Crimea river.

For anyone who wants the latest news, Russia has given up on trying to recover it, saying recovery is impossible and it will be left to break up in the atmosphere.

Embryos seem just ripe for moral debates. Here's another one I've been thinking about recently.

The current most realistic way for humans to get to another star system is via a generation ship; it's the only way out there that doesn't require some sort of revolution in other technologies, such as long-term cryogenic hibernation or relativistic travel. Minimizing mass is of course absolutely critical. The most practical implementation would be to have a crew of three young, short-statured women with a family history of good fertility, a large embryo bank onboard, and appropriate facilities for implantation, with the embryos chosen for implantation in-transit also being female and from family histories of short stature and good fertility. One would try to maintain it so that there's always at least (but ideally not much more than) three people at or younger than a reasonably fertile age, so that there's a few chances to compensate should one woman prove infertile, die, or not wish to take part in furthering the population of the generation ship. Upbringing would be handled by the older generation, with the main focus of education being on medicine and repair skills. If a successful colony could be established on the other end then could a broader range of embryos be used to increase the genetic diversity, including males and people of larger stature and higher caloric consumption.

Now, best would be to start out with a staggered age for the initial crew of the generation ship and keep a staggered age throughout the transit. But here we start to get a problem. No ethics review board is going to approve the decision to, say, lock a six year old girl on a tiny, highly risky spacecraft for the rest of her life and give her a future responsibility to bear other peoples' children and then die in space. She's too young to give informed consent to such a monumental decision. Even if she were to travel with her mother, most ethics review panels would find that morally equivalent to a mother locking her child in a bunker for the rest of her life and refuse it. An infant is even worse - she couldn't even give uninformed consent, let alone informed. But the solution of only starting out the crew with informed consenting adults only postpones the issue. For each child they carry en-route is born without a choice in the matter, into a small, highly dangerous, probably uncomfortable craft with few to no peers, limited opportunities for enrichment, and no ability to leave the situation except death. Is that morally any better than sending young, non-consenting children to begin with?

It's hard for a newbie to get used to just how useful welding can be. I was trying to wedge a heavy beam into a high, tight corner, and having to bear its weight all the time, all the while thinking, "this would be easier if there was just some sort of lip to rest the beam on". Then later, of course, "Oh duh, I can just weld one there in like 20 seconds, then cut it off with an angle grinder when I'm done". It's one thing like that after the next; it's hard to get a hold of the concept of "whatever you need to make this task easier or possible, if you have appropriate scrap metal on-hand, you can make it". It's like a superpower ;) Also discovering that your welder isn't limited to the tasks that it was designed for; I've used it as a wirecutter when I couldn't find mine, as an angle grinder when mine broke, etc. I once was nearly tempted to use it as a lighter when I couldn't get mine to work ;)

That said, it's also a good way to injure yourself if you're not careful.

Ugh, I don't want to hear how "simple" it's supposed to be, I've been spending way too long trying to stop the old MIG welder I picked up a while back from birdsnesting : I think I'm going to have to take it back to town and have it serviced because I can't figure out what's wrong with it. I've got the drive wheels set so loose that it slips a little just feeding the wire into the torch, I've got the feed tube brushing up against the drive wheels (couldn't get any closer), and it's still birdsnesting. Maybe there's something wrong with the drive wheels? Or perhaps the liner in the (new) torch is somehow damaged? Or maybe something's wrong with the wire spool? There's no signs of rust on it, but the label does say "USSR" on it ;)

Stick welding is trivially easy to set up although harder to use well. Didn't help any that I had to learn it with mainly vertical and overhead welds. And yes, I burned myself a few times from sparks finding their way around my clothes.

I think the thing that's appealing about 3d printing for most people is its purity. You have a design and you send it to the printer; you don't need to have any fabrication skill or knowledge at all. Even being a good CNC operator takes practice. That said, it's hardly the be-all end-all of manufacturing technologies. I'm personally of the mind that when I want a small to moderate sized custom shape I just send off to a service that owns all of the expensive equipment and has all of the skills in doing it right; I don't care how they do it, just what the costs, design limitations, quality etc are.

