PakledHostage

Right, but Machete Order goes 4, 5, 2, 3, 6. Watching Rogue One before any of them ( i.e. before 4) doesn't make sense when watching them in that order. The Saint makes a good case for watching it after 6.

I wondered that too, so I looked up a handful of them.Of the ones I looked at: Radium (Ra), Radon (Rn) and Technetium (Tc), all are radioactive decay products of more common elements like Uranium. They exist in small quantities in nature but are not stable. I don't have time to look them all up but it seems plausible that they are all decay products of heavier, more stable elements and exist in nature, albeit in small quantities.

As the thread title asks: Where does Star Wars Rogue One fit into Machete Order? I rewatched the whole series in machete order last winter and I agree that it works better that way than watching in other orders. I intend to watch it in that order with my kids once they are old enough. And as, in my opinion anyways, Rogue One is one of the best Star Wars movies, it needs to be in there somewhere... But where?

That actually raises an interesting question: what could we use on the Moon to make raw building materials? As far as I know, concrete is made from limestone, which is a sedimentary rock made up of fossilized corals, mollusks etc. We won't find any limestone on the Moon, so no concrete. And no oil, so no plastics either. (I am assuming that bringing large quantities of those materials up from Earth will be too expensive.)

I'd see one or two a day if I was paying attention, but I usually don't. I did see one up in the flight levels going over Banff last fall though. That was kind of neat.

It was a hot day with lots of heat shimmer coming off the runways so most of my photos weren't very sharp, but I liked the composition of that one. It looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. As for the other ones, I've always loved the P-51, and the Aeroshell team put on a good show. Cranking an airplane with greater than 1:1 thrust to weight ratio around the sky is a lot easier than doing the same thing in a big heavy T6. Watching those guys was like watching a rollercoaster. Their energy management was impeccable.

Three photos from this past summer:

I am out of my depth on this topic, but I thought gravitational lensing around distant galaxies was one method that we can "see" dark matter, in so far as we see its effect on light bending around those distant galaxies to form Einstein rings? I understood that the amount of lensing we observe is consistent with what we expect if dark matter is indeed present?

How it is done depends on the type of sensor and I was referring to my own camera.

I presume that they would have mounted each filter separately, captured the analog data for that image through the filter and then digitized and downlinked the data at a later time. Post processing on the ground would then combine the colour filtered images to render some sort of false colour image. If you think about it, that isn't too different from how a modern digital camera works. At least not in principle... Modern camera sensors just have the A/D conversion built in to their hardware. Each "pixel" on my camera's sensor is really three individual sensors. A microscopic filter is mounted in front of each of the three sensor elements at each pixel to make them pick up only one of red, green or blue light. The A/D converter hardware in each of those three sensor elements then converts the observed red/green/blue light intensity into a 12 bit number. The resulting 36 bits of RGB data acquired at each pixel is then stored directly into a 'RAW' image file or converted in camera to some other compressed format (like .JPG). In other words, a modern camera is really taking three images simultaneously, each with a different filter installed, and then combining the data in post processing to render a "colour" image. It just does it in near real time. But if someone were crazy enough to try, they could also print out the data from each of the red, green and blue sensors onto a grid and hand-colour it to generate an image...

I got the sense that they stored the analog data from the camera onto analog tape and Mariner then digitized that data for transmission back to Earth. This system makes sense because they wouldn't have had to do the processing in real time and it could be managed by slow electronics. The Wikipedia article also says that they transmitted all the images twice for redundancy.

Derek at Veritassium made a good summary of this observation:

What about a quark star? Now that would be a thing!

I don't know... This is actually pretty exciting. We are seeing a whole new branch of astronomy/astrophysics being opened up with the advent of gravitational wave detectors, and in my mind this announcement really validates this year's Nobel Prize in Physics.

Q.E.D.

Contact. Good movie, better book.

Why? So far your argument has amounted to "because [technical] reasons" but "because reasons" as an argument doesn't even pass muster with my three year old. You do realize that we are talking about detonating a warhead at a distance of tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of kilometers from earth?

But nuclear weapons have been detonated at an altitude of 400 km: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime. That's "space" enough for the ISS.

I don't think anyone is talking about vaporizing whole asteroids... at least I am not. What we are talking about is using the energy of a nuclear explosion to ablate the surface of the asteroid/comet with the conequece of imparting an equal and opposite momentum to it. The idea is that the "push" is sufficient to cause it to miss. The advantage of this method is you don't need to land anything on the impactor. You just detonate the warehead in proximity. It may not work or it may not work enough, but with today's technology, it may be the only arrow that we have in our quiver if we suddenly discover an inbound oort cloud comet that's going to hit us in 18 months.

Exactly. Because the thing won't hit (if it hits at all) until ~860 years from now. We've got lots of time. Heck, a significant factor in whether it even hits is the Yarkovsky effect. Simply taking the Rolling Stones' advice and painting it black might even be enough to deflect it.

That was implicit in my last post. But that doesn't mean that, in the absence of any other options beyond digging underground bunkers, (hey, it worked for our mammal ancestors 60 odd million years ago), we wouldn't at least try it.

Something to bear in mind for a realistic ELE type impact scenario is that we may not have any option other than to detonate nukes as the object whizzes by at ludicrous speed. All the near earth objects over 1 km in diameter have been identified via the WISE probe's whole sky survey (within a reasonable degree of confidence) and none of them other than maybe 1950DA are on a collision course with us. The dinosaur killer has been estimated to have been on the order of 10 km in diameter, so we can be quite confident that we won't get blind sided by something like that. What we have to worry about, on the other hand is something like comet C/2013 A1 Siding Spring that passed close to Mars in 2014. It was only about 18 months from when it was discovered until it passed Mars, and initial computations of its orbit suggested that it might hit. Worse yet, it was on a retrtograde trajectory and would hit at ~60 km/sec. It wouldn't have to be very big to do a lot of damage at that speed. And we don't have any rockets with enough delta-V to reach and land anything on something like that enough in advance. All we could do is send nukes on flyby trajectories and detonate them at closest approach in the hopes that they deflect it enough (via the ablation method mentioned above) to miss us.

The CBC played Wildflowers on the radio this morning after interviewing Cameron Crowe about his friendship and professional relationship with Tom Petty. I'll be playing the whole album when I get home from work.

At first there were news reports that Tom Petty had died, then there were reports that those reports were wrong. Sadly now there are new reports that Tom Petty has indeed died. One more Wilbury has reached the end of the line.

Pot calling the kettle black? Said Polynesians settled the entire tropical Pacific, including some of the most remote islands on the planet. They weren't just blown around like flotsam in the breeze on one way trips, either. They knew what they were doing and were extremely skilled mariners. (Ref. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau_Piailug and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupaia_(navigator))