Codraroll

It's that time of year again! The time when the most prestigious prizes in all of science are awarded. The 2022 Ig Nobels have been handed out! https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/maya-ritual-enemas-and-constipated-scorpions-the-2022-ig-nobel-prize-winners/ The URL alone should give you some idea of the absolute insanity that is science sometimes.

The weather forecast also uses it as soon as clouds are present. "Partly cloudy, no rain" translates into "delvis skyet, oppholdsvær" after all. Also typical of the Norwegian weather and language is that there are no commonly used words to discern different types of heat ("warm" is pretty much all there is) and no word for drought, just "dryness".

Another one, then: The Norwegian language has a word for "not-rainy weather", which is "oppholdsvær". Directly translated it means "pause weather" or "interruption weather". Norway is a slightly rainy country, to put it that way.

It would be perfectly possible to be King without knowing about it. It would not matter there and then, of course, but for the purpose of official record-keeping after the fact, no delay happened. The Queen stops being Queen at the moment of death, and the new King is technically King from that very instant, as far as history is concerned, even if it will take half an hour for anybody to learn about it or experience any difference. It's only when the first person asks "what just happened there?" that it will be puzzled together that Charles has technically been King for the entirety of the light speed delay between the Queen's death and the message reaching Earth. Monarchy transfers instantly, even if the universe can't keep up.

Problem is that somebody made a typo in the order and got an army full of oafs instead. It's working as expected.

Why do that when you can build one of those?

Those 30 minutes would be a gap in the monarchy; time when the previous monarch was dead but the new one unaware of it. And monarchy does not allow for gaps. Hence, when Charles sees it happening, he will learn he has already been monarch for 30 minutes. Or in other words, the exact start of his reign would be impossible for him to experience. It can only be learned about after the fact.

Monarchy is one of the few things that can travel faster than light. The system is set up so that the reign of one monarch officially begins instantly when their predecessor dies. There can never not be a monarch. If Queen Elizabeth had died in a hoverboard accident on Mars instead of in Scotland, the news would take 30 minutes or so to reach Charles on Earth, even if he was watching the livestream of her fatal attempt at doing a 1080 over the mouth of a sandworm on fire, due to light speed delay. However, from his point of view, his regency would have begun 30 minutes before he watched the spectacular crash. Of course, things get a little complicated as soon as you start considering third-party observers to verify the timing of the transition of power, but with the monarch and the heir apparent as two fixed points in time and space, it works out quite well between the two, at least.

Quite a bit if it's not coated, which is why items left in your window sill will be bleached by the sun. You don't get that degradation just from visible light.

While we're talking about light and colours, here's one from my field of work I've always found amusing. First a bit of background: Glass is transparent because it transmits pretty much all the visible light at every wavelength equally. All over the visible spectrum, it lets through 95% or so. However, it doesn't stop at the edge of the visible spectrum either. It's equally transparent quite far into the infrared. This means that it's transparent to thermal radiation as well as visible light. From the perspective of a "ray" of heat, it doesn't matter if your window is open or closed, heat passes through regardless. Now, this is obviously not good for building energy management. We'd like our windows to insulate against the cold. Or the heat, depending on your climate. To help energy efficiency, modern windows are coated with a transparent coating that blocks thermal radiation - that is, infrared light. And that's the cool part: what do you call a substance that blocks radiation in only a certain part of the visual spectrum? Coloured! Essentially, modern windows are painted in a colour we can't see. It's totally unlike other colours, because our eyes can't perceive it, but it can be measured. Some animals can probably see it too.

I've finally learned a fun fact worth bumping the thread for. People might not know a whole lot about Ethiopia, but it's a big country in east Africa. Addis Ababa, the capital, is a regional hub of modern development, surrounded by (occasionally drought-stricken) farmland. It's close to the Rift Valley and has a wetter climate than the drought on Africa's horn, but not quite the rainforest of the African interior either. It's sort of a mid-range place as far as climate goes, really. People don't know a lot about Bhutan either, but the common image of it is a tiny, traditionalist country in the Himalayas. Like Nepal's older little sibling. The entire country is mountainous, with the human settlements nested in narrow valleys between tall, icy peaks. The capital Thimphu is the quintessential Himalayan city, crammed into one of the country's innermost valleys with a view of the tall mountains above. Thimphu is very much a mountain city, being the fifth highest-elevated capital city in the world. In fourth place? Addis Ababa. The East African metropolis, with the farmlands and fields and forests, is located at a higher altitude than the mountainous Thimphu of the Himalayas. The three capitals located at even higher altitudes are the Andean capitals of South American countries; La Paz, Quito, and Bogotá. You frequently hear stories about people getting altitude sickness when visiting those places. But I wouldn't ever guess Addis Ababa was next on the list. Oh, and for the record: Kathmandu, Nepal, is also known for being way up in the mountains, with that infamous airport planes can hardly land on. It's all the way down on eighteenth place on the list.

Life in cold and dark climates seems to cause lifeforms to produce significant quantities of ethanol in general. There's a joke out in the countryside here that if you want to buy moonshine, look for the house of the local priest. That'd be the only place you wouldn't be able to buy moonshine.

