Comment Re:Frist Post! (Score 1) 162
The energy released was mind-numbing: in one-fifth of a second, this supercharged magnetic neutron star blasted out as much energy as the Sun does in 250,000 years!"
There's no way for me to get my head around these numbers to "truly" feel it. What methods can you use to visualize such extreme numbers?
A fifth of a second is about the time it takes to blink. It's about 12 frames of a 720P HD video signal.
NASA Tests Flying Airbag 118
coondoggie writes "NASA is looking to reduce the deadly impact of helicopter crashes on their pilots and passengers with what the agency calls a high-tech honeycomb airbag known as a deployable energy absorber. So in order to test out its technology NASA dropped a small helicopter from a height of 35 feet to see whether its deployable energy absorber, made up of an expandable honeycomb cushion, could handle the stress. The test crash hit the ground at about 54MPH at a 33 degree angle, what NASA called a relatively severe helicopter crash."
Zombie Pigs First, Hibernating Soldiers Next 193
ColdWetDog writes "Wired is running a story on DARPA's effort to stave off battlefield casualties by turning injured soldiers into zombies by injecting them with a cocktail of one chemical or another (details to be announced). From the article, 'Dr. Fossum predicts that each soldier will carry a syringe into combat zones or remote areas, and medic teams will be equipped with several. A single injection will minimize metabolic needs, de-animating injured troops by shutting down brain and heart function. Once treatment can be carried out, they'll be "re-animated" and — hopefully — as good as new.' If it doesn't pan out we can at least get zombie bacon and spam."
Comment Re:A Scientific Protest (Score 1) 746
Fact: Every year, the temperature rose on average 0.01K or 0.0039 percent.
Fact: Temperature differences of less than 0.01 K require very sensitive equipment to be measured correctly.
...
Let's imagine that out of 73000 temperature readings only 3 values were only 1 degree Celsius off. The person reading the temperature scale made an error and incorrectly reported 21 degrees when the true daily average was 20 degrees.
If we have 3 erroneous readings out of 73000, the error is 50% higher than the assumed increase in global temperature.
Fact: 3 measurements out of 73000 being 1 degree off is an error of 0.00004 degrees. This is 1 day's worth of global warming.
If we thought we were able to predict when a specific global warming event would occur, and we we were actually wrong by an entire day, then obviously global warming is a crock.
Comment Re:No boom today... (Score 2, Funny) 600
On a totally unrelated note, NASA will try launching its new ARES X-1 rocket tomorrow.
Comment Crowdsource it (Score 4, Funny) 568
But is it wiki'd so that people can make corrections to it?
Comment Singularity Sky (Score 1) 541
"The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering to the coblestones from the skies above Novy Petrograd."
Charles Stross
Comment Re:New doomsday scenario? (Score 4, Informative) 383
The neutrinos from a core collapse supernova would be lethal to humans at the distance of Jupiter. Any given neutrino has very little chance of hitting interacting with normal density matter it passes through, but there are a LOT of neutrinos: about 0.05 solar masses of them.
Furthermore, they are the first things that escape from the core (apart from gravitational waves) since they move at near-lightspeed and have very little chance of interacting with the envelope of the star. The big flashy special effects are driven by the shockwave from the core reaching the surface, and that takes hours. So if you were at the distance of Jupiter, you would have time to die from neutrino effects before the blast hit you.
Admittedly, Betelgeuse is somewhat further away than Jupiter, and the only neutrino effects are likely to be a lot of very excited astrophysicists. But both Jupiter and Betelgeuse are much closer than 99.9999999999999999999% of the Universe, and much further away than everyone you've ever met, so the distance scales aren't that different.
Comment Google Earth (Score 1) 46
If you have geographic data, Google Earth is a great output viewer. It is easy to use Python to write a KML file.
Comment Not a new discovery (Score 1) 509
Searching on prime numbers and Benford's law, the first page includes a hit on the book
Prime Numbers by David G. Wells which on page 17 talks about Benford's law and the distribution of first digits of primes.
Comment Re:Punched cards - there was a machine for that (Score 2, Interesting) 731
Around 1980, there was a program called SPIKE, which was a virtual keypunch. It put an image of a punch card up on the screen (character graphics on a Z-100). As you typed, it wrote the characters (uppercase) at the top of the card, and blacked out the appropriate squares.
It had a mode to do blind typing (not all keypunches printed the characters at the top of the card--that cost extra). It also had a 'dropdeck' command to shuffle the lines of your file.
Comment Re:Offline Gaming machine (Score 1, Insightful) 528
Your 4-year-old's account shouldn't have administrator access.
If you gave his account administrator access, neither should you.
Comment Re:My write in (Score 1) 471
Unfortinly, Candlejack dosnt prev
Comment Re:Not from the satellites (Score 1) 155
The collision will not be elastic, since the relative velocity is faster than sound speed in any relevant material. There will be some small stuff spalled out at excess speeds due to shock waves, but anything big enough to cause the Texas fireball is not going to be accelerated by shocks and remain intact.
Inelastic collisions lose energy (but conserve momentum). So even if you had two pieces smashing together and merging to get a piece with shared momentum and a large plane change to somewhere between the two original orbits, it would then have too little velocity to remain in orbit, and would hit Earth within 45 minutes instead of sticking around for a few days.
