JoeSchmuckatelli

liquid expands when it freezes.

At what pace do you reasonably expect sea level rise?

Don't be so sure: phthalates, BPA etc are often artificial hormones and endocrine disruptors. Toxic chemicals linked to infertility found in Big Macs and Taco Bell burritos (msn.com) We Know Plastic Is Harming Marine Life. What About Us? (nationalgeographic.com) EDIT: all this stuff is why I am pollution focused rather than needing the speculative horror of catastrophic global warming. (Slow climate change is something we can adapt to quite readily, but stupidly poisoning ourselves because its convenient and cost effective is... stupid).

There is a free article limit.

Over the last three decades, I've run into occasional articles about 'sunsets' or plant life on different worlds. Scientific American stuff, rather than Popular Science - so you can at least have some comfort that there's been actual work done behind the article. If you google enough, you should find some; I've seen 'plants will be black' under this light/atmosphere kind of articles. Point being; you're not stuck just hoping an guessing - if you look hard enough, you will find some, if not fully on point, adjacent information by legit scientists.

In another of the, things that make you go "hmmm" - the great Pacific Garbage Patch. Great Pacific Garbage Patch | National Geographic Society I've read this above part before: most of the plastic is supposed to be from terrestrial sources. There are a variety of proposals to clean up this muck... and here's a report on one of them: This amazing effort to clean up the ocean actually worked! (msn.com) The problem is - when you look at what they're harvesting, it looks primarily like marine junk (as in crap sailors heave overboard or that gets washed off the decks of ships) - rather than land based stuff like detergent and soda bottles, baggies and other things used by average consumers. Mind you, this is an impression from reading articles and looking at the harvest from one video - but the muck they dump on the deck of the clean-up ship looks predominantly like marine-use plastics, storage containers and fuel/oil barrels. So the question is: if the garbage is primarily marine garbage - how in the world do you regulate that? Ships operating in international waters are unlikely to be fined or held accountable for polluting, especially since they'd also have to self-report before getting regulated.

Some Fresh Scoop on the Troublesome Poop - Straight from SpaceX: SpaceX needs to tame toilet trouble before weekend launch - The Washington Post (paywalled for me - but I figured @Spacescifi would enjoy a look.)

...handwavium, you do realize that, right? We have 7+ billion people currently working on terraforming this planet and we can't even raise the temperature 5 degrees or change the atmospheric makeup by 5% in 100 years... How much 'patience' and effort do your future scifiguys have? We find the planets that suit our needs or we bypass them

Absent finding Unobtaniym (discovered by Russian Deep Spac3 Probe 7-with-slash), or frictionless abrasive powder or phlebotnium in abundant surface deposits - humans won't care about planets without Earth-analog atmosphere. Given that it's just chemistry and there are a lot of die to roll, pretty good chance that once the instawhere drive is available, so are the destinations. The inhabitants did well, until that one guy took up smoking...

Not true - if it was fully funded by congress and they had several successful subcontractors doing the work, Boeing would happily supply the stickers for the outside of the craft

I agree with everything else, but this. Shelves are empty. We've not enough truck drivers. Modern warehouse jobs suck and warehousers can't find employees to fill vacancies - or stick around long enough to become skilled. Longshoremen can't empty the ships in the harbors, much less those parked outside the harbors - and that's just in the US. Upstream problems continue, and second-wave spot covid - based lock downs are only just now easing. Total accordion effect. It's going to take a while for this to settle out - which is causing real scarcity and is increasing prices where computer goods can even be found (vs the false scarcity we have become accustomed to in the last decade). It's been a year since the RTX 30xx series came out* - and that tier of card should be pretty much ubiquitous, but people are scrambling to find cards today. Hell, you can't buy a car b/c of the chip shortage * (I know about the BS corporate decisions, mining fiasco, soft launch and yield issues that are not covid related)

Sources: Wikipedia and

Did they dock the engine of that reentry vehicle?

