Back in the early 1960s, psychiatrist guided trips with LSD, Mescaline and Psilocybin were kind of a thing. I have an ancient copy of "The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience" and a common theme for many of the people who took LSD in controlled settings was a sense that it was a transformative experience.

Of course, that's probably what right wing nutjobs fear and why it got made illegal. Can't have the masses realize that religion, the rat race and the whole media-inspired hokum is bullshit.

Picture reversing the time vector. Do you think you can gently throw an object to Charon escape just by choosing some clever trajectory? No? Then why do you think it will work that way and land with a gentle velocity with time flowing in the opposite direction?

That's the point. The escape velocity on Charon is 580 meters per second. So even something with no momentum when it arrived at Charon would be falling at 580 m/s (1300 mph) when it hit the ground. Picture shooting Mount Everest into the ground at that velocity. Is this really what you'd expect to see as a result, it holding together and just sitting in a hole? Of course not, it'd shatter and explode massively, kick out a rim, fill in the transient crater with debris, etc - aka, a crater forming event. And that's the bare minimum impact velocity, realistic impacts would be far harder (dozens of kilometers per second) in the overwhelming majority of situations..

I love how Alan Stern and the rest of the team go through lengths to call Pluto a planet. This time he even laid particular emphasis on calling Pluto-Charon a binary planet. :)

Great team. Great project. Great results. Just amazing.
 

It's really weird. I've heard a lot of people speculate that it's just an asteroid that "landed gently" in Charon's low gravity or something by being on a really lucky trajectory. But it just doesn't work that way. Picture running the time axis in reverse. Does one think that there's a particular trajectory that they could pick the rock back up and throw it back into space without requiring a lot of energy? The fact is that even on a body like Charon, big chunks of rock can't just gently settle down.

It's just a really weird thing to see.

It seems more complicated than that (even ignoring that impacts don't generally make heart shapes). For example, have you seen the carbon monoxide data? It's all clustered in that area. Why would an asteroid make carbon monoxide cluster there?

There's some really interesting things going on. Take a look at this picture and think of what it looks like to you:

Link.

Doesn't it look like... well... a shoreline?

Now take a look at those fractures in Sputnik Planum - notice how they have a curious inner ridge:

Link

Where else have we seen that before? Oh right, Europa:

Link

It's the shape of a liquid welling up through a crack and freezing due to a drop in pressure.

To me, this shows all the signs of a cryosea underneath an ice cap. Which leads to the question: can that occur on Pluto? And the answer is, "probably". With N2, CO, and CH4, you can get eutectics with triple points as low as 51K (a naive solar equilibrium-temperature calculation for pluto's surface, without any other sources of heat, reaches up to 55K). Add neon into the mix and it gets down to 24,6K. The key is, these liquids can't exist on the surface - they require pressure to exist. Which means that they can only exist as aquifers and subglacial lakes/seas. Pure nitrogen requires about 18 meters of pure nitrogen ice (more because it'd have pore space and be mixed with lower density ices). Pure neon would require about 3x as much.

The flat areas in Tombaugh Regio have two radically different appearances. One is the aforementioned area that looks like sea ice with frozen cracks (Sputnik Planum). The other is what's being called a "pitted" terrain. The latter touches the "shore" of the regio, while the former is deep in the middle (at least, from the pictures revealed so far). If one wanted to step even further out onto the limb here, they could posit that the "pitted" terrain involves these ices sitting directly on "bedrock" (which in a pluto context here is water ice), while the terrain that looks like sea ice would have liquid dozens of meters or more down.

But this is all just along one line of thinking. There's just so many possibilities right now. One notices, for example, similarities with various pluto features and frost-heaving earth features like pingos and ice wedges. But it could be something completely new entirely. This isn't water we're dealing with.

A real crazy thing is to think about how there might be vertitable explosive processes on Pluto. Solid nitrogen that forms due to decompression undergoes an energetic glass to crystalline transition. And overall does really weird stuff when freezing (start about a minute in).

