Shpaget

Cartoons don't anger me. Anybody should have the ability to say they mind, no matter how ill informed they are on the subject they speak of. It is the listener that has the responsibility to judge what he sees and hears and reject or accept the claims made. I understand that some people don't appreciate the stuff done on and around ISS. It's not necessarily their fault they are not informed well about it (although one could argue that they should inform themselves on the matter they publicly talk about). Some are not interested in space or technology in general and as such didn't have the chance to absorb the knowledge of subtle, yet important changes that humanity in general received as a direct or indirect result of space exploration. Just like most of us (I would imagine) know pretty much nothing about the advancements made in the nail polish industry. The combined volume of modern knowledge is so vast that no single human could ever hope to master it in its entirety. We are very limited in our capacity and have to pick and choose the topics we want to learn about. If someone doesn't pick space exploration and physics it should be perfectly understandable.

With all the immunity diplomats have, it's perfectly possible, and quite easy, to import tactical nukes to a country you plan on attacking. After a few months of such smuggling you can have dozens of such bombs placed around the targeted country, ready to detonate. It seems to me it's a lot simpler, cheaper and safer for the attacker than launching a nuke from a submarine, not to mention more effective. As for satellite killing, it's my understanding that only relatively recently they started to work on and test kinetic sat killers. They started with detonating nukes in the vicinity. Probably because before the advent of fast enough computer you could install on a missile, along with attitude, RCS, and targeting systems, they just weren't accurate enough to actually hit such a small and fast target.

Not all of them. WISE is doing a great job of finding them directly.

Are those fractures?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspian_Sea_Monster

A taxi driver abruptly stopped, I stopped some 3 m behind him, he then reversed into me, got out of the car, took a suitcase from a client he was supposed to pick up, dumped it into the trunk and drove off. All with my bikes front tire firmly stuck under the car. Cops brought him back. Another time I went for a ride and woke up with my chin in the process of being stitched and the jaw broken. I still don't remember what happened, but apparently some kid changed lanes into me. A week in the hospital and the kid didn't even come to say sorry or something.

Are you talking about the one that was improved after both were discovered? You do realize that the improved version was tweaked until it fitted?

Thanks Aqua. Now I wish we had an orbiter around Pluto. I know, I know, they give us a finger and we want the whole arm, but it would be amazing to see how the relief changes with the obit, as Pluto gets closer and further away from the Sun (I'd wait 100 years).

And this leads exactly to what Ralathon said. You can take any sequence of known numbers and draw a curve through them, without it being able to predict the next (unknown) one. Titus and Bode had the info on inner planets.

It also failed with Neptune, and missed even the ballpark for Pluto.

Yeah, it seems that way, but there are not 65 dishes in the DSN, so why are the numbers that large?

What do the numbers under the dish icons on the DSN now site mean?

Is it an accident if you look for a planet and find a (dwarf) planet? In any case, since then we have armed ourselves with some very neat space telescopes that combed the skies and came up with nothing matching the description of Nibiru (Earth sized planet, or even a brown dwarf) which would glow in IR like there's no tomorrow.

Where's JB?

I've never heard of this dispersal definition. Does a rock not resist dispersal?

Add four and a half hours for the coms delay.

Where does it get energy to multiply from if not a chemical process? Sure it does. The smoke from the fire carries the traces of the material burning and not all fires are the same. You're not a copy of your parents, are you not alive?

Life is just an arbitrarily complex chemical process. You say fire is not alive. I say it meets some important the criteria. It comes into existence, it lives, multiples and eventually dies. It's a chemical process and depending on what is burning and in what kind of environment can be rather complex. So... fire.

All this talk about human lives and their value is male bovine doo-doo. Mars One proves that people are ready to go on a risky (and certainly one way) missions, provided that the mission is interesting enough. Every astronaut and every candidate who ever enrolled in the training process knew perfectly well that there is a non-negligible chance that they will not survive the mission. There are more than enough volunteers that would be willing to risk their lives for a chance to hitch a ride on an orbital vehicle, me included, and I don't ask for millions of euros.

You make a good point there. You should have explained it this way earlier. Now if only you could expand on it a bit further. I'm slightly on the slow and dull side of the knife drawer.

That in itself doesn't tell us much. You can spend a lifetime studying the radio link through the Earth only to discover one after another reason why it doesn't work, or why the link quality doesn't meet your needs. That being said, CONSERT is up and running.

Sounds like a picnic for tardigrades, the second most awesome species on Earth.

So, I wanted to send a copy of a receipt of my recent internet purchase to the customs office just to realize I still haven't installed Office on my PC, since I recently reinstalled the Windows. They want a PDF, so I needed someplace to convert my email to it. No problem, I have the Office ISO on my other HDD, just to quickly download the DEAMON tools and I'll be done in a minute. Well, it turns out DEAMON Tools Lite now forces the install of Razor Web adware. It is impossible to launch the thing without installing this crap that camouflages as an essential part of the install. It's not a question of unchecking a box. It just refuses to launch (reports an error) until you install that thing. Now in the process of removing this crap, along with the DEAMON Tools. I've unleashed the Malwarebytes, but the adware seems to be more resilient than your average stuff.

Oh, I know there's no debating him and people like him. He sees the Sun through some light clouds and claims that "the clouds are clearly behind the Sun". It is me who would like to understand the phenomenon (assuming he really was able to see the laser). Unfortunately I live on the continent and the largest straight body of water I have available nearby is 2 km long which is not enough for a good test. So I can't do a proper photographic test until I get to the seaside in a month or two. @Robotengineer You would say that the tides locally leveled out the surface of water enough that much (3m over a few km)? That sounds too much. Edit: Eratosthenes approach to calculating the size and shape of the Earth fails in the eyes of flat earthers since they believe the Sun is a spot light that hovers a few thousand kms above the surface of the flat Earth. Such a model, with appropriate dimensions, would closely simulate the effects of a distant Sun and round Earth on the shadows of towers.

Now that we have a stock-ish telescope, maybe we need that high-res zoom function.