@ARS - let me add something... you are asking questions that threaten to drag you down into the exciting and frustrating and addictive hobby of system building. Should you be brave / foolhardy enough to venture there - allow me to recommend [H]ardforum. Good place with really knowledgeable people who've been building computers since the floppy drive days. I'm one of them: a guy who really enjoys building my own rig... but I'm also not one of the extreme over-clocking types. If you want to get into that: they're there in spades. ... So... allow me to toss out a prejudicial thought: laptops are not gaming computers. (I write this as a guy who played DOOM - the first one that came on 7 floppy disks - on a borrowed laptop before I could get a real computer). Even Alienware/fill-in-the-blank 'gaming' laptops are gimped for what you can get for the same money building a desktop. I know that sometimes a person's financial state isn't such that they can dive into an expensive hobby... but just DON'T think of any laptop as a gaming machine. The first desktop you build is always the most expensive - because after that you salvage parts to use in new builds. I should warn you that you need to have the ability to turn a Phillips Head Screwdriver to the right before even thinking about building your own system. You should also have some familiarity with reading directions and understanding technical terms and jargon. Once you've developed these abilities, you can build your own computer. Another caution: the Covid logistics crisis makes building at this time very expensive - way moreso than normal. But in normal times you can usually build a system for $800 that will do everything better than a $2,000 laptop.

Not power in the sense of electricity - as much computational and processing power... So CPU / RAM / GPU is the usual trifecta. Better system (especially NOT a laptop) = better gaming experience. Net code improvements have greatly increased gaming enjoyment for many, as has improved ISP internet 'speeds' - but just as those go up, people started trying to play games over Wi-Fi which can be problematic. Wired connection for competitive gaming often a must. 'lag' is rarely a factor in the games' underlying code (i.e. Textures and rendering improvements won't stop lag) - but net code, ISP choice, use of a VPN, the backbone network and quality, location and number of servers are all big players in the lag issue.

That's because you hogged all the water. ;D We got nary a drop. Sky had this really weird yellow tint. Winds were straightine, sustained and otherworldly without clouds.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52668915-entangled-life This is really good. I hate mushrooms - but this opened up a whole lot about biology that I was only peripherally aware of (you could say I only had a surface understanding of the topic). He takes a deep dive into the subject and really gets into the weeds to demonstrate how fungal life touches pretty much everything. Even a section about Lichens in Spaaaaaace!

You guys are really over thinking this: much more likely to be the destabilizing power of dropping 100t of Shinsegae catalogs over the entire country of NK every 30 days.

Grin! Still laughing! Side effects include: * Obscene burping * Testicular itch * Macular Degeneration * Visions of hopelessness * Life threatening elbow spasm * Constant prattle * Stop taking NaniSan if you are allergic to NaniSan or know someone who is

So - not exactly science... But if you get a chance to watch Dune in theaters... Do it. I've read the books several times, and I really appreciate the direction the film took. The visuals are big screen worthy - as is the soundtrack.

I haven't read everything - but a couple of observations: Star Wars style 'one guy gets into a car/truck sized craft, hyper flies all over the galaxy and some bum in a dump with 3 robots can combat repair the whole thing in a couple of days' seems glib. Having sailed with the Navy - they have large crews doing lots of necessary tasks with a variety mechanical and complex systems - along with massive support infrastructure both on the ship (tool shop, medical, food service, laundry) and on land. Star Trek mimics this. How realistic and vibrant is your fictional space economy? Even our current 'manned space efforts' is little more than a diving bell: complex set up designed to take a very few people into certain death with a slim chance that if everything goes well they will be able to survive and return. Exploration - not exploitation - of the environments.

Anyone ever been in a 'dry hurricane'? One of the weirdest things I've seen. Hurricane force (remnant) winds and not a cloud in the sky. https://www.wlky.com/article/8-year-anniversary-of-hurricane-ike-hitting-louisville/3869681 "Camped In" with my wife and new son as we were without power for 10 days. Thank God the plumbing still worked! Oddest part was how social my neighborhood was during the time - without TVs, everyone hung out outside. Reminds me of pictures of the 50s.

'Tis True!

It's maddening stuff, ain't it! Important topics deserve straight talk. The durned thing is: there is so much advocacy... and yet I'm a believer in truth wins out. I think we could get people to stop peeing in our own wells, if we stop saying the pee is radioactive acid. It's gross enough as is.

Anything learned can be unlearned - and vice-versa. When I came out of Boot Camp I was stone faced. Tell me the funniest story, and all you would get is "Ooh-rah. Good to go." Freaked my friends out.