Recently, I saw  video, showing the phenomenon of the self-siphoning beads.  Dangling one end of a coiled string of beads outside of the container, a single pull is needed to cause all the beads to fall out.  Why is this so?  My main question: It is also observed that the longer and more coiled the string of beads is, the higher the exiting beads will "jump".  Why?  This not only defies the principle of gravity that I learnt, but also the fact that energy cannot be created!
There is a  being thrown out of a flask, literally hovering out of the container  My question is how detailed a physical explanation of this phenomenon we have?  Question: More precisely, if we used the best available mechanical physics simulator software, and we tried to simulate this behavior, would the software be able to reproduce the effect or not? My guess is not but I would like to know why not.  Or do we have to content ourselves only with handwaved explanations? I am from the school of thought that you don't understand physics until you have a reasonable certainty that you can reproduce the physics in a computer.
I have seen many folks doing this  concluding that shadow from point A on the Moon can travel to point B on the Moon faster than light.  What I fail to understand here (and I am sure I am wrong), is nothing can travel faster than light. I also read about Relativity where Einstein stated that every event happening for you depends on how fast the light gets from where the event is happening to you.  This is my particular problem with this Moon shadow experiment. You cannot make a shadow travel faster than light, because in order for the "disappearance" of light to get to the Moon, it has to travel at light speed.  Here is one way to understand my point. Consider we shine a flashlight on Moon, like the guy in the linked video did, we move the finger across the face of the flashlight, before we moved the finger it was casting the shadow at Point A on Moon, after we finish moving our finger, the shadow is at Point B on the Moon.  When the finger reaches the end of it's moving length, the light waves that have left the flashlight before the finger reached there will have to hit Point B and it will take them a second and a half to get there, and another second and half for us to see that shadow on point B, which makes it 3 seconds + finger moving time for us to actually see the shadow at point B. That means shadow traveled (say) across the diameter of the Moon in 3 seconds.   So. about 3000 Km in ~3 seconds make it 1000 Km per seconds which is very tiny compared to the speed of light. How can these experiments conclude that Shadow could be made to travel faster than light? What is the obvious clue that I am missing here? Where does Mac OS X come from? Film where aliens looking like humans are waiting in an airport closed due to snowstorm I saw the movie 6 - 7 years back on cable tv, from the looks of it it seemed to be made in the late 1990's or early 2000's. Unfortunately I could not see the complete movie. The story goes like--   Some people are waiting at a small airport because snowstorm activity has cancelled all flights in and out. There are two children in the group as well (one boy and a girl). Somehow they discover there are aliens looking like humans among them. They decide to check passengers through baggage scanners (checking the skeletal structure via x-ray). They find and kill 2 aliens.   and the big twist:      5. They then realize the two children are also aliens.   any ideas what the name of the movie is ??? I'm not very knowledgeable about physics generally, but know that nothing can escape a black hole's gravitational pull, not even light (making them nearly invisible?).   My question is: What has been obtained from direct observation of a black hole to prove their existence? Please note that I'm not questioning the existence of black holes, but am just curious as to how we have come to realize it. Why is unity feedback used? How does light speed up after coming out of a glass slab? As I learned today in school, my teacher told me that when light enters a glass slab it slows down due to the change in density and it speeds up as it goes out of the glass slab. This causes a lateral shift and the light emerges out from the point different than that from where it should have actually emerged from.  Okay so what I mean to ask is, when light enters point A on glass slab and emerges from point C why does the light speed up? Where does it get the energy it has lost when it entered the glass slab?  P.S.: Also, if I place a very very very large glass slab and make a beam of light pass through it will the light never come out as all the energy was lost in place of heat? Prove that the multiplicative inverse of $a$ modulo $m$ exists if and only if $a$ and $m$ are coprime. Prove that the multiplicative inverse of $a$ modulo $m$ exists if and only if $a$ and $m$ are coprime.  