Kryten

Does it physically feel okay? Because it sounds like a mechanical issue.

This really explains a lot.

This statement invalidates itself. Putting a computer together doesn't involve remotely a grands worth of labour, training or anything else-these days it's basically 'put tab A into slot B'.

Nonsense. The computers on Apollo were nothing special; they were based on the miniaturised digital tech that had already been developed for missile guidance systems. Why does that have anything to do with crewed spaceflight? The first communications sat was launched three years before anybody went into space, again using missile technology.

10 mSV is a tenth of the legal yearly limit, and is far below the dosage shown to have any significant medical effect.

After the sun and the planets, the largest object (by diameter) is either Pluto or Eris; the difference between them is below the margin of error in the measurements. Eris is the largest object in terms of mass.

Given most of the major conferences are now done, what are people's thoughts on this years E3? Any new games people are really looking forward to?

It depends on how you define 'sperm' and 'egg'; it's certainly not going to result in viable offspring in a mammal, and probably not any animal, but pretty much anything goes in plants.

That's the same mindset that bought us the space shuttle; just look how well that turned out.

Again, it doesn't really matter. Pretending that was a success, the predicted ratio for Falcon 9 becomes 91%, as opposed to 95% for Atlas 5.

You might want to look at the flying flea/pou-du-ciel. It's a light home-built aircraft design from the 30s-hundreds were built, and most of them used standard motorcycle engines.

The Atlas V mission ended up with both payloads being able to reach the correct orbit; it's still considered a partial failure. Why are people so hung up about this one flight? Atlas V beats Falcon 9 predicted even if it's treated as a success, so it doesn't make any real difference anyway.

A failure to place payloads into the correct orbit is a partial failure, regardless of circumstances. Atlas' own failure involved a mechanical problem that's now been completely fixed, but it's included in the reliability figure just like Spacex's, which could potentially recur on any COTS flight.

Sorry, try telling that to Orbcomm.

They didn't, falcon 9 had a partial failure. Leaving that aside, that's empirical rate, not the same thing. Prediction is a bayesian method that starts with assuming a 50-50 chance for the first flight, and then modifying that assumption based on subsequent flights-thus rockets that have a perfect record purely due to low number of launches are distinguished from ones with real proven reliability. EDIT: The actual equation is just (k+1)/(n+2), where k is the number of successful events (launches in this case) and n is the number of trials (i.e. launch attempts).

Using the standard way of predicting rocket reliabilty, falcon 9.1 still comes out with pretty a low figure-83%-due to the very low sample size.

The high oxidiser-ratio engines he's talking about are all kerolox, not LOX/LH2. Cryogenic engine tech is basically in it's infancy in Russia, they've only flown six times with two engine types.

We already have a telescope capable of analysing the seafloor; we only have to wait for the sea to dry up first. Thankfully, 'rainfall' on Titan is infrequent and the lakes shallow enough for such dried lake basins to be pretty common; they show deposits of solid hydrocarbon evapourites, but under that just pretty much normal Titan soil.

Ranching is agriculture.

It's more likely he simply doesn't know the difference.

They've got one nuclear merchant ship and they very nearly scrapped it. The rest are all government-owned icebreakers.

What exactly distinguishes your supposed far older pyramids from 'rebuilt' ones? Nobody's seen any evidence of two massively differing pyramid populations, just a constant evolution of adapting techniques-one that matches the carbon dates.

Sorry, but multiple Egyptian pyramids contain original wooden elements, which have been carbon-dated; all about 4500-5000 years old. Oldest plants (bristlecones in California) live at high altitude, in semi-desert, and well inland. There's no reason to assume tree-killing floods happen everywhere on the planet, at least without ridiculous 'earth changes'. The pyramids were built to seem impressive , not to survive. Some of them were shoddy enough to barely outlast their construction.

Significant movement of the equator after the time the first egyptian pyramids were built (~5000BP) would result in a number of living trees being well out from their logical habitats. For the mesoamerican pyramids (most <1000BP), there would be entire forests of living trees in the wrong place.

Are you high?