JoeSchmuckatelli

The weirdest part of Covid, for me with a mild case, is the loss of smell. Orange peel smells the same as an aluminum can. I.e. Like nothing. This extends to the whole gamut of things with a smell. Milk and water smell the same. I was worried initially that this indicates a neurological effect - but recently read that it is not the neurons, but rather the receptor cells. I don't know why, but I find it relieving. The other thing I will mention is that while food may not have a taste (or a severely restricted flavor, given most of what we taste, we actually smell) - it still retains a distinct texture. Example: biting into an apple or a fresh pepper. What you get is a wet crunch. No distinct flavor to separate one from the other. But the apple has a distinct texture from the pepper. And there is a sense of acidity with the apple, and a sense of heat / spice with the pepper. The milk, I mentioned above, is noticeably thicker than the water. It is very strange. Edit - oh, and we have been very careful about masking and isolation (very sick old people who we take care of in the fam)... Despite this, my son caught it and gave it to me. We've been lucky. I can see how for sick people this becomes the fabled straw. Stay safe folks!

Thanks. I just watched the 7.1 fast replay. Are they planning to pop this one as well?

On my phone - what is the white structure currently off gassing? I can't read the text on the screen

Little bit of overkill for short range rocket arty, don't you think? With that angle of attack, the target can't be more than 30 miles!

Solid reference!

But then you end up with The OA and are canceled after two seasons. ;/

If they had to follow that profile - could SpaceX recover the lifter?

Fair enough - I'm just asking about the frame of reference time relativity and trying to come up with a 'what if' to help me figure it out. Admittedly, this came out of an argument between my father and I from something we read in a novel. So I take the correction as a fair one! @kerbiloid - you are breaking my heart! I thought entanglement ignored the light speed limits! (Edit - seriously; I thought you had to move the entangled electron via conventional methods that did not violate Relativity... but once there... the change could be instantaneous)

So - the two oil platforms - I was under the initial impression that SpaceX planned to use them for landing rockets, and then I read they plan to drill for natural gas. Which is it? And if they plan to use them for landing - are they limited to the Gulf waters or can they go somewhere else?

OK - something esoteric to build off of this: if we had an outpost / space station out there at AC and instant comms (via quantum entanglement or other sci fi tech)... And a ship that could travel from Earth to the station in 7 months rather than 70,000 years - if the Earth dispatch told the AC station that the ship was leaving 'now' ... Could the station expect to see the ship in 7 months - or is the Earth 'now' still distinct from the AC 'now' such that '7 months' means different things to each observer?

Is there a 'now' that is relevant at Alpha Centauri (or any other place, really)? Or is 'now' a concept that is tied intrinsically to our reference frame?

Sounds messy

Apologies if this is already covered somewhere in the preceding 5 pages... But: If instead of the moon being a black hole - or rather the black hole being a moon (in orbit), what would happen to the earth if a lunar mass black hole were falling in in toward the sun, traveling at 32,000 mph and on a direct collision course with the planet? Is the earth solid enough to collapse into the BH - or would it bore a pinprick hole through the diameter?

That's not really saying much. Dew point is one measure of the amount of water in the air - thus in an arid location, saying that the dew point is below freezing merely means that in order to see condensation (or dew) the surface must be below freezing. It does not, conversely, mean that because it's arid and the DP is below freezing that water or water vapor will freeze passively in a shadowy hole with the ambient temperature above freezing. So if you are in the high desert and ground temps are below freezing you can get frost rimes - presuming the ground temp and DP cooperate (i.e. a 30 degree rock won't precipitate water from the atmosphere if the DP is 10 degrees)

This VOrbit stuff has been off my radar. So - a few questions, if you will indulge me: If LEO requires a craft to go about 17,500 mph or so - is it sufficiently cost effective to launch from a jet that can only go a bit above 500? The payload looks a heck of a lot like an ALCM. We have anti-satellite missiles that look and work similarly. How is this different? Did they merely swap out the boom-stuff in favor of something that beeps? The under wing launch position is severely restricting to payload diameter - given that some satellites are the size of a school bus, and microsats are relatively new - will there be enough demand for tiny satellites to keep going? Surely they don't hope to compete directly with SpaceX when they can poop out constellations of small sats from traditional ground launched rockets Given that the 747 is an awesome plane - would it make sense to ask Boeing if they would pimp one out with a bomb bay and doors to be able to launch a larger payload?