Can someone help me with this? This is really two questions.   Is there a definition of the principal $n$th root of a complex number? I can't find it anywhere. Presumably, the usual definition is $[r\exp(i\theta)]^{1/n} = r^{1/n}\exp(i\theta/n)$ for $\theta \in [0,2\pi)$, but I have yet to see this anywhere. Is this because it has bad properties? For instance, according to this definition is it true that for all complex $z$ it holds that $(z^{1/a})^b = (z^b)^{1/a}$? Why should events in C# take (sender, EventArgs)? It's known that you should declare events that take as parameters (object sender, EventArgs args). Why? Closed form for the sequence defined by $a_0=1$ and $a_{n+1} = a_n + a_n^{-1}$ According to the Wikipedia article on  the sample SD   $$s = \sqrt{\frac{1}{n-1} \sum_{i=1}^n (x_i - \overline{x})^2}$$  is a biased estimator of the SD of the population. It states that $E(\sqrt{s^2}) \neq \sqrt{E(s^2)}$.   NB. Random variables are independent and each $x_{i} \sim N(\mu,\sigma^{2})$   My question is two-fold:   What is the proof of the biasedness? How does one compute the expectation of the sample standard deviation    My knowledge of maths/stats is only intermediate. Vacuum sealing vs. water displacement method when doing longer sous vide cooking Modernist Cuisine recommends that for longer sous vide cooking (times greater than 36 hours) that bags are vacuum sealed rather than just using the water displacement method to remove the air from a ziploc bag.  What is the reason for this? Will I be losing something essential if I just use a regular ziploc bag without vacuum sealing? Topological/Geometrical justification for $\text{CFT}_2$ being special It is known as a fact that conformal maps on $\mathbb{R}^n \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^n$ for $n&gt;2$ are rotations, dilations, translations, and special transformations while conformal maps for $n=2$ are from a much wider class of maps, holomorphic/antiholomorphic maps. I was wondering to know if there is any topological or geometrical description for this.   To show what I mean, consider this example: in $\mathbb{R}^n$ for $n&gt;2$ interchanging particles can only change the wave function to itself or its minus. It is related to the fundamental group of $\mathbb{R}^n-x_0$ ($x_0$ is a point in $\mathbb{R}^n$ and $\pi_1(\mathbb{R}^n-\{x_0\})=e$ for $n&gt;2$) but this is not true for $n=2$.   I want to know whether exists any topological invariant or just any geometrical explanation that is related to the fact that I mentioned about conformal maps on $\mathbb{R}^n$. How to graphical remote control an Ubuntu server? I've tried googling and .  I'm connecting my Windows 7 SP1 machine to an Amazon EC2 Ubuntu cloud server, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. What I have done is   Enabling Remote Desktop in Ubuntu (, ) Connect to my server using 1)  and 2)  &ndash; I don't use  since it contains viruses.   But all of those result in Connection failed. I'm giving up!  More Detail Ubuntu server to remote to: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (codename lucid)  My Windows: Windows 7 SP1 Is there a single word for “one who explains his point of view very clearly”? What is the difference between DPI (dots per inch) and PPI (pixels per inch)? There are lots of other questions on Graphic Design which partly cover this, e.g. .  However, I have become frustrated at the number of questions and answers which confuse the two terms. I think understanding the difference is important.  So here's a place to answer this question well and clear up the confusion! What will be the one's digit of the remainder in: $\left|5555^{2222} + 2222^{5555}\right|\div 7=?$ What will be the ones digit of the remainder in: $$\frac{\left|5555^{2222} + 2222^{5555}\right|} {7}$$ Suppose $A$ and $B$ are similar matrices. Show that $A$ and $B$ have the same eigenvalues with the same geometric multiplicities.      Similar matrices: Suppose $A$ and $B$ are $n\times n$ matrices over $\mathbb R$ or $\mathbb C$. We say $A$ and $B$ are similar, or that $A$ is similar to $B$, if there exists a matrix $P$ such that $B = P^{-1}AP$. Hardware Enablement Stack (HWE) out of support read only access to all files in a specific sub-folder I have got a specific folder located in "/home/.../reboot/".  I have a series of users that require read-only access to the ever changing files within.  My problem is that the same users are not authorized to view any of the parent directory files.  Right now, the only thing I have in place is that their starting folder is at "/home/.../reboot/" by changing the etc/passwd file; and I need to block all access to other folders.  How could I only give them access to this directory?