Kerbface

Doctor Who will not end while it is popular. This will probably not be the last Doctor and that has nothing to do with what has been suggested or stated in canon (not that canon has ever meant much in Doctor Who).

If that were the case, I wouldn't have to worry about whether it's on the right way. But I do. Because it doesn't always start off facing outwards from the surface. None of the docking ports consistently do.

They really should be set to face out by default and require manual turning back to front, since that would be a fairly niche use of it.

I think we all sort of got runner up. I think it benefitted all of humanity, but I don't want to say we all "won" because we sort of gave up a lot once someone had no near major term goals that they could "beat" someone else at.

I like it when I don't know the actor playing the Doctor. That way he can be the Doctor first and foremost. I haven't seen Peter Capaldi before but he looks like he could be good. I'm excited.

It's the Dragon of the West!

I think China could end up being the one who sets off another space race, combined of course with the commercial space companies helping advance technology faster. China wants to send someone to the moon and build their own space station, the latter they are already quite underway with, it's the sort of competition the US hasn't had in years, I think once they land on the moon (or start getting close to it), the US may start putting a lot more direction and money into their space program. By then we'll probably have Dragon and Dreamchaser for LEO crew operations and Orion for the moon and asteroids (and as a basis for further interplanetary craft designs).

XD That's adorable.

Well there is a Bermuda triangle, it's a triangular region of ocean between Bermuda, Florida and Puerto Rico. It just doesn't have any crazy supernatural or paranormal activity going on in it.

You have creative freedom by the way, doesn't have to be the most likely thing.

Where is it? What features does it have? How did it become a moon? How does it affect Earth? How does it affect humanity?

I think the SLS could end up going to the ISS or another space station, just so long as it has a seriously big module to add.

Theories on what? The unremarkable nature of the Bermuda Triangle region? Gee, I wonder what could have caused it to be so unremarkable considering all the aliens, wormholes and Elder gods trying to skew the statistics. There's got to be SOMETHING keeping the dissapearances and crashes at an expected level for the amount of traffic it gets.

If I'm going to go through years or decades of serious astronaut training and then spending a long time in a cramped module, you can bet I'd want to spend as much time as possible on the moon. There are easier ways to get famous than going to the moon anyway. Hell, I could get to the moon, then do something unexpected and ridiculous, then people would remember you anyway for being that guy who went to the moon and then acted weird.

I don't think the inventions of ancient China can be used as an accurate representation of the modern Chinese government and Space Agency's practices. That's like saying your sports team is going to win the championship because they once won four championships in a row even though all of the people in the team who won those championships have been replaced since.

I know JPEG is supposed to be a compressed format, but I also know in the quality I get it off the camera, it is still 16mp, and the pixels aren't even "compressed" in the way that lower quality JPEGs are with the weird lines when you look close. But even with that, my question remains. HOW does something compress (even if it looks worse) so that the number of pixels can exceed the number of bytes or even perhaps bits.

I want to see the Europa report, but I can't seem to find any information about where and when it's being released and in what formats...

Example. I have a 16 megapixel camera. Most of my photos are anywhere from 2-5MB (JPEG). So to take the more extreme example, say a 2MB photo. That basically means 8 pixels per byte, or one pixel per bit. And pixels are more than 1 bit of information, right? A pixel needs information not only on it's location but it's colour. How can they possibly fit this into a file this size? I mean maybe they could simplify the info by taking all pixels with the same colour and referencing them, and maybe they could simplify coordinates by having the list of pixels (their colour) just go in rows left to right (so you only need to list the resolution and a program would work it out from there), but with all this, I still can't see any fathomable way you can have less than or equal to or even near to a bit per pixel, because even a list of 1s and 0s with no purpose can only be 1 bit per item. But I'm no programmer...

My cat's breath smells like cat food.

I was riding someone else's bike on a gravelly road in the forest, there was a steep hill, I tried to brake and didn't realise how ridiculously sensitive the brake was. I flipped over about 270 degrees, landed on my back on the gravel. Normally after that kind of event I would lie there in extreme pain, but in this case I scampered up and rushed to the side as soon as I touched ground, because I was scared as hell that the bike was going to land on my head. I didn't see exactly where it landed because I was facing away at the time and it looked like it had bounced a little further down the hill. Anyway, guy wasn't too happy that his bike was scratched but there was no serious damage.

Oh yeah, totally forgot about Soyuz, of course. What are the reasone the US capsules usually have a conical shape rather than something like that?

How major of an advantage is the flying reentry thing, and on the same note, what about a hemisphere or semisphere with a base similar to existing capsules?

How do regular capsules stay aligned? Maybe I'm mistaken, I would think it would be quite easy for a capsule to flip over to the conical side rather than the flat side, since the flat side would be less aerodynamic. Also, I don't really get that last point. I would assume some sort of radiators would be on the ship...

I ask because I've heard that spheres are pretty efficient in terms of re-entering with minimal damage and also that it would prevent pressure problems from occuring as they apparently can do with more irregular shapes. Also, wouldn't a sphere be the most economical shape in terms of volume per unit of surface area? But they don't make spherical capsules, so there must be some problem with them.

Not sure whether it's theory of mind though, since they are not able to do things like recognise themselves in a mirror (dogs, not sure about elephants). But it's probably not that clean cut. Vsauce had something about theory of mind, a test they give to children to see if they have it, one girl leaves the cookie in the basket, then leaves, then the other girl takes it out and puts it in a box. They ask the child where the girl who left would look for the cookie when she got back and apparently if they say the basket, it means they don't understand that other people don't always know the same things as them, thus no theory of mind. And that apparently, most kids don't develop it until 4 or 5. But that doesn't sound right to me, because kids younger than 4 or 5 always ask questions that adults might know the answer to but they don't. So they must be able to recognise knowledge that is seperate from themselves. To me it just sounds like in this theoretical situation they just simply don't think about it too carefully and have a failure of logic. Just forgetting to take that into account in a sort of abstract situation they're probably not all too used to.