Comment Re:Tons of lumber? (Score 1) 452
Aren't most houses made from concrete nowadays?
They certainly aren't in the US.
Aren't most houses made from concrete nowadays?
They certainly aren't in the US.
What is the declared value of a dollar?
The value of a dollar is the ability to pay one dollar's worth of US Federal taxes.
What percentage of Internet users in the United States have even visited Wikipedia, much less would feel the loss?
Visited? Um, basically all of them?
I think you meant "edited".
The trail ought to expand and get larger, the farther the source moves away from the thrust. Although there's some uniformity to the seeming circumference of the contrail, it would be larger to the west, and therefore doesn't look like an airliner coming east.
I've seen the inverse argument made. That because things get smaller with distance, it can't be an airliner coming east. The enlarging of the contrail as it disperses is competing with the shrinking with distance. Intuition about which should be winning fails.
And why would there be thrust when the airplane is supposed to be descending (W to E, Honolulu to PHX)?
Because Phoenix is 375 miles from Los Angeles? Flight records for a later run of flight 808 show it beginning its descent about 25 miles west of the California/Arizona border. The flight took a good 50 minutes to get from 37k feet over Los Angeles to arrival on the ground at Phoenix.
They also don't turn the engines off to make the plane go down.
Apollo 11 was run from this perspective. Multiple launches (Apollo + Agena) docked in orbit to become the composite lunar spacecraft.
This is incorrect. Each manned Apollo mission used a single Saturn V. (Except for the Apollo 7 test flight, which used a Saturn IB.) Orbital docking occurred between the command/service module and lunar module launched on the same rocket.
Agena boosters were modified to practice docking during the Gemini program, but had no direct involvement in Apollo.
They would have except for Obama de-funding the program. I guess you forgot about that.
You're kidding, right?
Obama has proposed removing funding for the Constellation Program in the 2011 budget. The budget cuts haven't taken effect and are still being argued over. The reason NASA hasn't built them is that NASA is years behind schedule.
Let's see:
SpaceX has delivered a 1960s era liquid fuel rocket designed for LEO. NASA has delivered a 1970s era test vehicle as part of a program to develop a 2010s era launch system.
SpaceX has an almost working satellite launch vehicle. NASA was developing a system for sending people to Luna and Mars.
In five-ish years, SpaceX designed, built, and flew a prototype two-stage rocket. In five-ish years, NASA put a guidance system on an existing STS SRB, and launched a fake second stage.
And you are still confusing two separate launchers. The Ares I is a LEO launch vehicle, an orbital taxi. It can no more get one to the Moon than the Falcon 9. It can ferry people to a lunar transfer vehicle, but so could the Falcon 9.
Yeah, SpaceX has gotten very far using NASA's old technology.
NASA can't get anywhere using NASA's old technology, so SpaceX is still ahead on that score.
SpaceX started years before the Aries program, used 30 year old technology
I guess you forgot that the Constellation system was supposed to take us back to Luna and then on to Mars and not just the ISS which is the primary target of the Falcon 9 system.
You are misinformed. The Ares I rocket is just a LEO launcher. It is an extended space shuttle solid rocket booster with an upper stage powered by a single Saturn V motor. The technology in it dates to the mid-1970s or even earlier.
The Ares V is a heavy-lift booster that outclasses anything built. Or it would if they'd actually try building one. It is a STS External Tank with five motors off the Delta IV under it and two STS SRBs attached to it. The upper stage is powered by the same Saturn V derivative motor used on the Ares I.
Both programs started development circa 2005 (SpaceX was only founded in 2002). SpaceX has delivered a working launch vehicle. NASA has launched what was literally a slightly modified SRB out of the Space Shuttle inventory as the Ares I-X, and is unlikely to launch the real thing until 2017. The Ares V hasn't even begun to leave the drawing board.
SpaceX has a working satellite launcher that can be made man-rated. The Constellation program has nothing.
