The Colour Blind Man

This is a philosophical thought experiment that I came up with at school.

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Imagine a 'colour blind' person. What we see as green, he sees as red and what we see as red, he sees as green.
Surprisingly, nobody would ever know. Why?
First, to explain, I will invent two new words.

• Gred - The colour we see as red but he sees as green
• Reen - The colour we see as green he sees as red.

Now, imagine this man as a baby. His parent points to a gred object, and teaches him it is red. His parent then points to a reen object, and says it is green. Now, this person calls anything he percieves as green "red", and anything he percieves as red "green".

So, in later life, when he is asked 'What colour is this?' about a reen object, even though he sees it as red, he will call it green. So, from the outside, he would be indistinguishable from a non-colourblind person.

--Thomas

Real Life Waterbe?!?

Well, not quite. Yet. They are green, so they can't be Waterbe. But we do have intelligent lizards. Look:

Image by Manual Leal, Duke University

This is a lizard solving a feeding puzzle designed for birds. Birds are a bit more intelligent that reptiles, so these reptiles must be pretty smart.

Basically, what happens is there are two caps: a yellow one and a blue one. Underneath the blue one, there is a worm. Underneath the yellow onbe, there isn't a worm.

To get the food, the lizard needs to use its intelligence to flip the caps over until it finds the one with food under it. It can then eat the worm, and then wait until the next day when it is hungry again.

The researchers found that, form day-to-day, the lizards where able to figure out how to flip the cap and figure out which cap contained food, even with a waiting period of 24 hours.

At least they won't develop bipedalism and war, right guys? Guys? Where is everyo

--We ArE tHe LiZaRdS tHiS pLaNeT iS oUrS

What will the future be like?

Here is a timeline of what I think will happen in the future. These dates are assemble from various sources, including:

• Wikipedia
• Tea Leaf Reading
• Gut Instinct
• More Wikipedia
• Did I Mention Wikipedia?
• Wolfram|Alpha
• Wikipedia

That's about it, actually.Wait, I think I forgot Wikipedia. Nevermind. These dates are in chronological order, by the way.

2011: Today
2011: Opening of the first commercial spaceport.
2011: Tiangong 1 is launched
2013: Tiangong 2 is launched
2013: Robots that can farm
2013: Robots that can care for old people
2014: Tiangong 3 is launched
2014: 2-D circuit boards are reaching their limits
2014: ¹/₃ of US Army is robots
2017: Robots that can care for sick patients
2017: Robots that can do all housework
2018: Food prices begin to fall
2019: China launches a 20 ton space station
2019: Commercial nanobots
2019: Video games indistinguishable from reality
2020: Cure for cancer
2020: The average chocolate bar costs £17.64
2025: Full brain simulations
2031: First space elevator
2035: Fully automatic robotic soldiers
2100: 50% of all languages are gone
2200: Only 150 languages remain
2605: Population of Mars hits 8 million

Protons, Neutrons and Electrons: A Guide

I made a sort of informational post about protons, neutrons and electrons. Here it is:
(note: red asterisks are where I had to do research)

-START TRANSMISSION-

So first things first, you must know your elementary particles:

• Protons are positive and have an mass of 1
• Neutrons are neutral and have a mass of 1
• Electrons are negative and have a mass of ¹/₁₈₂₂*

By the way, mass is measured in atomic mass units. It doesn't really matter what the mass of poarticles are right now, but for reference, the units used will be at the bottom of this help thing.
Your average atom is made up of these 3 particles. The atoms need a neutral electric charge, so they have the same number of electrons.
This might better be explained with an example:
 
U-235 is an isotope of uranium. Uranium has an atomic number of 92*. This means it has 92 protons. Because, of course, the number of protons and electrons have to be balanced, this means it has 92 electrons too.
Now, we can work out neutrons. To find out the number of neutrons, first we have to look at the isotope number. As you can see, the isotope number is 235.
This isotope number is equal to the sum of the number of neutrons and protons.Since we know nthe number of protons, we can work out the neutrons easily, using the sum 235 (the isotope) - 92 (the protons). This comes to 143 neutrons.
Electron Shells
Now that we know the number of electrons, now to talk about electron shells. Each electron orbits in a 'shell' going around the atom. As more electrons go in, the shells fill up.

In this diagram, you can see the 'shells' in Oxygen. Each shell is made of a type of subshell, which can hold different numbers.

• The s subshell can hold 2 electrons.*
• The p subshell can hold 6 electrons.*
• The d subshell can hold 10 electron.*
• The f subshell can hold 14 electrons.*
• The g subshell can hold 18 electrons.

And here are the shells:

• The first shell is called the 'K' shell*. It is made up of the subshell 1s*.
• The second shell is called the 'L' shell*. It is made up of the subshells 2s and 2p*.
• The third shell is called the 'M' shell*. It is made up of the subshells 3s, 3p and 3d.
• The fourth shell is called the 'N' shell. It is made up of the subshells 4s, 4p, 4d and 4f.
• The fifth shell is called the 'O' shell. It is made up of the subshells 5s, 5p, 5d, 5f and 5g

And so on, until the 'Q' shell.
To tell which order these subshells are filled in, we use the equation n+I. n is the number of the subshell (e.g for 4s, n=4).* I is the letter, starting at s=0 and then going on to p=1 (e.g. for 4s, I = 0).* They are filled in increasing order of n+I.*
If two subshells have the same number of n+I, then they are sorted in increasing order of n. This gives us the subshells filled like this:

• 1s (1+0=1)
• 2s (2+0=2)
• 2p (2+1=3)
• 3s (3+0=3)
• 3p (3+1=4)
• 4s (4+0=4)
• 3d (3+2=5)
• 4p (4+1=5)

and so on. Some elements are exception to this 'rule', but that would be getting into Special Relativity and Hartree-Fock calculation*, which are far too complicated.
In our next lesson, we will talk about Ionic bonds. Yay! !
If you have any questions, just reply to this topic.
PS:
One atomic unit (what the particles mass is measured in) is 1.6726 yoctograms*.
-END TRANSMISSION-