Answer a question, ask a question......

[Athlete]

I've seen this topic on another board and I thought it would be interesting to start it off here as well.

Its very basic, but interesting.

I ask a question, and you answer it and then you ask a question , which someone else will answer and so on.

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Q. why is betaone so great?

[stumuzz]

A. Great bunch of guys an gals.

Q. why do we sneeze ?

Stumuzz.

[Athlete]

A. When the inside of your nose gets a tickle, a message is sent to a special part of your brain called the "sneeze center."
The sneeze center then sends a message to all the muscles that have to work together to create the amazingly complicated process that we call the sneeze. Some of the muscles involved are the abdominal (belly) muscles, the chest muscles, the diaphragm (the large muscle beneath your lungs that makes you breathe), the muscles that control your vocal cords, and muscles in the back of your throat. Don't forget the eyelid muscles!
Did you know that you always close your eyes when you sneeze? It is the job of the sneeze center to make all these muscles work together, in just the right order, to send that irritation flying out of your nose. And fly it does - sneezing can send tiny particles speeding out of your nose at up to 100 miles per hour!

Q. Why is it so inactive around here, these days?

[Keru]

A. coz we need to syncro our watches ... 9pm tomorrow everyone

Q. why do we snore at nite?

[Cyberion]

A: there is a flap at the back of the throat. You can disable this snore via cutting that part out, however that also disables the gag relex

Q: Why does the United States not venture into metric like all other countries?

[Olde Style 48]

Answer: Because our US educational system has been dumbed down to the point where the masses simply cannot comprehend two different ways of expressing the same measurement. There is also a difficulty in that metric measures mass (a constant) while the english system measures weight (a relative measure)

OK, My question: Most influential band--Stones or Beatles?

[AnneJay]

Answer: Well first of all the answer to that particular question is completely subjective, but here's what I think: The Beatles. Why: because their music appeals more to the masses (young, old & in between - heck "Old Blue Eyes" sang a few of the Fab Four's tunes - can't imagine his rendition of 19th Nervous Breakdown) and therefore has had a bigger influence on our culture.

Question: What exactly is a black hole?

[BearCat]

A :
What is a black hole?
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Loosely speaking, a black hole is a region of space that has so much mass concentrated in it that
there is no way for a nearby object to escape its gravitational pull.
Since our best theory of gravity at the moment is Einstein's general theory of relativity, we have
to delve into some results of this theory to understand black holes in detail,
but let's start of slow, by thinking about gravity under fairly simple circumstances.
Suppose that you are standing on the surface of a planet. You throw a rock straight up into the air.
Assuming you don't throw it too hard, it will rise for a while, but eventually
the acceleration due to the planet's gravity will make it start to fall down again.
If you threw the rock hard enough, though, you could make it escape the planet's gravity entirely.
It would keep on rising forever. The speed with which you need to throw the rock in order that
it just barely escapes the planet's gravity is called the "escape velocity."
As you would expect, the escape velocity depends on the mass of the planet:
if the planet is extremely massive, then its gravity is very strong, and the escape velocity is high.
A lighter planet would have a smaller escape velocity. The escape velocity also
depends on how far you are from the planet's center: the closer you are, the higher the escape velocity.
The Earth's escape velocity is 11.2 kilometers per second (about 25,000 m.p.h.),
while the Moon's is only 2.4 kilometers per second (about 5300 m.p.h.).

Now imagine an object with such an enormous concentration of mass in such a
small radius that its escape velocity was greater than the velocity of light.
Then, since nothing can go faster than light, nothing can escape the object's gravitational field.
Even a beam of light would be pulled back by gravity and would be unable to escape.

The idea of a mass concentration so dense that even light would be trapped goes all the
way back to Laplace in the 18th century. Almost immediately after Einstein
developed general relativity, Karl Schwarzschild discovered a mathematical
solution to the equations of the theory that described such an object. It was only much later,
with the work of such people as Oppenheimer, Volkoff, and Snyder in the 1930's,
that people thought seriously about the possibility that such objects might actually
exist in the Universe. (Yes, this is the same Oppenheimer who ran the Manhattan Project.)
These researchers showed that when a sufficiently massive star runs out of fuel,
it is unable to support itself against its own gravitational pull, and it should collapse into a black hole.

