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Codraroll

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Posts posted by Codraroll

  1. 7 hours ago, Maria Sirona said:

    Now to completely different topics, there is an unique- and objectively more correct- nickname for the Eurovision Song Contest in finnish- Euroviisut. The reason it is objectively more correct is because it uses the word viisu, which is finnish slang for "song".

    In Norway, the contest is known as "Melodi Grand Prix". It probably stems from the original official name "The Eurovision Song Contest Grand Prix", which was in use until 1968.  "Melodi Grand Prix" is a nice rhyme in Norwegian that rolls nicely off the tongue, so it has been retained even if the EBU changed the international branding more than fifty years ago. The commonly used abbreviation is MGP, which is much less of a mouthful than ESC.

  2. 2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

    And only in Armata they finally have a comfy office room with game displays and a toilet (professional gamers would understand that very well).

    And blackjack! And ladies of negotiable affection! Actually, forget the tank and the blackjack!

    Speaking of the Armata, apparently its chief problem is engine-related. Nearly all Soviet/Russian tanks since the 1930's have used an iteration of the V-2 engine (not related to the rocket), but Armata was designed around an entirely different engine. However, it hasn't worked as expected, and since the tank is a different size, they can't just throw in a V-2 variant instead. The tank is built around the engine, and the chosen engine doesn't work. Neither is there a good supply of the necessary microelectronics, and because of the two aforementioned problems, there is no established production line for it, which again makes it prohibitively expensive to produce. It seems mass production of the Armata is still a long way away. It might even be shelved altogether.

    https://wavellroom.com/2023/02/10/armata-the-story-is-over/

  3. Similar damages to very similar parts of similar craft, in the same general area as each other. The odds of micrometeorites being so selective with their points of impact (and they have all of the ISS to hit, of which the two docked Russian craft comprise roughly a percent of the surface area) seem abysmally small.

    Could it be damage from fairing separation sending pieces of shrapnel to the same general area every time? Or a rough surface on whatever clamps are used to lift the craft into place for transport/assembly? Because it really seems that something is punching holes in roughly the same area of these craft. Or, well, "holes", maybe just pits, until thermal cycling cause them to finally break through.

    And as somebody chillingly pointed out in the comments section of the ArsTechnica article on the story, Soyuz MS-23 was loaded with hypergolic propellant before Progress MS-21 started to leak. If the leak was caused by a process on the ground, or related to the integration of the craft somehow, it may not have been discovered before MS-23 had been through most of it already. Before the same thing happened to MS-21, the story was a micrometeorite strike, after all, so they may not have taken any precautions regarding other failure modes. And it's not like a Soyuz can be drained of hypergolics while they go over it an extra time. Apparently, it's a "point of no return", "use it or lose it" milestone in the assembly process. Worst-case scenario, they might have bricked MS-23 before they could find the flaw. Well, now at least they know where to look for it.

  4. 22 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

    Away from wars and back to fun facts, please.

    No wars? Okay, crime it is. Or crime fiction, to be precise.

    The classic crime story resolution that "the butler did it!" was used for the first time (in a widely read story) in a 1930 mystery novel called "The Door" by Mary Roberts Rinehart. It was an otherwise forgettable book, apart from introducing the idea of the butler as being guilty of the crime to the public imagination.

    However, two years earlier than the publication of "The Door", novelist S.S. Van Dine wrote an essay featuring "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories", where he chided the idea of the butler being the murderer as a tired cliché. His words struck a chord, because we still poke fun of the idea today. "The butler did it!" is often quoted as an overused and unimaginative resolution to a detective novel.

    But prior to Van Dine's essay, only one piece of fiction has been found where the murderer turns out to be the victim's butler, and it was hardly read by anybody at the time. It was a short story titled "The Strange Case of Mr. Challoner" by one Herbert Jenkins, published as part of a detective stories collection in 1921. Until Rinehart's book in 1930, almost nobody had ever read a detective story with the butler as a culprit ... but already in 1928, it was called out for being a poor way to resolve a murder mystery. "The butler did it!" is so cliché that it was considered overused before it was used for the first time.

    https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/dec/09/why-we-think-the-butler-did-it

  5. 20 hours ago, Ben J. Kerman said:

    I don't know where the person that made a list of countries that have never been in wars got his infomation, but yeah, I forgot the Sino-Vietnamese war

    According to some, that wasn't a war. China tried to invade, got bogged down, realized after three weeks they had no good way of winning, pulled out, declared victory, and then pretended it never happened.

    If only current leaders were as good at recognizing when their failed invasion has gone sufficiently belly-up that quitting would be the best course of action ...

