near the speed. That figure you quoted for a neutron travelling at c is more like the momentum of a neutron travelling at about 0.7c Also, I'm gonna need serious citations for your claim...

If she doesn't recognise Pusheen, how is she supposed to know that it's a trend rather than just a cute design someone came up with? How is anyone supposed to know that their shirt signifies something if they don't know the thing it signifies?

As a physicist, I'm pretty good at maths. I took the Further Maths A-Level, which covers things like calculus, differential equations, Taylor series, conic sections, proof by induction, complex numbers, matrices, vectors, statistics, decision maths, and more mechanics than I did in the A-level...

Well, see, that's just not true. It's well-established that emotional pain is a real, neurological thing. It's been shown that areas of the brain associated with physical pain are also active when emotional or social loss occurs...

You can get low density amorphous ice if you rapidly cool water to low temperatures, below about 130K, and it is stable at atmospheric pressure. Other than that and the two you mentioned, I know of no other form of ice that is stable at atmospheric pressure.

I don't think this is a particulary well thought out question. As it's phrased, it's essentially asking us whether we want something that works but looks ugly, or that looks pretty and doesn't work. This is a not very interesting question, since not many people would seriously answer aesthetics...