Yes, but is it grammatically correct to say that something is in effect a tunnel, if it is in fact and literally, a tunnel?

I get that - but if Elon is dedicatedly focused on Mars; don't you think he's got to at least land and return SShip from the Moon... at least once? That would be an enormous coup; especially if he brings back regolith... and then relaunches the same ship within a year

...isn't the whole point of Starship to quit expending expensive rockets?

@K^2 - I'm just fascinated that it is possible at all. The qanat system is quite good at bringing snow melt great distances - and when you look at how they're built, and consider the will it took to build with hand tools alone. The ability to use those and windcatchers to passively cool structures shows just how innovative our ancestors were.

So - it's doable in the lab. But even if you took those materials and buried them in a hole hoping to passively create ice by radiating heat through the atmosphere into space... Won't the ambient ground temperature be pumping heat into your system? Shaded ground still takes in heat from the atmosphere during the day - and releases it through the night, but not dramatically enough to freeze water in a hole during the summer. Also https://www.acoolcave.org/temp.html#:~:text=This temperature will be influenced,state the cave is located.

Yes, Mr. Brevity

I've spent a lot of time in several deserts across the world - and yes I've seen snow and ice rimes - but never in the way you describe. Inevitably you need the atmospheric conditions to support snow or frost or any icing. It almost always occurs in the late fall through winter and in to early spring* - in other words, when you would expect to see snow or ice given the conditions. Basically, every time it's happened, there was never any 'surprise' (i.e. no 'how did that happen' moment). Evaporative freezing might not violate the laws of physics - and might be doable in a lab - but it won't happen naturally / passively during the summer in any low to mid altitude desert with daytime temperatures above 100 and nights above 60. * I have seen snow fall in late June on a high desert plateau above 8,000 feet, but it was one of those crazy whip up storms that happen at altitude. I've also seen snow falling when the local temp is 42 degrees, but it was obvious that the air immediately above us was quite frigid. Again - no surprise situation - and it did not stick.

I don't disagree - but what we are seeing here is the value of pushing through; they have a very, very different mindset from the US Governmental 'Zero Defect Policy' thing that affects many departments so adversely. (Saw this in the Marines, and hated it greatly, during the Pre-Iraq War days... It went away when necessity put theory to the test in '03-05 -- but over time, it has settled its innovation smothering blanket back over everything. NASA has suffered this since the Moon landings - with a possible exception of the early days of Shuttle. Fact is - when you accept that there is value to learning through failure, you can achieve success so much faster. It's when you FEAR criticism and will only accept perfect execution that things get very expensive and take for ever (if ever) to be accomplished.

I am too - but you have to admit; it's a heck of a lot cheaper to test prototypes with just computers aboard than people. Also, if Elon&Co crash a rocket, everyone says, "Aww, that's too bad. Better luck next time." if NASA crashes a rocket, Congress and the Press start the whine about 'waste of money. Where was the oversight! Need moar administrators, and lets slow this thing down until after a full investigation, review and wait for the next Administration's funding cycle"

I read that; and frankly it's not a very 'sciency' article for something that purports to be 'real clear science.' It also does not comport with the other stuff I have read. Sadly there are a lot of articles on the internet that look like science reporting that end up being very slim on data / details to support the claim... EDIT: Here's a little BBC blurb showing the inside of a Yakhchal - and it describes it as being used for 'ice storage' - not generation. BBC - Travel - The world’s oldest ice cream?