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What funny/interesting thing happened in your life today?


Ultimate Steve

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25 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

I’m not a flat-earther, will you carve my name into a rock anyways? :D

IIRC, the exhaust plume just spreads out so much in a vacuum (seeing rockets rising on columnar plumes on earth really messes with your... perspective here) that there’s not nearly enough force left to dig out a crater. It’s also only close enough to interact with the surface for a scant few seconds, and then at very low throttle. I believe you can see crater-like rays emanating out from the LEM on some of the later “aerial” shots from Lunar Surveyor, but they’re also heavily smudged by footprints. 

Yep, and you can see dust being kicked up in the videos of the landing. He wasn't talking about the video, though, because apparently that's completely different from the pictures

A comparison I thought of later is expecting a helicopter to kick up a crater as it lands. It's unreasonable because the thrust is so spread out and primarily used to displace gas, not rock. Displacing rock to slow down is called lithobraking.

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6 hours ago, cubinator said:

He payed me no mind when I told him about the time I was at a beach in Rio de Janeiro, and could see a white buoy when standing but not when squatting. He didn't understand that you'd be able to see it at any altitude

He should say that the light interferes with a close surface, so being close to the water or ground surface you can see worse, while from plane you can see farther. From "space" you see the best, but curved.
Also maybe you can't see direct light rays, but only curved ones, and maybe the light rays have some curvature radius more or less equal to the Earth "radius", and that's why you can see it "spherical" from "space".
(Any flat-earthers here? Take a note.)

6 hours ago, cubinator said:

I also told him about the time I measured the distance to the Moon by parallax. He believes we cannot see craters and features on the Moon because it is too far away.

He should say that "That's no Moon!", and what you are calling Moon is in fact a glare on a solid sky surface containing a blurred and distorted reflection of the round Earth.
As you can see the only Moon "craters" pattern, this proves that the Earth is round and doesn't rotate, so from any point on the Earth surface you see the same "crater" picture on the "Moon".
(Any flat-earthers here? Take a note, this is a nice start for comparative geography, which "crater" is a reflection of which Earth structure..)

6 hours ago, cubinator said:

I expected him to ask how we know the Moon is closer than the stars to be able to use parallax

Same way as glares on your telescope lenses are closer to you than the "Moon".
(The further discussion about craters. What "craters" on a glare? It's a light spot, you see a distorted terrestrial landscape.)

***

They should make a 3d flat Earth simulator.

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6 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

They should make a 3d flat Earth simulator

There is. I think his name was Walter Bislins or something similar.

They don't get it. Hilariously they think his simulations support the idea of a flat Earth.

I love the fact that these people don't get their own geometry!

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15 hours ago, cubinator said:

Today I spoke with a flat Earther.

Lucky you. I've never had such pleasure. Maybe for the best, since I usually don't have much patience for willfully stupid. Your particular specimen may have been tolerable for me, though. 

15 hours ago, cubinator said:

However, he instead went a different direction (towards the Moon landing conversation) and asked how all those craters, supposedly made by meteor impacts which should come in from all sides, all end up perfectly circular. I don't know why this is, and I told him as much, but I will find more information later on that. (Pretty sure Scott Manley or such has a video on it.) 

The answer is very simple. There are plenty of craters that are not circular. A google search for elongated crater shows us countless of examples. The thing is, it take extremely shallow angle to produce a non-circular crater.

Furthermore, it's not very difficult to take a gun/rifle and shoot some sand and see what happens. If that's too much to ask, somebody already did it. From NASA Ames Vertical Gun Range:

Well, it's NASA and they're obviously lying. But if they are, it's not difficult to replicate the experiment to an extent. This particular shot was made at 30° from horizontal, so a pretty shallow shot, and it still produced circular crater. While it would be hard to match the speed of this projectile, even with high power rifles, I'm fairly confident that even an airgun would be enough for a result and some backyard science (obey your local laws, folks).

15 hours ago, cubinator said:

He then asked something interesting.

He asked if I had ever seen one of these meteors impact the moon.

Yes I have.

