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Talk like Up-Goer Five: Express complex ideas using only very simple, common words. For anyone who has somehow managed to miss it, a while back xkcd had an absolutely brilliant strip: a schematic of the Saturn V, carefully labeled.... but with all terms restricted to only the thousand most common English words. This is where the KSP community gets the term "you will not go to space today." https://xkcd.com/1133/ This game is to talk like Up-Goer Five. That is, you have to express complex ideas using only the most common English words. Here are the rules: The person before you ends their post with a brief paragraph of something reasonably complex to explain. You need to take their post and re-word it using this tool (it lets you type what you want, and draws a red line under any "forbidden" words): http://splasho.com/upgoer5/ You can paraphrase if need be (you'll probably need to). The one really hard rule is, your "translation" has to fit in that tool's edit box with no red "forbidden words" underlines at all. Post your translation inside a spoiler box, so that people reading your post have a chance to guess an answer first, if they want to. Then provide a technical paragraph of your own for the next person to take a shot at. You're not allowed to answer your own post; someone else has to. But you're welcome to come back again after some other folks have had their turns. Guidelines for the "technical paragraph": Don't make it too long, please. Just a sentence or two is plenty. (Otherwise nobody will want to take the burden of "translating" it.) Don't make it so hard that nobody understands it. It should be something that a typical KSP forum user can understand without having to go look stuff up. Ideally the post should be about KSP-relevant topics, e.g. spaceflight, astronomy, engineering, KSP game advice, etc., but that's not a strict requirement, just a suggested guideline. (Props to @Deddly for pointing out the upgoer5 tool to me, which is what gave me the idea for this game.) Just as an example, here's a sample technical paragraph: SRBs are useful as boosters on the launchpad, because they're inexpensive and provide a lot of thrust. However, they're less efficient as upper stages, due to having a low Isp. Here's my stab at translation, using the above-linked tool to validate it: Fair 'nuff? Okay, to get the ball rolling, here's a technical paragraph for someone to start with: Building a SSTO spaceplane is challenging, because not only do you need to balance air-breathing engines with those that work in a vacuum, but also the ship needs to be aerodynamically stable at high velocity.

https://xkcd.com/903/ Alt-text: Wikipedia trivia:if you click on any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses and italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy". Now, I decided to test this. I went to a random Wikipedia page. I got "Knife Sharpening". My path: Knife Sharpening -> Knife -> Blade -> Tool -> Matter -> Atom -> Matter -> Atom -> Matter -> ... It ends in an infinite loop! The "Philosophy" myth is a lie! I thought I'd share it with the community.

Got 'em? Wanna share 'em? Here are mine: http://xkcd.com/1663/#0aa66228-fa6f-11e5-8001-42010a8e0013 My main one. I made others before, but this is the one I realized you could save the URL and it would edit only from that browser. http://xkcd.com/1663/#e13412ce-fb30-11e5-8001-42010a8e000d My blue garden. I wanna see what else other than Octopi grows on blue lights, but it's mostly boring. I put some warmer lights later for diversity, but the first one is still cooler. http://xkcd.com/1663/#8c21ea92-fa5c-11e5-8002-42010a8e0007 When I realized you could save your gardens, I dug my history and found the first one. I call it the 'Kittengarten'. Also, isn't this called 'The Lounge' anymore? I liked that p.s.: If you don't know what I'm talking about, XKCD strip 1663 is a flash where when you open it, it generates an ID which is associated with the browser that created it, so it's your garden but you can share it as read-only. You set up the lighting, and things grow. Slowly. From my experiments, it seems things grow in the background, but grow faster if at least one browser has that garden open (I leave my main one open at work, and got no reason to think anyone is looking at my other ones, but things still grow in them from time to time).

http://what-if.xkcd.com/142/ The What If? blog hasn't been updated in awhile, then today there's two new entries. This one is pretty funny, but what I'm pointing at is the panel with two cars in orbit, their drivers having a dialogue (it makes sense in the context). Read the panel, then mouseover for the tooltip. Friggin' hilarious.