Actually, let me rephrase that -- it's not counter-intuitive at all that amplitude goes as 1/r, but what's odd is that with gravitational waves, you directly detect the wave amplitude, so detectability falls off as 1/r. For most waves, you detect the wave intensity, which goes as amplitude squared and therefore 1/r^2.

Counter-intuitively, the strain amplitude goes as the inverse of the distance, not the inverse square!

The Earth-Moon system is bound, so not useful to measure the Hubble constant. By definition, a bound system is one in which gravity has overcome cosmological expansion.

These are all true, but I find the reasons people are giving for grocery stores completely miss the point:

No two tomatoes are the same.

I can't tell you which tomato I want without picking it up, looking at it, and feeling it.

[TMB]

And every US state has official road maps for free at the first visitor's center after you cross the state line.

It's all about delta-v, not about the occurence of said gasses on Earth.

Rockets work, whether we like it our not, according to the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation: the delta-v you can obtain it only logarithmic in your start mass / payload fraction, but linear in your exhaust velocity. That velocity is in ~3 km/s for chemical rockets, but 20-50 km/s for ion engines. That allows you to push a probe/ship from LEO into a transfer orbit using a massively lighter ship, which in turn allow you to launch that into orbit using a massively smaller launch vehicle.

http://www.urbandictionary.com...

Do you have numbers to back up your assertions? Are you comparing it to ALL aspects of "traditional currency?" According to wikipedia 350 MW is approximately 1% of ALL US power usage. That seems rather a lot to me to be going to something that has zero physical benefit.

I spend a large fraction of my time deep in the National Radio Quiet Zone. WiFi is illegal. The assumption that you will always be able to do wireless is faulty.

For some reason that I don't understand, ethernet adapters die at a ridiculous rate. I've been through 7 in 3.5 years, and everyone I know who uses them has similar stories. I've tried a variety of brands, with no difference in the results.

Two wrongs do not make a right.

...without the transfer or matter of energy.

Come on it is the first line of the summary and a glaring error editors.

I don't like locked-down computers any more than you do. I hate ransomware even more; it's the single most despicable use of public key cryptography there is. But consider that without public key cryptography Apple wouldn't even be in a position to stop the FBI from hacking the iPhone. Individuals wouldn't even have the option to secure their personal communications, at least not in practice. (Yes, I know all about one-time pads. That's why I said "in practice"). Nor would we have the Internet, or at least anything like the one we have now. And without the Internet, computers of all kinds (secure or non-secure boot) wouldn't be nearly as capable and available as they are now because the volume and demand would be vastly less.

Where you see eccentricity, I see genius, insight and long hair. And I couldn't care less about the long hair.

I really can't think of more deserving recipients. I've never met Hellman, but I've met Diffie a few times, including when we testified to the Senate Commerce Committee during the 1990s Crypto Wars. He's a national asset whenever the NSA and FBI get a little too far out of line. Which is most of the time.