Also note that there is nitrogen being lost from Pluto. Lots - 500 tonnes an hour. Over geological timeperiods, that's a massive, massive amount. Pluto loses its atmosphere 2 1/2 orders of magnitude faster than Mars. And yet it's still there. So where's it coming from? The team already pointed out that there doesn't seem to be a planetwide layer of deep nitrogen ice. To me that only seems to leave the possibility that it comes from deeper within the planet. But for it to move from deeper within to the top means a fluid (an aquifer), not an ice (either that or serious tectonics dragging up 500 tonnes an hour!). And given that Pluto's crust provides pressure, it's easier for nitrogen to exist as a liquid than a gas in such a situation.

My sense is that for severe bipolar, schizophrenic and psychotic people the meds all have pretty awful side effects. I can't even list the number of articles I've read about people who would rather live in dark hole, hallucinating and talking to Satan than NOT do that but put up with the side effects.

I think the challenge for bipolar patients is worse because when they quit taking their meds there is a transition period where the mania-dampening effects wear off over a period of time and during the transition the positive feelings (energy, positive mindset, sense of potential, etc) give them a false sense that they don't need the meds and by the time they start getting into trouble they're into a full-blown manic episode and out of control.

It's probably worse for a lot of bipolar patients because some of them end up on what sort of amounts to contradictory drugs, one pill to control the mania and another pill to control the depression, resulting not in feeling especially normal but kind of seesawing between mania and depression. It's like Leonardo DiCaprio in "Wolf of Wall Street" inhaling quaaludes to come down off all the coke he's doing and then doing a bunch of coke to overcome the quaaludes.

I feel like I know more than I probably should, but part of that is probably because her "boyfriend" slipped a phone to her in the psych ward and she called me (I don't know why, we were friendly but not friends, if that makes sense) several times so I think her family felt like I was owned some details.

Anyway, I don't have a great handle on her experience prior to this episode other than that she had been treated for it for a while and I'm sure her husband had struggled with her for a long time before this incident. The problem for any husband in this situation is that it's a community property state, so whatever debts she rung up would have been his debts. How's he supposed to help her if they're both broke because she spent all their money? Even with his insurance from the college he worked at, which is probably a better policy than many, mental health coverage is horseshit. A ton of out of pocket.

About the only other thing that could have been forcibly detaining her, heavily sedating her on ativan for a couple of days while re-starting her on her bipolar meds and keeping her detained until she recovered enough. Almost impossible to pull off without criminal charges, long-term resentment on her part and the cooperation of a psychiatrist to administer the meds via IV if she wouldn't take them. If it fails, well, now he's not just broke, but in prison.

The thing is she had a history of bipolar behavior which was stabilized by medication. I don't know why she quit taking it. It could have been a conscious decision or could have been the byproduct of going out of town without it, not taking it for three days, deciding she didn't need it and then the mania sets in and she *won't* take it because she feels so great.

I think a lot of people on meds for bipolar have this risk -- I think the onset of mania probably feels pretty darn good, filling them with energy and false self-confidence.

My mother sometimes sends me checks from the states. The bank cashiers are always confused by them and have to get their managers, who eventually sign off on them. The last time I was at the bank with a check the cashier spent several minutes insisting to me that they can't accept checks before going back and getting approval.

Checks have no place in this modern world.

Good to see you guys catching up on credit cards. When are you going to finally modernize your banking system as well? ;)

Anyway, I can attest to the point of this article, in Iceland you see those little portable card readers (I don't know what they're called in English, they look like this) everywhere, whether it's someone walking around between tents at a campsite collecting the day's fees or some unknown band playing a little gig in a bar - a lot more often than you see them in the states.

They had been married for 20-odd years, I'm pretty sure he'd spent a fair amount of time, money and effort helping her manage her situation. This wasn't the first or only time it had happened, but was probably the worst.

And in her situation when she stopped taking her meds, she goes off the rails and between her paranoia and crazy behavior he had to make a pretty difficult decision to either "stick with her" and have her ruin both their lives or finally decide enough was enough and divorce her just to save himself.

It's arguable that male on female spousal abuse is a mental illness, too, but nobody would suggest that the wife in such a situation should just stick with it, try to help him while he beats the hell out of her.