I saw the meteor that hit the Moon during January's lunar eclipse and was recorded by many astrophotographers. Again, he payed little mind to my experience.

Hey, that's awesome!

 

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I figured out the length of the front-straight at Gateway Speedway because Wikipedia is terrible with basic information like that.

Basically, I approximated the length of the front-straight by measuring the pixels it took up on Google Earth (~600p). Then, I did the same for the length of the scale, which said the bar was 200 feet (at ~70p). Some simple math later, I found the result to be 1,714.28571428 feet, which translates to 0.32467532 miles- just a tad shy of my guesstimate of 0.325 miles. If anyone wishes to check the math of the 1.25-mile oval, feel free!

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Here have a real life glitch

 

So lately i have been reading a lot before sleeping,when i feel tired i put the book in a night table i have right by my bed.

So last night the book fell,that happens...

What is not normal is that the bookmarker was at the living room.

It somehow when out of my bedroom and down the stairs.

And there is a hallway between me and the stairs.

I guess my cat likes bookmarkers?

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1 hour ago, KerbolExplorer said:

Here have a real life glitch

 

So lately i have been reading a lot before sleeping,when i feel tired i put the book in a night table i have right by my bed.

So last night the book fell,that happens...

What is not normal is that the bookmarker was at the living room.

It somehow when out of my bedroom and down the stairs.

And there is a hallway between me and the stairs.

I guess my cat likes bookmarkers?

Gremlins....

gremlins-ultimategremlin-figure-closeup-

Edited by StrandedonEarth
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14 minutes ago, Delay said:

Congratulations...?

Not sure if this is something to be proud of. Certainly you're getting exposure, but in the wrong group, for the wrong purposes.

Certainly. I just did it to talk with the guy, and I'm only in a video because he was recording it. It wasn't necessarily something do be proud or ashamed of, rather it was an educational experience for me. I did learn some core things about the mindset.

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I saw a double rainbow today! Managed to take a picture of it while stopped at a light on the way home from work:

VvYjuam.jpg

Unfortunately, the picture isn't very good (as you can see, the light turned green just as I was taking it and I didn't have time to frame the shot, and the view of the rainbow just isn't that good from that street), and you can barely see the supernumenary rainbows that were visible, but still.

Double rainbow!

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Yesterday, after editing some stuff in GIMP I noticed a gap in my desktop icons that I could swear wasn't there before. I'm now slightly worried that files have been deleted at some point by something (or someone), but if they were I'd have no idea what was there, so it must have been pretty unimportant.

Everything else is exactly where it should be, but it feels like 3 icons are missing... Strange.

Edited by Delay
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On 9/11/2019 at 5:39 PM, DarkOwl57 said:

I figured out the length of the front-straight at Gateway Speedway because Wikipedia is terrible with basic information like that.

Basically, I approximated the length of the front-straight by measuring the pixels it took up on Google Earth (~600p). Then, I did the same for the length of the scale, which said the bar was 200 feet (at ~70p). Some simple math later, I found the result to be 1,714.28571428 feet, which translates to 0.32467532 miles- just a tad shy of my guesstimate of 0.325 miles. If anyone wishes to check the math of the 1.25-mile oval, feel free!

For measuring the distance between two points in Google Earth, they provide a tool for that. Click the blue ruler shaped icon on the top bar to get it.

Bunch of other measuring tools in there too (path, circle etc.)

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6 hours ago, purpleivan said:

For measuring the distance between two points in Google Earth, they provide a tool for that. Click the blue ruler shaped icon on the top bar to get it.

Bunch of other measuring tools in there too (path, circle etc.)

Well yes, but then I don't get to flex my algebraic muscles with a little math...

I'll just go now

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Brought home this bad boy today. :cool:

FTaiGKY.jpg

 

It's just a rental. :( Needed a little more room in back than the 3.

But I could do this all day:

Spoiler

3Sv9E5E.gif

This probably gets old eventually...

Spoiler

QIXpnxs.gif

...probably...

 

Now this is something I could live with. All the best parts of our my wife's Model 3 without the annoying leaning-back car-y part.

Of course, it costs as much a small house... ;.;

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