  6. On 2/11/2023 at 7:20 PM, DDE said:

    Also, I decided to look if NASA has publicly concurred with the Roscosmos party line. It doesn't seem that they have. This is presently what amounts to their final word:

     

    It's not entirely controversial to say that Russia has certain challenges when it comes to quality control and accurate reporting of issues up and down the chain of command. If this is indeed the cause of these two failures, it is worrying.

    But if Roscosmos has been aware of it and still chooses to blame external factors instead of giving NASA an accurate rundown, we're crossing the threshold from worry into something rather more serious. Because that indicates they are willing to sweep some really serious issues under the rug, and it makes you wonder what else may be lying underneath that rug already.

  7. Not sure whether this belonged here or in the Fun Fact thread, as it's not very closely related to science per se, but I ultimately decided that the subject matter was so decidedly un-fun that the other thread would be inappropriate. Still interesting, though:

    The seismic waves of today's Turkey/Syria earthquake, passing through Japan:

    https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1622436401299226626

  8. 8 minutes ago, steve9728 said:

    Couldn't the Chinese have a need for more accurate weather forecasting? Then, since there is a need for more accurate weather forecasting, isn't high-altitude atmospheric sounding necessary? Things on this planet don't just either serve a political or a military purpose.

    All fine, if done in their own airspace. But when balloons fly into the airspace of other countries, certain international treaties apply.

    And when they fly into the airspace of other countries without a warning beforehand, it's an outright hostile action according to most definitions.

  9. 21 hours ago, steve9728 said:

    I was thinking that it shouldn't be too difficult to add a self-destruct mechanism and a post-failure emergency return system consisting of releasing the parachute by detecting changes in air pressure. After all, something that can float so far and so high in the sky for so long must be more expensive than an ordinary car.

    A leading theory at the moment is that it was meant to self-destruct, but that the destruction mechanism was faulty, which caused the balloon to drift further than intended. The Americans let it drift along to have a good look at it, and put a big hole in it before it headed out of their airspace.

    The hissy fit thrown by Chinese diplomats after that suggests it was indeed of Chinese origin.

  10. 1 hour ago, steve9728 said:

    In fact, I think it may not actually be the technology itself that is limiting the development of this shape of airliner, but the cost of building supporting facilities at airports around the world.

    The way I've heard it explained, is that the biggest hurdle is evacuation of the passengers. The requirement is, if I recall correctly, that the plane must be emptied in a minute even with any two doors blocked. Bit hard to do that on a lifting body design.

  11. 32 minutes ago, linuxgurugamer said:

    Second, this is a patch that I use to adjust the maxthrust on three of the engines.  Been a while since I made them, but I believe it was because they were underpowered:

    Are those the Penguin vacuum engines? I remember finally unlocking them and eagerly trying to design all sorts of new ideas with the awesome-looking upper-stage engines, only to realize they barely had the thrust to move themselves, never mind themselves and a fuel tank.

  12. 2 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

    Centimeter?  totally arbitrary.

    It's approximately the width of each of your fingernails, if you want a body analogy. That also makes your fingernails roughly one square centimeter.

    But then again, being arbitrary is not a problem, I'd say. The value of a centimeter is not the selling point, it's how it fits in an easy-to-scale system where units fit nicely together in base ten. I could learn to live with inches and pounds if there were simple and easy relations between the various units of length, volume, and mass that make conversions a breeze.  Maybe add speed and force to the mix too. But the Imperial system decides to denote some of this in base 12, some in base 16, and some in base 8, or 10 depending on local customs. The common units of length and volume have nothing to do with each other. The more scientific you try to be, multiplying units with each other to work out complex problems, the worse it becomes. Metric is smooth sailing all the way, with the only hiccups arising from the occasional conversion of minutes or hours to seconds. If accuracy is not absolutely crucial, you can even approximate gravity to 10, and density to 1 for most organic substances - it makes a lot of calculations very simple to do in your head.

    And again, division by fractions is overrated. The value you start with before divisions is rarely a whole number of units anyway.

  13. On 1/13/2023 at 8:58 PM, Nuke said:

    what was your opinion of ad astra? i think that movie was kind of disappointing, thats one i definitely felt like i wasted ten bucks and 2 hours on.

    "Kind of disappointing" is drastically overselling it. Boring as balls, with pretentiousness dripping from every shot. They somehow managed to make space travel monotonous, even while condensing it to the run time of a movie. And that's not even mentioning the various scientific accuracies that permeated the whole movie, of course. It's one of those movies that are more fun to have watched than to watch, because at least then you can find some enjoyment in discussing how much of a piece of crap it was.

