I think you meant Western Russia? Here's a map of the population density of Russia.
◊ Only about 30 million Russians - less than a quarter of the population of Russia - live East of the Ural mountains (i.e. in Siberia.) Siberia is well over 2/3 of Russia's vast land area, but almost 80% of Russians live in European Russia (i.e. West of the Urals.)
I'm not entirely sure that "smoothness" was ever a property of the Earth that we were idealizing.
edited 21st May '13 8:47:19 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"is kind of poignant. And depressing.
This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...I'm not really sure that's a true statement, since guns tend to work best on things that are macroscopic. A microwave oven, however, now that I'm certain would kill all the cancer cells in your petri dish (and possibly the dish itself).
Not so sure about this. I discovered by accident recently that ants can endure at least a minute of being microwaved with no apparent ill effects.
...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.That depends on the amount of water the ant (or the cancer cells) has inside compared to the total amount of water in the microwave.
Fjón þvæ ég af mér fjanda minna rán og reiði ríkra manna.My definition of "killing" a dish is to either crack it if it's glass/etc or (partially) melt it if it's plastic. I would expect any container that wasn't specifically designed to be microwavable to react badly if you cook it long enough.
My assumption on the dish was that it's the only thing in there, and that the cells are probably suspended in either some kind of nutrient heaven or an approximation of the environment within the body. Either of which includes at least a bit of moisture.
That thing about the ants... wow. I honestly wouldn't have expected that. But then I guess I'm so used to microwaving either one thing at a time or several similar dishes that my intuition doesn't try to visualize what happens to two very different items unless I'm reminded to. Without details on your accident I'm going to go ahead and assume that there was also some food in there at the same time which they'd been attracted to and which you were actually trying to cook. If so, it probably had a lot more volume of water than a couple ant bodies.
That reminds me of an experiment we did at uni, splitting He La cancer cells so we could see the unusual chromatids inside. Splitting them involved dropping the cell solution onto slides from a metre up. Low-tech, but it works.
Eradicating He La cells entirely is phenomenonally difficult, apparently - it's a common contaminant in many labs.
"Doctor Who means never having to say you're kidding." - Bocaj

What if
you made an earth-sized bowling ball?
This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...