Why? It's not like people were using ion thrusters too much. Most people don't want to use them because you can't accelerate the game much with them on (which is IMHO pretty stupid, they could just treat the ion thrusters as a 10x more powerful thrust source and then only simulate physics on one frame out of 10 or similar... they're so low thrust that even that would be less likely to destabilize the simulation than nuclear rockets on physics time warp) (in that regard, I don't know why time warping doesn't just self-limit itself based on the amount of forces being applied to the craft... ). And the cost of the fuel is just an absurdity, it's neither realistic nor useful toward balancing gameplay.

If there's anything that needs to be nerfed it's the nuclear rockets, almost everyone uses them and they make the game far, far easier. I know it's hard to make a "realistic" nuclear rocket design with real world-ish thrust/isp figures that's not overpowered for the game; the reason they're not used in the real world isn't because of weaknesses in that regard, but because they're difficult to make and the public is afraid of them. So why not make that their weakness in the game? You could even up their atmospheric Isp and maybe thrust to a more realistic value... but make it so that for every second the rocket is being used, there's a tiny risk of a runaway criticality incident in the reactor (come on, we know how kerbals cut corners on engineering ;) ) that could lead to the explosion of the engine. That risk would deter some players from using them, while others would consider it an acceptable riskto the mission if low enough (perhaps one in every 10 spacecraft you send to Mun explodes in transit ;) ), and still others would design spacecraft to be able to handle the loss of engines via isolation, redundancy, etc.

I think it'd be good for both gameplay and realism - "Here's awesome cutting edge technology that we haven't quiiiiite worked out the bugs on!". Totally in the Kerbal spirit.

You might have chipped it, but you didn't scratch it, unless your walls are made of diamond or something.

Having a high Mohs hardness does nothing to prevent breaks; all it does is prevent scratches from softer materials. A substance can have an incredibly high hardness but still be very brittle. You can scratch steel with a piece of chert, but if you drop a big piece of chert and a big piece of steel out a second story window, only the former is going to shatter into dozens of fragments on impact.

As if they will give a damn any your regulations... If they did, they would be a proper taxi service.

States have these peculiar individuals who work for them known as "police" who throw people who explicitly violate their regulations a place called "jail", and possibly another one called "prison".

Uber will have to play by the rules or get out of state. Otherwise their drivers and Uber corporate itself will be heavily fined at the least every day of operation, and at worst, people will go to prison.

Uber is an international corporation with venture capitol investors. They're fine trying to circumvent existing law by playing around with weasel words, like calling themselves "ridesharing" when they're really a taxi service. But when there's a bill that targets them specifically, they're not going to be allowed by the police to just keep operating in that manner.

It's hard enough to be scratchproof to the vast majority of things we encounter in our daily lives. Once you're harder than quartz and tool steel, there's not much you'll encounter in normal circumstances that can scratch you.

It's really not the spinel aspect that I find neat. It's the blurb about their process. They say they got it to work by two things: one, extreme purity (no surprise there), and two, mixing. No matter how well you try to mix fine powders together by any normal means such as shaking, you're never going to get a perfect mixture where all of the particles pack down together to their optimally dense arrangement. Apparently they've come up with a process that allows just that (they don't go into details).

Well, that's worth far more than spinel. Cheap and scalable production of materials comprised of perfectly arranged microstructures? It seems like such a thing could things in every field of materials science, from batteries to superconductors.

If, that is, it lives up to how the article makes it sound. TFA is rather high on hype and short on details.

Everything else in KSP has had months of testing (perhaps even years) and they change fundamental things like the aerodynamics model without letting it be tested by the established community?

But isn't that so in the Kerbal spirit? ;) Hmm, what's the coding equivalent of forgetting a ladder? :)

Yeah, the old aerodynamics was pretty horrible. Add a nosecone to your blunt-tipped rocket and it increases the drag? What kind of logic is that? It needed to be fixed.

