Especially important when working in the "Musk" Observatory.

At least with an enemy you know where you stand, but a "neutral"?

It wouldn't have been that remarkable, because people had been already been milking sheep and possibly goats for millenia by the time the cow was domesticated.

You're going to waste helium on balloons? It's much more valuable as a coolant for the collider.

Not at all; I think that would be a cool project. It just requires a larger baseline than the Earth's orbit and/or larger telescopes. Drop these at the Sun-Neptune Lagrange points, and it might work for the nebulae.

You're not going to get enough parallax on something as distant as a galaxy to be useful for stereo imaging. If you place these in Earth orbit, on opposite sides of the Earth, you're looking at on order 10000 km separation. The distance to the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy (let's call that the nearest one) is 25,000 ly, or on order 10^17 km. That gives you a parallax of 20 nano-arcseconds. Hubble's diffraction limited resolution is 50 milli-arcseconds. (Interferometry won't help here, since we're trying to compare two distinct images from individual telescopes).

There are closer nebulae. The Orion nebula is only 1300 ly away, so we're looking at a parallax of 0.2 micro-arcseconds. Still not enough.

If, as another poster suggested, we put them at L4 and L5 (Sun-Earth), we're talking more like a few times 10^8 km separation. So that puts us in the few milliarcsecond range for the Orion nebula. Not quite good enough for visible light, but UV could work.

You are technically correct. The best kind of correct. But it is curious that there are instances where my original assertion (mostly I was joking) holds. Full disclosure: I'm a northerner. Born in Ann Arbor, MI and grew up in Northern VA (which is culturally part of DC, not VA) and cannot say "y'all" with any legitimacy.

I voted on 28 Oct before Sandy came through. It was cold and blustery and took over three hours. I think this is the first Presidential election MD has had early voting for, and massively underestimated the turnout. The line wrapped around the parking lot. Folks were generally very nice about waving incomers to available parking spaces and holding places in line for people to run in to use the facilities, pop over to the 7-11 to get coffee, or retrieve additional outerwear from their vehicles.

I was at one of five early voting stations in Anne Arundel County, and they had a total of ten voting machines available for it. Judging by the rate at which people left (about one per minute), I estimate that it took an average of ten minutes to cast a ballot. There were a lot of ballot questions and such on there, but I got the impression that many voters hadn't bothered to read them before showing up. Why stand in line to vote if you haven't made up your mind yet? Poll workers were constantly walking down the line offering sample ballots for people to read and never got any takers.

Actually, "y'all" is singular. The plural is "All y'all."

Wind speed isn't everything, and that's all the Category tells you. Sandy was gigantic, and likely had more total energy than the 1938 'cane.

Let's try it first with some extant Earth life, a gila monster or bacterium or something for which we know the answer. There's no point in sending this to Mars before we can make it work on Earth.

That's the one candy I can't stand anymore. I think it's just years of getting way too many of them at Halloween. I don't think there's much difference between those and say, SweetTarts or Pixie Stix. But for some reason I just can't tolerate Smarties any more.

Nearly every non-chocolate candy is made of those three ingredients in varying amounts.

I have never heard of a paper being rejected by a journal and then sent to Nature or Science. It's the other way around.

That's exorbitant. I'm only willing to pay half of that rate.