In general relativity, gravity is a manifestation of the curvature of spacetime.
Massive objects distort space and time, so that the usual rules of geometry don't apply anymore.
Near a black hole, this distortion of space is extremely severe and causes black holes to
have some very strange properties. In particular, a black hole has something
called an 'event horizon.' This is a spherical surface that marks the boundary of
the black hole. You can pass in through the horizon, but you can't get back out. In fact,
once you've crossed the horizon, you're doomed to move inexorably closer and closer
to the 'singularity' at the center of the black hole.

You can think of the horizon as the place where the escape velocity equals the velocity of light.
Outside of the horizon, the escape velocity is less than the speed of light,
so if you fire your rockets hard enough, you can give yourself enough energy to get away.
But if you find yourself inside the horizon, then no matter how powerful
your rockets are, you can't escape.

The horizon has some very strange geometrical properties. To an observer who is sitting
still somewhere far away from the black hole, the horizon seems to be a nice,
static, unmoving spherical surface. But once you get close to the horizon, you realize
that it has a very large velocity. In fact, it is moving outward at the speed of light!
That explains why it is easy to cross the horizon in the inward direction, but impossible
to get back out. Since the horizon is moving out at the speed of light,
in order to escape back across it, you would have to travel faster than light.
You can't go faster than light, and so you can't escape from the black hole.

(If all of this sounds very strange, don't worry. It is strange. The horizon is in a
certain sense sitting still, but in another sense it is flying out at the speed of light.
It's a bit like Alice in "Through the Looking-Glass": she has to run as fast as she
can just to stay in one place.)

Once you're inside of the horizon, spacetime is distorted so much that the coordinates
describing radial distance and time switch roles. That is, "r", the coordinate that
describes how far away you are from the center, is a timelike coordinate, and "t"
is a spacelike one. One consequence of this is that you can't stop yourself from moving
to smaller and smaller values of r, just as under ordinary circumstances you can't avoid
moving towards the future (that is, towards larger and larger values of t).
Eventually, you're bound to hit the singularity at r = 0. You might try to avoid it by firing
your rockets, but it's futile: no matter which direction you run, you can't avoid your
future. Trying to avoid the center of a black hole once you've crossed the horizon is just
like trying to avoid next Thursday.

Incidentally, the name 'black hole' was invented by John Archibald Wheeler,
and seems to have stuck because it was much catchier than previous names.
Before Wheeler came along, these objects were often referred to as 'frozen stars'.

Q :
1 - did that aswer your Q ? :P
2 - What looks a little like an octopus and can live for 1,000 years ?

[XPatriot]

What looks like a Octopus... One possible answer is a Welwitschia (well-witch-ee-a) which is a plant of remarkably bizarre habits and survives in very harsh localities where the annual rainfall is often less that 25 mm and where the coastal fog is equivalent to about further 50 mm. The Welwitschia's oldest living specimens are estimated at 1500 to 2000 years is capable of surviving severe conditions of stress. Most of the observations are done on the Welwitschia Fläche, a desert plain, about 50 km east of Swakopmund and east of the confluence of the Khan and Swakop rivers.......... Thanks to Google..

Question... When is it time to get a new puter...

1) when your 5 1/4" floppy drive craps out?
2) when a single game of tetris fills your entire 10MB hard drive?
3) when your kid says "hey dad" how come this monitor isn't in colour?

[AnneJay]

Answer #1 - Definately time when you still have a black and white monitor.

Answer #2 - @ Bearcat - you absolutely answered my question!

Hhmmmm... looks like a Octopus and lives 1000 years - how about a Banyan Tree (google explanation below):

A single mature Banyan Tree will have many trunks and support roots which gives the appearance of a forest of separate trees. A single tree can spread to cover well over an acre (.5 hectares), the largest, in Sri Lanka, covers just over two acres (1 hectares).

The Banyan Tree can begin it's life in the top branches of palms and other trees where perhaps a bird dropped a seed. The seed sprouts and eventually the branches will send roots down to the ground. These supports will grow into trunks which in turn develop new branches and new arial roots and so on. The original host tree will eventually be strangled out and only the Banyan Tree will remain. The wood of the banyan tree is soft and very porous, the sap is a white sticky latex.

Height: up to 100 feet (30.5 meters).

Lifespan: possibly over a thousand years although the age of the Banyan Tree is difficult to determine due to the fact that the original trunk is usually hidden by years of arial or support root growth.


Question: Who invented ice cream?