JoeSchmuckatelli

Don't know if this already has a thread - but the show is enjoyable. Thankfully it's been a few decades since I read the books - so I am not bothered by any departure from cannon - but it is a cool adaptation. The two female leads do a good job and the characters playing Empire pull off the role. I'm only through the first season - but I found it binge-worthy

Only wish I could give another up-thumb!

Couple of brain twisting things from reading the article ; stars look tiny (pixel-ish) even though we know they are impossibly huge. The light I might see while looking at Orion & Betelgeuse from Washington is not the same light I might see at the same time from Florida. The entire planet must be bathed in Betelgeuse light. The asteroid is comparatively tiny - but large enough to occlude the light in a swath (the article doesn't say, but perhaps hundreds of miles wide or dozens. It doesn't say.) across the face of the planet. Some will see the star wink out - most never could. What a wonder is this universe!

Sunspot activity has returned to normal. Kraken has banned me again

...is actually worth it if for no other reason than keeping players in the game. MA Bell was cutting edge at one point, and then fully functional for years... But monopoly ultimately kills innovation. (I know, so does pork) ... Is the main frustration with SLS is that it's diverting funds from other players? B/c SX is currently the only domestic rocket producer at any volume. Unless BO suddenly starts to pump out working engines. Whoops, sorry SLS has launched more big rockets than BO has to date - but you get what I mean. There's other players trying to get in the game, but aside from SLS NASA doesn't have a lot of choices *right now*

Wait, what? I've not been following along... The plan is to use inertia to shift the fuel? Isn't slosh a problem?

Some verbosity expanding on my infrastructure / maturation and saturation thoughts combined with the Smarter Every Day video posted in another thread. The theme is simplicity and redundancy. Mil-tech is made to be used by basically trained soldiers with only a HS diploma, be reliable and tough. We really rely on interchangeable parts (even, perhaps especially, where those parts are complex - and it takes a smart tech / highly trained person to fix the thing... Any grunt can swap out the thing). This takes solid logistics and infrastructure to be feasible. ... Clearly in the 60s / 70s we had the ability to do great things. I haven't run a full cost to GDP analysis comparing 1970 and 2020, but the Apollo program cost approx 257 billion in 2020 dollars (while the 2020 GDP was like $20 trillion). Baseline it looks like a much smaller % of GDP in 2020. Part of the cost was how cutting edge - even bespoke - everything was. But to do what you are suggesting - the industry should look more like SX or the airline industry rather than what I imagine Apollo / SLS looks like. Also, a look at material science advances since then - things that are common now were invented then - I don't see that stuff proliferating at the rate necessary for economic saturation absent a hot war. https://en.m.wikiversity.org/wiki/Materials_Science_and_Engineering/Timeline_of_Material_Advances https://www.google.com/amp/s/singularityhub.com/2020/05/21/3-major-materials-science-breakthroughs-and-why-they-matter-for-the-future/%3famp=1 If you look at the ships Columbus used to cross the Atlantic and compare to what purpose built oceanic craft looked like a hundred years later, a lot of 'lessons learned' are baked in. Superpower competition, hot and cold wars drove the innovation. Yes, a more desperate competition (existential) between the US and USSR might have pushed the envelope back in the 70s... But for that to happen the Soviet economy would have had to be much more competitive. And there would have needed to be a reason to keep it competitive rather than combative. (Far simpler to just Nuke the ground infrastructure of the enemy than build competing moon bases) I kind of think things happen in their own time for a reason. E. G. Take one of my story ideas: a 3 ship ARG of sailors and Marines gets transported back to the 1450 Pacific and lands in San Francisco - presuming we can avoid / mitigate the disease process that wiped the continent, could those people have recreated a version of America given our Connecticut Yankee knowledge... And I don't think so. Even if the locals were enthusiastic partners and the Navy was able to acquire horses, cattle and everything else for 'modern' agriculture, trying to shift the local population and economy to even 1800s levels in less than a hundred years seems not feasible

... well, if it does (but not too much) I will still be too far away to see anything. Except this time, instead of a good internet connection, I'll likely be on a paddleboard fending off sharks.