There's a couple balance issues I'd like to see fixed, mind you. For example, it's possible to make small solar ion-powered aircraft in Kerbal. But only small ones, because all of the ion engines available are tiny, and all of the fixed solar panels are tiny, so while technically it's possible to make bigger craft, the necessary part spam makes the game unplayable. Fuel for ion engines is also absurdly and unrealistically expensive for no obvious reason. Yet solar panels and RTGs produce orders of magnitude more power than they should for a given size, if ion engine power to thrust ratios for a given ISP are used as the baseline.

Drop xenon costs, tweak power production / consumption for existing hardware, and add in nuclear reactor power sources (after all, they have nuclear rockets, we know kerbals understand nuclear physics), and and you could balance that out pretty well in terms of both gameplay and at least slightly more approaching realism.

(Note that one may be tempted to say that the ion thrusters are far too high power, but at least that's plausible if we assume that they're MPD thrusters with some type of advanced cooling system - you can get crazy power to weight ratios (by ion standards) out of MPD thrusters if you could somehow supply them many megawatts of power and dissipate all the waste heat - they manage it in pulsed mode, at least. But Kerbal's solar panel area-to-thrust ratios at the given ISP are not even close to being compliant with the laws of physics)

I love how true that all is. You have Musk making Kerbal references in his tweets. I've seen engineers from SpaceX doing likewise. I was once chatting with a researcher working on a Titan probe concept and he responded at one point with something like, "Well, like what one experiences on Eve in Kerbal Space Program...."

The development team really should be proud.

Thank you, but I said nothing about calories. Did I? I don't see it anywhere. I commented that a sugar SUBSTITUTE actually has more sugar than substitute in it.

By mass only, but thats a complete red herring since you use far less of it than you would of actual sugar.

Nobody is ever going to make a mass-market pure Stevia product because it's way too hard to use - it's just way too concentrated of a sweetener. Trust me, I've used it, I usually have to resort to weighting it out on a jewler's scale. It's silly to point out small amounts of sugar filler; for a given amount of sweetness you'll never consume a significant amount.

They could use something else that wasn't a digestable carb instead.

No, people like you and "food babe" would freak out at the names of indigestible carbs far worse than you do with dextrose. And dextrose won't alter the texture or flavor of the food product like many indigestible carbohydrates such as resistant starches would.

I was talking about ingredients in Stevia products; she has the documentation.

She has a page full of claims, half of which are laughable BS that she just made up, as is her typical modus operandi.

Right. Ok. Whatever. I don't think I told you to believe everything she's ever said, did I?

You're the one who linked to a running joke, its your problem.

I just gave you a link to a peer-reviewed study which studied its breakdown components in the bloodstream and you're still claiming otherwise? Tsk tsk. And to help you out with what you're confusing, you're mixing up aspartame with olestra. Olestra is the food additive that doesn't break down in the small intestine, passes through, and if eaten in excess causes loose stools or related problems. The quantities of olestra used, since it's a substitute to fats, are significant. The quantities of aspartame used are far too small to have such an effect even if they didn't break down rapidly in the intestines (which has been amply documented that they do).

find it humorous that you are ranting about me for "anecdotal evidence" when you just challenged someone to "prove me wrong right now in just a couple weeks" by using the same kind of evidence.

Surely you'll admit that "I experienced it myself" is better than "some TV 'documentary' whose name I don't remember had some woman who claimed it"

The human digestive system does not throw away energy from digestible substances.

Uhhh, yeah, it can. Maybe there's more to this than you know? Ok, the digestive system may not, but the excretory system can.

Link

The interior surface of the small intestine is composed of microvilli that dramatically enlarge its absorptive surface, accounting for an extraordinary efficiency in absorbing consumed substrates: 98% of all digestible carbohydrate is absorbed; 95% of all fat is absorbed; and 92% of all protein is absorbed.

That's the baseline. How much more efficient exactly do you think your particular digestive system is than 98% of carbs, 95% of fat and 92% of protein?