Drunken Hobo

Without cataclysmic asteroid impacts we wouldn't exist in the first place... Sounds like a good argument for a cataclysmic asteroid impact.

The same was true for CFCs, albeit on a smaller scale. Poor countries couldn't afford to develop and produce alternatives, so rich Western countries did and the effects trickled down to the poorer countries, who abandoned CFCs once it became viable. Same thing happens with other technologies, such as nuclear & wind power. Of course the ozone depleting was a more immediate and obvious problem than a slow rise in temperatures, and the pro-CFC lobby wasn't nearly as powerful as the fossil fuel industry. There was also Greenpeace who actually did good work backed up by science, rather than the massive self-promoting profit-hungry corporation they are now.

Was trying to figure out the difference between the two. Apparently your model has the power adapter built in, whilst I'll have a power brick. Your one will be more energy efficient too, and you can tilt the stand. Actual screen specifications seem identical. Mine was slightly cheaper - £72, but has now gone up to £95.

But people with arts degrees writing in tabloid newspapers owned by people with interests in oil companies have told me it's all a scam and not to worry. Why would I trust millionaire scientists over humble individuals like Rupert Murdoch? Checkmate, warmists.

Finally ordered myself a new monitor to go with my new PC: http://www.amazon.co.uk/BenQ-VW2245Z-21-5-inch-Monitor/dp/B00EQ0PB5Y Will no longer have the joys of a 17" 4:3 CRT. Hopefully I've made a good choice. Next I'll need to do something about my 17-year-old speakers. Will also have to rebuild by computer desk... yay.

I thought your cash was plastic. How do you write on it?

Released in 2004, this deck of Top Trumps cards had a few... inaccuracies. It won't come off nearly as well if I try to explain it, so just watch (contains strong language, for good reason): I had to pause the video to laugh for several minutes after the Venus card. Absolutely unreal.

When I first started typing this, my earliest memory was around 2002. Then it moved to late 2001, and now I think we're back to early 2001. Funny how memory works. Anyway, it was probably Habbo Hotel. Was introduced to it by a friend and ended up with half of my school year on it. It was fairly pointless, but a pretty interesting novelty at the time. I remember wasting many hours queueing for a virtual diving board. Plus, being about 10-years-old, it was an endless source of amusement when a censored word came up as "Bobba", and you'd try and string the most offensive sentence together, only for it to come up as "I want you to Bobba my Bobba until there's Bobba all over your Bobba". I'm glad I haven't matured at all since then.

Not the most ground-breaking or important suggestion, but it'd be nice to have an alternate orientation version of "Structural Wing Type D". Seems strange that we have: & & & & But... & And this totally isn't for the selfish reason that I built a SSTO that would look so much cooler if we had an alternate orientation of "Structural Wing Type D". It just seems like a bit of an oversight to have alternate orientations for every non-swept wing except "Structural Wing Type D". Again, hardly an important suggestion but it'd be nice for completeness' sake. Spent ages looking in the SPH for this part only to discover it doesn't exist. Also, is there a reason "Structural Wing Type C" & "Wing Strake" have different lift ratings (0.5 & 0.75 respectively) despite having the same dimensions? Every other alternate part shares a lift value with its twin, except "Wing Strake" which appears to be 0.25 too high. Is this meant to be or just a mistrake? (Hah, see what I did there?)

I'm tired, so I may not be thinking straight, but I'm not sure how such an asteroid could even exist. The low density indicates that it's probably a rubble pile (or extremely icy), yet it's rotating too quickly for gravity alone to be holding it together (escape velocity is ten times slower than the equatorial velocity). Perhaps it's a fragment of a comet? I demand an explanation!

Work in the other direction, and it'd only take an object of around 6 x 1016 kg to obliterate the Pluto-sized body. So rather than hoping Jupiter's orbit perturbs it, let's just hope it smashes into Lysithea.

I barely played at all between 0.23.5 & 0.90. Sandbox just felt a bit redundant after the addition of science, yet the "career mode" was so shallow I never really got into it. 0.90 was a huge step forward for me and I'm back to playing almost obsessively. Things like the editor update has just made it so much nicer to play.

Windows 8.1. I really don't see the problem people have with it. I never used the start menu anyway, and there are some nice interface choices. It's not exactly Vista.

It is indeed it's possible. You could even argue that Earth already has a "ring around where a race of people live", only it's based on latitude, not longitude: With a tidally-locked planet, the image would be rotated 90 degrees, and habitability would be based on longitude. You would have to have a thick enough atmosphere to distribute heat to the dark side though, otherwise the atmosphere would all just condense & freeze on the dark side.

I think one of the most spectacular photos in the Solar System would be Mars from Phobos. You'd be on a rocky body just 9000 km away from Mars, and it'd look more than 4 times bigger than Jupiter does in that video. We have the technology to send a camera there, so let's get on it! A shame Fobos-Grunt failed, although it was going to land on the far side of Phobos. And if you want to get silly, you have Metis' view of Jupiter, which would be more than nine times larger than Jupiter in that video and would take up roughly 1/9th of the visible sky. That might not sound that big, but our Moon only takes up about 1/1,000,000th of our night sky (Honestly, it really is that small. So is the Sun). Once again real life manages to do better than Photoshop.

That's a pretty good point, especially regarding the tutorials. At present the solution to any problem is "check the forums" or "watch a Scott Manley video" I think one of Minecraft's biggest failings is the complete lack of in-game help, which means you constantly have to check the wiki. Would be best if KSP didn't follow that route.

If you look at the rest of Steam, can anybody find an "Early Access" game that is more complete than Kerbal Space Program?

Jamie Lee Curtis!?

I talked to a girl once.

An interesting image, but what if the aliens don't know about Pythagoras' Theorem, or even basic numbers? If they're thousands, if not millions of years advanced from humans, maybe they have no need to know about these things? Ask a modern human to start a fire from sticks or to catch a wild animal and they'll go cold & hungry. But that'd be child's play to a human 10,000 years ago.

Jeremy Clarkson has to weigh around 200kg...

I believe the pillars in that photo are about 5 light-years tall. In the full resolution picture, they're 1170 pixels tall. That means that each pixel covers over 8 times the maximum distance between Earth and Neptune. Even the distance to Sedna at aphelion would only cover 3.5 pixels. And that is only a tiny snapshot of the whole nebula: Feeling small yet?

My resolution for next year is to stop procrastinating.

It's mostly because our life has some pretty basic requirements. Water is extremely common in the universe and has many properties that make it ideal for life. Other compounds with similar properties - such as ammonia - are less common and less stable, making ammonia-based life less likely. That means you're more likely to find life in conditions where water is liquid. Carbon is also very common in the universe and is an ideal element to base something like DNA on, as it is stable in long chains. Alternatives such as silicon are less stable, and boron is pretty uncommon compared to carbon. Water/carbon-based life on a wet temperate terrestrial planet with an atmosphere is probably the easiest solution you could hope for.