Not sure about that. I've seen claims that a lot of the thrust of a solar sail would be due to the solar wind...which would tend to stick, and thus couldn't be tacked against.
Those claims are wrong. The force on a solar sail due to solar radiation pressure is about a thousand times that of the solar wind.
Also, solar cells tend to absorb photons, capturing their momentum, and when they re-radiate it (at a lower frequency) the direction is random.
The solar cells are going to be absorbing a small fraction of the incoming photons. If the sail is designed properly, the rest will be reflected in a controllable direction.
If this is correct, then the simple model of solar sails tacking using reflected light is at least an oversimplification, and possibly so much of an oversimplification that it doesn't properly predict the effects.
Your assumptions are wrong, and the model is correct.
MESSENGER has used its mostly reflective solar panels to make deliberate course changes. The basic physical principle is already proven, not just in the lab, but in space. JAXA is examining the practicality of building large solar sails, not whether they will work at all.
2000 was the end of the last decade.
2000 was not the last year of the 1990s, 1999 was.
2000 as the end of the 20th century works because it's counting time since the switch to positive integers, and there was no year zero. Decades such as the 80s, 90s, and whatever we end up calling the period from 2000 to 2009 (inclusive) are not set from the origin, but are based on the tens digit of the year. 2000 may have been part of the 20th century, but it wasn't part of the 90s.
Also note that kimvette made an exception to include a movie released in 2000, which establishes that the conventional 1990-1999 definition of the 90s was intended.
It was made in the same decade as Starship Troopers, The Phantom Menace, the Look Who's Talking sequels, Highlander II, and let's include Supernova since it was actually reproduced in the '90s, although not released until 2000. Let's not forget Lucas' destroying the original Star Wars trilogy, changing A New Hope so that Greedo shot first.
There were far worse movies made in the 90s.
Then it's a good thing Battlefield: Earth was released May 10, 2000, and not in the 1990s.
The official nominees were Battlefield Earth, Freddy Got Fingered, Gigli, I know Who Killed Me, and Swept Away.
I guess Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 was too awful to acknowledge.
"Conclude" means "bring to an end." They might have concluded treaty negotiations, but they didn't conclude a treaty (except to the extent that this new treaty may replace an old one, which is clearly not what was meant). And concluding negotiations doesn't imply either agreement or disagreement, so the headline should probably read "US and Russia agree to arms control treaty."
This is incorrect. The headline uses the word "conclude" correctly.
"Bring to an end" is one of the many meanings of conclude. The one being used here is "to bring to a decision or settlement; settle or arrange finally: to conclude a treaty."
This use is not only correct, it is the dictionary example of this particular meaning.
Or even as simple as: You get 200k/year based on the % of votes you were there for. Show up for 5 votes out of 100, you get 10k.
But the point is, we shouldn't have to pay senators anything. The money should be a symbol of gratitude for their service.
Then you intentionally limit Senate candidates to those who can do without a source of income for six years. They'll either be filthy rich, or really open to taking bribes (real bribes, not just "campaign donations").
A legislature skewed even more towards the wealthy and corrupt, just what we need.
The sterile insect technique dates to the 1950s, and has been used with great success in suppressing the screw-worm (eradicated in the US in 1982). An animal infested with screw worm maggots can die simply from the tissue damage as the maggots "screw" into their flesh. It's one of the few species against which there is an intentional attempt at extermination, and I can't disagree with it.
The technique inspired the Nebula Award-winning science fiction story The Screwfly Solution. In the story, the technique does not so much go wrong as horribly right.
Dang that thagomizer, skewing the statistics down.
Ask yourself: why care of the targets know they're being watched?
Firstly, when the enemy knows that you're watching, he can attempt to deceive you.
Secondly, if the enemy can reliably know when he is being watched, then he can also reliably know when he is not being watched and is thus free to do whatever he wants.
Mystics always hope that science will some day overtake them. -- Booth Tarkington