And the advantage her sister had was that she wasn't Theresa's husband, she was her sister. A longer, blood family relationship that couldn't feed into any husband/wife issues or paranoia. If I recall right, she also had the slight advantage that Theresa had a scene with the hotel staff (probably one of many) where the staff eventually called the cops and they got her put into the county psych ward on a 72 hour hold because of her obviously bizarre behavior. This psych hold was key in obtaining conservatorship by her sister.

The main problem with this solution is the amount of power the fan would draw.

Solar Impulse is a 30kW airplane. Cooling fans are nothing compared to that. Furthermore, I also wrote: "Or if you want it to be passive, a greenhouse window opener to open up the insulation when it gets hot".

This isn't rocket science here. Everyone who works with large format battery packs knows that you can't just cover them in foam insulation and pretend that's good enough. You don't have to go to the sort of extremes Tesla and GM go to - Nissan's Leaf doesn't even use cooling fans. But it does use cooling channels with passive forced air coming from the car's motion, as well as pad heaters to warm them up when it's too cold. Because they're not so daft as to think that you can just pack them in insulation and call that good.

They probably know more about batteries than you will ever learn.

You know nothing about me, let's leave it at that.

They are attempting something very difficult that hasn't been done before, There will be problems.

As I said - "I'm not faulting them for their oversight - bad decisions happen in every engineering project."

But as I also said: "But this doesn't strike me as any sort of unusual nor unexpected situation. News flash, temperature-sensitive batteries need proper temperature regulation rather than just being slathered in foam, details at 11...."

Building a manned solar powered airplane to make such long runs is very much a new and challenging thing. Designing large format battery packs, not so much.

Right about average. The average US driver drives 13.476 miles per year and goes an average of 10 years between accidents.

I agree there can be abuse, but here's a counter example:

My neighbors across the street were a well-educated couple in their early 50s. Your stereotypical liberal, white academics. They had a son in college. Mike was a university professor and Theresa was a writer and an editor for a book publisher. We hosted several neighbors for a New Year's Eve party, including this couple. We had known all of them for a few years.

During the party, Theresa was unusually animated -- if I didn't know better, I'd thought she'd done a couple lines of coke. Fast forward a couple of months later, I see her pulling up to her house in a brand new hybrid sedan. I start talking to her and it's like, wow, Theresa, no more coke. She's, well, crazy animated. She's got a semi-paranoid story about how her husband left her. She's starting her own magazine. She's arranging a photo shoot in Nepal. She's just bought a $2000 recumbent bike. A $2000 set of downhill ski gear.

A week later, I see her again. This time "I've been staying at the Grand Hotel [a pricey, boutique hotel downtown] because I need Internet access and Mike made it so I can't get it at home."

A week after that, a really scary looking black guy is getting out of her car -- without her -- and is seen going in and out of her house, sometimes carrying stuff to load in the car. Her immediate next door neighbors try talking to the guy "Hey, how's Theresa?" and he's angry and threatens them. They call the cops, the cops detain the guy but they let him go after talking to Theresa on the phone "Yes, he's my boyfriend."

Fast forward a few weeks later and we see her ex-husband and we get the story. Theresa is bipolar. She's went off her meds around New Year's Eve. She got so bad and refused any kind of treatment or to take her meds, yes, he does leave her and basically files for divorce to protect himself from her.

By the time her sister -- working with lawyers -- is able to gain conservatorship of her, about a month later, after probably six weeks of trying, she's nearly bankrupt. When she and her husband divorced, their house had been recently remodeled and was owned free and clear. She stayed, mortgaged the place to cash him out and had blown through the $200k half of her equity plus another $50k in credit card debt. Fired from her job, the "magazine" a total fantasy. The black guy was literally some guy she met on the street outside the hotel.

Her sister finally gets her committed on a short-term basis and they get her back on her meds. By this time, though, she's done. She files bankruptcy, sells the house short along with almost all her possessions to try to pay off some debt. She ends up in a studio apartment somewhere, working part-time at a book store.

All of this happened in about six months. About 2 months into it, before the divorce is finalized, Mike had called her sister and said "Terry is out of control, we have to do something" but it was all futile. Had they been able to institutionalize her and stabilize her, she might still be living across the street with a manageable mortgage and some cash in the bank. But because it was so impossible, her life is basically over. Totally broke, divorced, career lost, friends alienated.

Potassium nitrate foliar spray!