Got something for you Math Nerds: Does the windshield of a car travelling at 60 mph hit more raindrops in one second than the windshield of the same model parked collects?

Too young for Carrier Pigeon Too old for Zoom ...but I do remember when email was new and cool. (On that, my wife and I told the kids recently about *gasp* writing letters to each other when we were long distance dating)

Heh. I can confirm that sunspot activity is suppressing the Kraken, and I, too, am temporarily un-banned. At least on phone.

Why does my (IOT) oven have a stronger wifi signal than my router? (rhetorical)

Saturation and maturation. Just an observation, but often times it's not just about effort and will, it's about infrastructure. There was a lag between the first Industrial Revolution and the second because it took time for the RR and steam power to permeate the country - which before was a collection of small towns (applies to any country). 'Modern' example: ... Oh, and that was dial-up

Back in the late 80s, a bunch of us who decided to full-time it in our college town (as opposed to being 'tourists' who went home every break) got together for Thanksgiving in a group we dubbed 'The Orphans Club'. Basically a bunch of kids who didn't go home and made do, together. Loads of fun. Everyone brought something or made something. It was great. A few years ago, my wife's college buddies started getting back together again, annually, for FriendsGiving. Same idea - except we now leave the kids at home and the adults all get together. So much better than trying to entertain the in-laws!

If you imagine a future where we have built the tech for capable autonomous robots, then sure, why not. However - we are still orders of magnitude away from this. Also - there will be people who want to go, if for no other reason than the danger and prestige. So - purely automatic is possible but imo unlikely

Thank God we've left that era behind us! https://m.startribune.com/noah-s-ark-in-kentucky-must-be-seen-to-be-believed/398956821/?clmob=y&c=n&clmob=y&c=n

Yeah - sunspot activity can only suppress the Kraken-Ban for so long. Read: I'm 500 as well I did all of that (including a full reset of my modem and router) to no avail. Too many different ways of trying (phone, work pc, home pc, different browsers, you and magnemoe... It's not us.

Yeah - I've seen reports that the primary population of the indigenous people who first settled the Americas (N&S) was possibly as low as 3500 individuals (genetic extrapolation). Certainly the next several thousand years proved them to be resilient and sufficient for the various environments - but being cut off from the rest of humanity, very very few domestic animals and no understanding of infection / germ theory in the world did not help. Possible that future colonists could be OK even if cut off for thousands of years - presuming no major loss of technology / information about disease management upon reconnecting with disparate populations, etc.

Kraken Ban or Solar Flares? I'm in on the phone. Again - don't know what happened or why, but last night was 500 and I just visited S&Sf on the phone. Noodly digits twisted

@Gargamel (for info) I'm getting intermittent success with S&Sf via PC. (One in 3-5 attempts gets 500, but sometimes I get through) Ofc - I also got this interesting thing trying to hit the BO sub: Website blocked due to a suspicious download Website Blocked: tpforum.s3.dualstack.us-east-1.amazonaws.com v2.6.15 | Heuristics: a suspicious download Malwarebytes Browser Guard blocked this page because it may contain malicious activity.

My 'used to play KSP' answer is... sure? Given enough deltaV I'm pretty sure you could do a mid-course correction on an intercept to get a craft aimed at the pole and then suicide burn to a halt wherever you wanted. (I was never good enough to hit anything other than 'an orbit') Which - now that I think about it - might be the same amount of fuel you would need to do an inefficient orbital capture, followed by changing inclination to polar followed by lowering PE to intercept. (Someone will, of course, point out that I have no idea what I'm talking about via fuel needs... but then again, I am the resident knuckle dragger!)

Still no on phone. I'll check PC later but given Gargamel's post I'm not hopeful

Whippersnappers. I'll bet you don't even remember the 60s!