Ask something - We can help.

[m0ds]

Thanks guys! That eases my mind. Consumer Direct it is then 

[Anian]

How many plants would it take so a human can live only on the production of oxygen of those plants or is there a way to calculate this?
For example a space station/ship (for lets say a crew of 20-50 people) with a green room full of plants, would that be able to sustain a human or two (if say the others died and you're left in that room cause every other part of the station was decompressed or something)?

Oh, yeah, does anybody have a Kindle (the amazon digital book reader) and if so what's their opinion on it?

[Bror_Jon]

Apperantly Google is my friend 

[Baron]

I'd disagree somewhat with the assumptions in Bror Jon's link.  It seems factually accurate -specific numeric figures add to the illusion -but personal experience dictates that a fundamental assumption has thrown off his calculations.  He states that the average human breathes 252L of air in an hour, and given his background numbers this seems roughly accurate.  He also states that 21% of air is oxygen -no arguing with that either.  But then he concludes that we need 53L of oxygen to survive in an hour (252L * 0.21 =53L), and this is plainly wrong.
      Consider the following: if you are trained in first-aid/CPR, they will at some point instruct you in assisted breathing -literally blowing the air from your lungs into a non-breathing victim's lungs.  This would clearly be a waste of time if you were using all 21% of the oxygen in the air for every breath.  A brief perusal of the internet suggests an absorbtion rate of somewhere between 1/5 and 1/3 of that for every normal breath.  This can reduce the number of plants you need by a factor of 3-5, depending. 
        Of course you would need permanent sunlight (or equivalent) to sustain full plant production all the time.  Since plants don't do photosynthesis in the dark, any down time would require a corresponding increase in the number of plants needed.

[Bror_Jon]

...and this is plainly wrong.

Indeed. My bad.   

I do though want to stress that the consumption of breathable air will be highly dependent on the physical state of the people on the space station and what they are doing.

[LUniqueDan]

Can someone explain me the full rule about capital letters in english titles. I get use to just put Capitals everywhere then remove the small words, but I'm pretty sure I saw exceptions.

tx.

(Now I'll be able to flood forums 1!!1)

[Gilbert]

I'm not quite sure whether there is a universal rule, but I think you may start here.

[Ryan Timothy B]

Does anyone know of a super fast and efficient programming formula for finding out if a line is passing through a rectangle?
For instance, something traveling from point A to point B, will it intercept with the rectangle?

[bicilotti]

Does anyone know of a super fast and efficient programming formula for finding out if a line is passing through a rectangle?
For instance, something traveling from point A to point B, will it intercept with the rectangle?

'Line' as in 'straight line', defined by slope/intercept? Or 'line' as in 'segment' (defined by two coordinates)?
Calculating the extremes of "intersecting slopes" (on the 4 corners of the rectangle) could do, but I'm not sure whether this is the most efficient solution (most probably it isn't with a segment).

edit: google agrees, even for segments

[Kweepa]

The standard way is to clip the line to the rectangle, edge at a time, and see if there's anything left (check after each clip).

[Atelier]

What is name of the place where owls live? Is it nest or roost? Or either?

[NickyNyce]

In a nest, they are also known to sleep in hollowed out logs and trees, even barns.

[Snarky]

What's a good way to convert a series of images to a video, and which codec/file format should I use so it looks good in AGS (320x240)?

I'm currently using Photoshop's "image sequence | export to video", but none of the AGS-compatible formats look any good.

[Wyz]

I usually do that with virtualdub: you can name the files like blabla0001.png, blabla0002.png, ... and it will open the first image as if it is a video.
As for the codec, well there are a lot of different ones out there, for every use I'd recommend a different one so what is it for?
If it is for an AGS game I'd go for ogv, in that case you need theora.
The tool I linked is command line driven so you end up with something like this:

Code: ags

ffmpeg2theora.exe blabla%04d.png -o bla.ogv

If it looks shitty there are ways to encode in higher quality using -v.

[Snarky]

Thanks Wyz. Once I figured out that "%04d" was a wildcard, that ffmpeg2theora worked. It doesn't seem to like my PNG files, though (colors go all wonky), but JPGs are fine (although it throws a ton of errors about "no JPEG data found in image").

VirtualDub only shows a short list of piss-poor codecs under "Compression". Do you know where I can get some better ones for MPEG-compression?

[arj0n]

There's also a handy Frontend (GFrontend (ffmpeg2theora) v2007.2 Final) for the Converter (ffmpeg2theora-0.28) Wyz mentioned.

Xvid codec: DL
More here

[arj0n]

Somehow I always get a quick and serious headache from drinking apple juice (clear juice), grape juice, cassis (soda), and wine.
2 small nips of apple juice for example is enough for me to get a serious headache within a minute.
Headache is the only side effect when drinking such drinks.

Eating apples or grapes doesn't give me any problem, so it's clearly the drinks.
Maybe they add something to it my system can't stand?
But then, why only for these juices/drinks?


So, are there others around here who have the same problem?
Does anyone have any idea about this?

Seaching the internet didn't gave me any clues about this...

[Tuomas]

Could be that when making juice, a lot of sugar is added. If your body doesn't like it, it might protest Dunno... useless post nr. 1.

[Buckethead]

If I'm not mistaking they use some sort of filler up for most wines. I don't know what the stuff is called but it's know to cause headaches. Especially cheaper wines have this. I don't know about the other drinks, but they too give me slight headaches.

[Nikolas]

I'd also bet it would be the sudden rush of sugar. Try this: Make some sugar water, with tons of water and drink it. If it brings headaches then you're done. If not then you might want to research a little further.

A (serious) problem of my own please.

________________________________________

I have a math problem, which needs coding, but can't solve it myself. tried in GWBasic (laugh all you want) and I can't get any further.

I'm looking to make an 'undefinite' (not really) strings of pitches/notes which have no repeated elements in them.

The way that music works is that the human mind can make the connection with previously heard pitches, or similar note connections. So if we assume that the 12 notes are numbered 1-12 then having 1-3-5 and then 6-8-10 would be faulty, because the intervals (space between the notes) is the same in every case.

So... *I think* that the following are the conditions:

1. Notes are numbered from 1-88 (from A0 to C8 or something).
2. I need to be able to define how many notes will be in the series I will get. (from 2 to however many is possible. It's not infinite actually. After a while you're forced to repeat a pattern and thus *BAM!*)
3. I cannot repeat the same note twice in a row (so the series cannot be 1-45-23-23-35-whatever).
4. The notes cannot move higher or lower than 11. (Since the octave is 12 semitones, thus 12 in an interval), you can't go 8-20 (since it's the same note an octave higher), or 22-10 (for the same reason,  but lower).
5. I need to be able to input the starting note (from 1 to 88).
6. What else do we need? The series must have a random effect, but it's not random by any means, with so many rules above... S

If someone is interested in building a code for me? I think that it can't be too difficult. I would be even interested in paying a small sum (30$ or something) to someone who does this for me... :-/

Perhaps there's more info to be needed, but I can't recall anything right now. We need to contact in PM, or MSN, or other...

Thanks