Just as long as you don't try to use the thing for a takeoff. And since it apparently needs to be repeated at least once a week, it does not make a good SSTO.

And the very likely possibility that Roscosmos would keep cranking up prices to no end if they had maintained their monopoly.

At least the one on the south pole isn't Scott crater. For a while after the race to the pole, it seems to have been a common British narrative that Scott was its moral victor, having done everything the proper and gentlemanly way; that mere flukes were the reason why that honourless barbarian Amundsen arrived first; and that the death of Scott and his entire party on the return journey were merely insignificant details in the glorious triumph. It seems that somebody thought Shackleton was a more fitting hero to be memorialized through the polar crater on the Moon, since he at least returned from the Antarctic. Still, it feels kinda cheap that the honour didn't go to Amundsen, who actually went to the South Pole. Oh, and fun fact: Amundsen was also the first person to properly document a visit to the North Pole. The two other claimants to the title did a rather poor job of proving they had actually been there. Amundsen arrived there by airship, though, after a single day's breezy flight from Svalbard, so his achievement in that regard was a bit overshadowed by previous expeditions who went there the hard way.

If the whole thing caught fire and burned down at the launchpad, it would simultaneously be the saddest and funniest thing in spaceflight history.

Heh, another army story about the moon. Not from my year of service, but apparently a couple years before: During an exercise, all the platoons in our company where tasked to secure the perimeter around the battalion HQ. Each platoon had its own little guard post, responsible for part of the perimeter. Each guard post was tasked to monitor the field of view between there and there, usually marked with different objects visible from the post. Stones, trees, ditches, etc. This would create overlapping fields of view and zones of responsibility around the entire HQ. ... if not for the fact that one of the guard posts was told to use the moon as its right-side limit. As the night went on and the moon moved across the sky, their field of view (and zone of responsibility) grew and grew, and the hapless soldiers eventually noticed movement in their zone. Cue the alarm being raised and a huge ruckus erupting. There was a lot of shouting and firing for a while until it was realized that the sleep-deprived soldiers had attacked their neighbouring guard post. The battalion was docked quite a few points in that exercise.

Have we still not succeeded in explaining to you what a horribad idea pusher plates are in atmosphere? One word: shockwaves. You really don't want to go about with explosive propulsion in a medium that can transfer the explosive force to the entirety of your craft. But I digress. The problem here is that "the air thins" is an event that will happen quite early in flight, as the rocket goes up first and then starts going fast sideways, because you don't want to go fast in an atmosphere for drag-related reasons. So a spacecraft's ascent profile tends to seek thin air before it starts building up the speed required to stay in orbit. In other words, the air-breathing engines will not be of use for more than the first short leg of the flight, but require their own wiring and plumbing and take up weight on the craft all the same. That's a particularly bad drawback on an SSTO. They're helpful for the first minute or so after take-off, and from there on they are dead weight. And you still need a different set of engines to actually take you to orbit. You might be able to use the air-breathing engines as a first stage of a rocket, though. I think the first stage of Saturn V only flew in the lower parts of the atmosphere. But that means disconnecting that entire stage from the spacecraft after they have expended their usefulness.

Yup, I like our moon.

I think a key point here is whether Starship could hold crew and cargo at the same time, like the Shuttle could. You'd need EVA-capability on the crewed part, cargo doors big enough to fit Hubble (sans solar panels), a Canadarm to grapple the telescope into the cargo bay, and astronauts to do the final strapping-down. If the Starship comes in either crew or cargo configuration, but not both at the same time, things get a lot more complicated. Having to rendezvous three craft so close to each other that astronauts could travel between them, KSP-style, would presumably be a bit of a safety nightmare.

Come to think of it, what would be considered the exact point of completion of SpaceX's mission obligations? Is the recovery process after splashdown part of NASA's mission, so SpaceX is off the hook once the capsule lies steady in the water (KSP style)? Or does SpaceX have to fish it out of the drink and put it on a ship before they can call it a job well done? And who would be responsible for taking the capsule back to shore? For unmanned missions, I guess it's not a very important distinction, but somebody would probably be fined for littering if the capsule wasn't recovered. Whose responsibility would that be?

It's human-rated in one domain, but went a bit beyond that for the particular journey in question. Similar to how the Apollo 10 capsule probably wasn't rated for taking crew to solar orbit for six decades.

Oh, it was definitely human-rated. One can't just put together any contraption of seats and wheels and take it into traffic. Try riding the Voyager 1 down a highway, you would be pulled over for lacking some quite essential features (most notably, and probably quite puzzling to the cop who pulled you over, wheels). That Tesla design went through a rigorous approval process to ensure it fulfilled a variety of different criteria to be legally usable in traffic. That's human-rating even by a very strict definition of the term.

If I recall the story about that video correctly, all the five men were volunteers. The camera man, however, was not. He was not happy to be there.

By the way, since this thread has now existed for more than three years, might it be time to remove the "[New]" tag from its title?