Well sure, but you've got to admit that the fact that a woman of the time was probably functionally illiterate meant that her-essays were pretty terrible!

Good. More sexily smart women for those of us who appreciate them.

Nobody considers it all that strange when a woman falls in love with some brilliant gnome for his mind, why should it be any different if the genders are reversed?

In fairness, she could possibly have delayed graduation another four years while gathering evidence to try to prove her hypothesis herself before publishing, but there was no guarantee she was right, and she was probably long past ready to graduate and get on with her life. I know I certainly was after only six years in college. Or she could have published prematurely and garnered the usual ridicule for making an outrageous claim without solid evidence, likely destroying her reputation and career before it even began - even after she was proven right the damage would likely have already been done. Even a man would be hard pressed to take that bet, and as a women in an almost exclusively male field she faced far greater risks of professional ostracization.

Instead she chose the safe path: didn't publish, graduated, and rode her credentials into what sounds like a very respectable career - an especially impressive accomplishment for a woman in a time and field that makes today's most mysogynistic CS departments look positively egalitarian. Her name may not have ended up in as many of the history books as she deserves, but she also didn't spend the time necessary to prove her hypothesis, and it sounds like her professor was (unusually?) honorable and gave her credit for it after he (aka, his future grad students) did the work of gathering sufficient evidence.

Of course pieces of moon raining down on Earth would be devastating, my point is that it would be far *more* devastating if you simply unleashed the same amount of energy directly on the Earth instead.

As for the specific energy required to break up the moon - it would actually be even higher than that required to get a single rock off the surface. Everything on the surface has a certain gravitational potential energy which must be overcome to escape the gravity well, as you go deeper that energy requirement increases. The fact that you're moving other pieces away at the same time changes nothing - conservation of energy requires that that energy debt be paid in full to get the pieces to stay apart rather than falling back in on themselves, regardless of whether only a single rock is being launched, or the entire thing vaporized.

As for stuff being "pulled in to the Earth" - if it doesn't hit on the first pass, it's, for the most part, not going to hit. Neglecting the complicating factors of the rapidly dissipating gravitational well of the ex-moon, every frgment will, at the moment of ejection, be on an elliptical orbit around the center of the Earth. Some of those ellipses will intersect the Earth, in which case that fragment will collide on it's first pass, everything else will continue to orbit in that ellipse forever* - there's no resistance in space to slow things down so that the Earth can catch things on the next pass. And since the Earth is the primary, there's no "gravitational keyhole" games that can be played to fine-tune the orbit for future collisions, as can happen with asteroids orbitting the sun.

* of course that dissipating gravitational well *will* confound things - instead of one big well you have many small ones all in different, but intersecting orbits (every orbit will initially pass through the space previously occupied by the moon - conservation of momentum dictates that the center of mass of all the fragments remain unchanged after the explosion - just like a rocket ship: the center of mass of fuel+ship never moves). As those fragments gravitationally interact with each other they will tend to circularize and coalesce into a ring system, but in the process some fragments will lose too much angular momentum and fall to Earth, while others will get thrown out at velocities that will escape from the Earth altogether. But mostly anything that approaches the Earth will be on a near-miss trajectory, and will rapidly be deflected onto a safer trajectory after a few more orbits interacting with it's peers - just as comets and asteroids rarely hit the sun: as objects get closer their tangential velocity increases dramatically, making them far less responsive to the gravitational pull. The only way they can hit the Earth is if their orbit gets stretched into such a long, narrow ellipse that it intersects the Earth itself.

If there's a way to retrieve your credentials, then that means someone else already has them. If there's a way to reset your account, that means there's a way for someone else to have it reset (and intercept the new credentials).

What's so hard about storing your key in an encrypted password vault? Burn it on a CD and store it alongside your birth certificate and other documents that could totally screw you over if stolen. Make it so that someone has to steal a physical object to get their hands on it, and you radically reduce the chances of having it stolen. Require them to also know even a half-assed password to decrypt it, and you make it unlikely that anyone interested in stealing physical stuff will be able to get it. Fill the disc with porn and stenographically hide the vault in one of the pictures, and it's unlikely they'll even suspect it's there.

