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Random tidbit. After watching Inception, I actually experienced "dreams within dreams." Not with weird temporal anomalies or anything, but simply events where I was having one dream, and then woke up in a different dream. Very frightening experiences and actually caused me to doubt reality a few times. And then there was once incident where I actually realized I was dreaming, and attempted to wake up. I woke up... still in a dream. Everything looked like it should've, until I glanced out a window and saw something that didn't fit. Then I tried to wake up again and couldn't. The dream suddenly felt like a cage I couldn't get out of. I'm guessing sleep paralysis factored into this. Finally the panic attack that it incited caused me to wake up, but by then I felt suffocated and my heart was racing. Thanks alot, Nolan.

How many Kerbals does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Just one, to use an EMU and hold the lightbulb in place. While a few million SRB's spin Kerbin.

Not really. The thing I saw in the room was in NO way related to the dream I was having before I woke up.

I don't see this as being much different than surface features looking more clear to a probe than it does to an Earth-based telescope. Obviously the closer you get, the higher the resolution you'll be able to get. Couldn't the atmosphere have been increasing all this time, but just on a different scale?

I can remember "casual gamer" being used as a term in old Nintendo Power issues, and it seemed to refer to nothing more than someone who didn't want their games to be ridiculously insanely hard. I think casual gamer became a dirty word around the same time computers stopped being 'nerdy.' And by that I mean the people who said, "Computers are for nerds," until somebody handed them computers and said, "That's alright, this isn't a computer, it's a phone. You like phones, right?" With that came the app stores, FILLED with rinse and repeat metagames that are designed to be played with a maximum of 2 buttons, or just a touch screen. And the size of the screen also demands very simple games because there's no room for detailed information. From what I've seen, the great wedge that got driven through the gamer community was never about console vs. PC or even console vs. console. It was about all gaming platforms vs. phones. That was when the people who NEVER would've touched a gaming console OR a desktop computer, finally jumped on board. But they never really joined the gaming community, and many still haven't realized, "Wait, I'm doing that thing that I used to give people wedgies for doing." That's my 2 cents worth of a hypothesis anyhow.

I think the point is that it's bright enough to get noticed to the naked eye. Stars get near the planets all the time, but planetary conjunctions are much more easily noticeable. Yeah, stars go behind the moon every day. But if one day it happened to something as bright as Polaris, we would all be out there to see it.

I think there's more to being afraid of the dark than simply, "What if something is hiding in the shadows?" The way I see it is the brain is constantly trying to interpret what the senses are telling it. This is why sensory deprivation chambers can more or less serve as a hallucinogen. In the case of darkness, there is so little visual detail to work with that the brain is left with much larger blanks to fill in (this also allows us to dream). What the brain decides to put in the dark corner of the room is probably just luck combined with environmental influences on your upbringing.

Tell that to the meteorologists who named it. El Nino patterns affect the entire planet. We also park on driveways and we drive on parkways.

Actually, do you get a fancy diffraction from the star at the last second? You don't need an atmosphere to cause light to bend, though you wouldn't get color shifts like you would with a prismatic medium.

I had what was apparently my first encounter with this just a few weeks ago. I'd already been having difficulty sleeping for weeks, which no doubt contributed to this. And I'd been sleeping on the couch so as not to disturb my wife with constant restlessness. And on top of that, I had a nasty cold. I woke up laying on my back, and glanced over to the adjacent couch and as real as everything else in the room, someone was there. My entire body jerked into a hardcore fight/flight panic attack and as soon as that happened, the image was gone.

In the Northeast US, El Nino just means ridiculously boring weather patterns. I hate El Ninos.

Here's why.

Gotta say, even if it were realistic, I find the concept of a bunch of Mecha in such a formation to be rather silly. "I'm scared. I've never done an escape burn before." "It'll be alright. Here. Hold my hand."

FB ad? By this, do you mean an ad that was actually created by Facebook? Or one of the ten bajillion ads in the universe that Facebook typically displays on the sidebar? If it's the latter, can't help you much there. If it's the former... link, maybe? It's gotta be out there somewhere. And... play a couple of the more popular facebook games. Many were designed to be easy enough for a 2-year-old. Many jokes have been made about some of their games only requiring the mashing of a single button - usually for 1000 sessions just so you can afford a cute hat for your avatar. I don't think FB deserves to have any say in what a 'real' gamer is.

I've tried this with and without texture replacer and have just reinstalled KSP x32 with JUST the EVE mod. With the EVE-LR version, I get the clouds looking like they should. Which is nice, but they're TOO low res for my taste. With the 'regular' EVE version, I get an opaque pink sky covering ALL of Kerbin.

Heh, you know... sometimes it's too bad that space missions aren't like Hollywood movies. After it's all over, you get an insanely long list of credits for everyone who contributed.

Exactly what I was just wondering. I'd like to see them test it in a vacuum with the polymer forming the hull of a pressurized chamber, to see what happens. Though, this may just be meant for dealing with microparticles, which it would probably have no trouble sealing. Anything bigger than the head of a pin? Not sure. Anyway though, how awesome is this? A wall that bleeds and clots.

Who do you think signed up for this? Alcatraz inmates?

If you put the reactor in the right place, how much shielding do you really need? Assuming it's way in the back, you only need to shield it in the direction of the rest of the ship. In any other direction, the radiation can just shoot out into space and nobody has to worry about it. Unless someone else wants to dock with the ship... And I don't think anyone is going to care about extra security measures. As far as the other difficulties involved, the cost of extra security measures would be a non-factor by comparison. Another thing about this. Assuming some of these would be used for return trip missions, I would hope this would be the sort of thing that could be recycled. Returning to Earth, shut the reactor down and leave it in a stable orbit (or dock it with the ISS, whatever). Then when you want to run another long-range mission, just send another ship to pick it up and turn it on again. The heat, I'm not so sure about. But couldn't that even be used advantageously to get some extra speed?

For the purposes of this experiment, it doesn't matter. They just wanted somewhere desolate enough to be boring to minimize the mental stimulation from EVA. No point in wasting money sustaining them in some ridiculously remote location like the Torngat mountains or Antarctica, when survivability isn't even the goal? Even Nevada would probably cost more because of the need to run air conditioners the whole time.

It's less of a concern than a nuclear plant. A meltdown anywhere beyond LEO isn't going to be much of a concern. Alright, so it's leaking radiation. Who on Earth has any reason to worry about it? Obviously it's bad for anyone riding the engine, but comeon. It's in deep space. Everyone needs to quit worrying about a repeat of Chernobyl.

Seems like the value for the shader should be completely independent of "how much" ablator is present. Pretty sure that if it got hot enough, it's going to turn black at the same rate whether you start off with 1 unit or 1000.

Yep, that was the problem. Cranked the min pressure all the way down and it worked as expected. Thanks!

So I tried installing some graphic mods today. One of them wasn't cooperating so I removed it. Then I suddenly noticed my old career game was gone. Trying to load a quicksave showed all of my quicksaves were gone as well. Verified the game cache via steam and two items were shown to be borked and it redownloaded them. Still no change. I scanned my HD for the savegames and found ONE of them and restored it. It told me the file was incompatible with the current version. I deleted the whole ksp folder and redownloaded it. Then I dropped the sfs file back in and tried to load it. Still incompatible. What is very weird about this, is this savegame file is from yesterday, BEFORE I installed any mods. I made no attempt to access this file while the mods were installed, but somehow it is still incompatible.