  14. 3 hours ago, intelliCom said:

    Okay, remind me how bad of a movie Interstellar is.

    It has some scientific accuracy problems, but it's miles better than what Star Wars/Trek does.

    To repeat a post of mine from a few years ago:

    On 8/1/2020 at 7:29 PM, Codraroll said:

    My biggest problem with Interstellar was when they went down to that planet deep in the gravity well. To paraphrase the scene:

    "This planet is deep within the black hole's gravity field, so an hour on the surface is like 25 years up here in orbit."

    "Yes, when we go there for an hour, 25 years will have passed on the ship."

    "25 years on the ship, that will be lonely for me, the pilot who has to stay behind in orbit. But you, who go to the surface, will only feel like you've been away for an hour."

    "I've also got a Master's degree in physics like the rest of you, and we've been preparing for this mission together for months now, but want to make it clear if we're on the same page here: when an hour passes on this planet's surface, 25 years will have passed elsewhere, right?"

    "That's right. One hour on surface, 25 years in space. Anyway, let's go down to the surface and check that beacon that has been sending signals to us for 25 years. I'm sure that means the planet is habitable, otherwise it wouldn't have sent signals for 25 years. It would have stopped broadcasting after, ah, an hour or so."

    (They go to the surface)

    "Wait, the ship is destroyed, and it happened only recently! I'd say about an hour or so ago! Wow, the astronaut was waiting for us for 25 years, and then disaster happened only right before we arrived!"

    "Wait a second ... I just realized! One hour on the surface of this planet is like 25 years outside! The ship has only been here for an hour, even though the signals it broadcasts have been reaching us for 25 years! It was destroyed almost immediately upon landing!"

    "Wow, that's quite a revelation! Good thinking! Sadly, it was impossible for us to foresee this. None of us could ever know that when 25 years had passed on the outside, only an hour had passed on this planet. I only ever thought of it, like, the other way around. Anyway, there's a giant tsunami coming, we better go."

    (They go back up to the ship)

    "Wow, pilot, you look a lot older! What has happened, we have only been away for an hour!"

    "For you, it was only an hour. For me it was 25 years."

    "Wow, that's crazy. I didn't know! I'm completely surprised!"

  15. 3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

    This can't be a truth !!!111oneone

    Just thirty years ago a nice young lady had warned the humanity about the inevitable ozone cataclysm and made a career.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severn_Cullis-Suzuki

      Reveal hidden contents

     

    It never happened before, and look, it happens again...

    P.S.
    The previous Greta looked better.

    All it took was an understanding of the science and political action to mitigate the situation (the Montreal protocol).

    Some seem to be stuck on the first point without hope of ever progressing.

  16. 3 hours ago, tater said:

    FmC1qrhWAAAmoty?format=jpg&name=4096x409

     

    I know it makes perfect sense and all when you consider it in detail, but with the scale of this assembly I still find it quite mind-boggling that the tall tower will use those black arms to lift that big rocket atop the even bigger rocket. It just seems too big to work like that.

  17. 13 hours ago, K^2 said:

    Even if rounding, it's way more precise to round once. What's a third of 1.15kg? Do you round it to 1kg, take a 3rd and call it 300g? But the real answer is closer to 400g. The relative error is now 22% instead of 13% on first rounding.

    You round it to 1.2, which is nicely divisible by 3, and get 400 g. That's accurate to within approx. 4% (the right answer is 383.33.. g).

    Bit harder to divide 1.15 feet by three, isn't it? Sure, you can do the same exercise and say it's approximately 0.4 feet, but your tape measure isn't likely to feature decimal feet, so then you'd have to convert it to inches, and that's not a whole number. It's 4.8 inches, or four-and-four-fifths if you like fractions. Five if you want to round it to the closest whole number, but that's rounding the wrong way, so it's more like four-and-a-half.

    Yet worse if you start bringing other measurements into it. 0.4 of a pound in smaller units, that's not the same number as 0.4 of a foot in smaller units. At least being consistent with base 12 would have been something, but for mass it's base 16 instead. And for volume, a fluid ounce is either 1/10 of an imperial cup, or 1/8 of a US cup, and the two fluid ounces differ by approximately four percent. No logical relation to cubic inches either way, of course, so calculating the volume from length measurements is a hassle and a half. 

    Calculating in base 10 and moving the decimal around is a bit easier, I think.

  18. On 1/7/2023 at 12:38 AM, StrandedonEarth said:

    Some ski hills will be running into trouble…

    Will be? They are already. It was, what, +15C in Salzburg last week and the ski slopes are green. Sure the resorts can withstand one bad season every once in a while, but they are coming more and more often, and eventually continued operation cannot be economically justified.

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