Amen. In my last local election most of the winners won with the support of only a single-digit percentage of the registered voters in the area: horrible turnout means the vote of anyone who cares enough to cast it carries a ridiculous amount of weight.

For starters, on Earth you have to deal with Earth governments, worry about Earth wars, and guard against Earth diseases. On the moon there would be potential for a fresh start - much the same motivation as moved most early Europeans to colonize the Americas. Granted it would take a far more rugged and visionary colonist to settle a dead rock than a lush continent, but so what? Perhaps the self-selection of visionaries and dreamers crazy enough to colonize the Moon would lend itself to forming a new kind of society. Worth a shot at least. It's not like the resources would be doing any more good on Earth - we've had the technology to turn the Earth into an Eden for everyone for a century at least, yet we insist on obsessing over the same damned selfish and short-sighted motives that have driven us since the dawn of civilization.

Granted, Helium-3 would be a challenge to mine, and we don't actually have any use for the stuff yet - that would be a more long-term resource. But Lunar soil is roughly 40% oxygen, which would be an extremely valuable resource on its own (for breath-gas and LOX-using rockets). And assuming a ready source of hydrogen and/or carbon can be found there's great potential to synthesize water and rocket fuel there as well. If nothing else it would potentially be a hell of a lot cheaper shipping just hydrogen from Earth and combining it with lunar oxygen to create water and peroxide-based fuels.

Tubes, not domes - somewhat different mechanism, and radically different shape and size. On Earth the theoretical limit of lava tube length is apparently 30-900km, depending on assumptions - that's one hell of a lot more enclosed area than the width would suggest. And on the moon we have discovered cave-ins 900m across, so that suggests that tubes at least roughly on that scale do exist.

And if tubes that large can theoretically exist, it seems reasonable to assume that much smaller stable tubes, say only a block or three across, probably do. (I tried to find information on the largest theoretical tubes on Earth to compare to the largest discovered, to no avail) And if they do, then further stabilization and sealing should be a relatively minor issue - the structural elements are already in place, you've just got to plug the holes. Break out the vacuum-grout (worst, case chink it by hand with rocks, or tough spray-foam in plastic bags) and then cover the lot in a tough air-impermeable surface (concrete? metal? plastic? nanocellulose?). After that habitability is pretty much assured, assuming there's enough rock over your head to protect you from cosmic rays and the like.

Hell, if you didn't want to do any new material-science work you could just inflate a large balloon within the tube, install a bunch of anchors through it into the surrounding stone, and throw on a few inches of sprayed concrete. Or don't bother sealing it at all, just build your little inflatable domes (or whatever) within them. The point is that you have stable radiation shielding already in place, and need only worry about retaining atmosphere and heat to enable long-term radiation-free outposts.

That would have to be one hell of an explosion - not only would it have to shatter the moon, it would have to impart enough energy to the pieces to completely escape its gravitational well - less than that and the pieces would either re-coalesce or form a ring system in the Moon's orbit, depending on just how much less.

Even a truly massive explosion wouldn't be nearly as damaging to Earth as you might imagine - the Earth, as viewed from the moon, subtends only 1.2 milli-steradians, out of the total 4pi, so assuming a random distribution only about 0.00955% of the ejected material would be on a straight-line path to Earth, plus a little more whose path is sufficiently deflected by Earth's gravity to impact - everything else would either enter an elliptical Earth orbit or, if the explosion were large enough, escape the Earth's gravity as well and sail into interplanetary space (though of course many of their orbits around the sun would cross Earth's and eventually a collision would likely occur, so the next few millenia could be a little exciting). Though of course if it didn't escape the Earth we'd probably have to deal with some long-term bombardment as fragments collided and occasionally lost sufficient angular momentum to fall from orbit. Most though would probably eventually stabilize into a ring system.

Granted, the Moon is 7x10^22kg, so even 0.01% hitting Earth would amount to orbital bombardment by 7e18 kg, more than enough to do serious damage, even if it were so pulverized that it completely burnt up in the atmosphere. Still, you have to consider that the original explosion was enough to accelerate all 7x10^22 kg worth of fragments to at least 2.4 km/s (lunar escape velocity, or 2.88MJ/kg) so that they didn't fall back under mutual attraction, and all of that first 2.88MJ/kg of kinetic energy would be neutralized by the escape. Meanwhile, the specific orbital energy of the Moon relative to Earth's surface is only ~62MJ/k, so even if 100% of the Moon fragments hit the Earth you'd only get a 124x amplification factor, and if you factor in a more realistic .01% collision rate we're talking about only 1% of the initial explosion energy reaching Earth. And if the initial explosion imparted more than 2.88MJ/kg to the fragments, then you'd only get the 0.01% return on that excess energy.

All in all, you'd do far more damage to the Earth using the same amount of explosives here, rather than 400,000km away. And that's my dose of recreational physics for the day.

Quite. It's a damned shame the way Buzz Aldrin and his crew died screaming on live TV, and on what was to be such a historic Moon-landing mission too.

So? They buy insurance, and pass the cost on to the customer. Or better yet, they don't buy insurance, since they're big enough to amortize losses and keep the insurance-companies profits for themselves. Millions may seem like a lot of money to us, but it's chump change for a major corporation.

Basically figure they'd be in pretty much the same position as human drivers are now (in aggregate) - Start with your current insurance premiums. Divide by, oh, something between 10 and 100 to reflect the fact that their automated systems are far safer drivers than you. Then divide by another factor of... oh, let's call it 2... to remove the insurance company profits. That's the expected liability cost of the automated driving system. Maybe you pay it all up front, or perhaps you pay a monthly "virtual chauffeur" subscription. Or maybe we go ahead and leave liability on you and you pay for it in your own auto insurance (which should be much cheaper than today, assuming you rarely drive) It all amounts to pretty much the same thing in the end - no matter who has legal liability, it's coming out of your pocket at the end of the day - just like the expected costs of catastrophic mechanical failure do today. the corporations are all in the business of making money after all - and that requires that they charge you a premium at least as large as they, on average, stand to lose.

Besides which, it's *extremely* unlikely that a kid could manage to get killed by an automated car in a school zone: the car would almost certainly be obeying the speed limit, be monitoring the entire 360* environment with far more obsessive attention than you could possibly muster, and will have started emergency braking before your brain has even registered that there's something in the road, much less sent the glacially slow signal to your foot to slam on the brakes a sizable fraction of a second later. Barring faulty software, any child that gets killed by an automated vehicle could almost certainly not have been saved by a human driver - no matter how safe we try to make the world, at some point Darwin will take his due, and I believe the courts generally respect that fact in cases where the only fault lies with the victim.

I don't know - a powered glider to get airborne and to augment navigation, with the majority of lift and thrust coming from perpetually falling through an updraft? It might work...

Of course, for "flying cars" to be practical as a means of transport you'd pretty much need VTOL capability - not that you couldn't outfit a glider with vectored thrust engines, but those long wings would make traffic a bitch. Even a far more compact airfoil, say something inspired by those boxy long-gliding paper airplanes, would be impractical if more than a vanishingly small percentage of the driving population took to the air.

So yeah, short of the development of some sort of antigrav system I don't see flying cars actually being an energy-efficient means of common transportation.

So why not vote for one of the third party candidates? Write them in if you have to. Sure, they may have no realistic chance of being elected, but you're mostly throwing your vote away on either sock-puppet A or B anyway, so you may as well send a message of what you'd actually like to see in a candidate. Sure, the sock puppets aren't going to even try to emancipate themselves from the hands up their asses, but it's a multi-layered power game and they do vie with each other for dominance, so you may even sway policy* slightly as they try to capture your vote.

*or at least rhetoric - which isn't *completely* worthless, it does help shape public opinion.

Basically a good point, but it's not quite that simple - gliders can reach speeds easily surpassing cars while consuming essentially no energy, especially when they have updrafts to work with - such as if they were flying over the heat-island of an urban area.