You are correct. A ship can take much larger waves directly into the bow than it can take abeam. It's perfectly logical if you think about it. The bow is designed to plow into the water, so it'll deflect the wave energy better, and designers know storms will come, so they design to some extent or another for waves breaking over the bow. Waves running directly into the side have a large surface to work on.

Additionally, consider the simple geometry. A ship is going to be much more stable in the pitch axis (where it is a nice, long lever) than in the roll axis (where it's much closer to a round log). Tipping a ship end-over-end would require something more like a Michael Bay movie, while capsizing it by rolling it over requires much less force.

The images I've seen of this ship show something much more like a floating rig platform than a plain old large yacht. It has a long axis, but it's much wider than a "normal" ship. That being the case, it would have more stability in the long axis, but it should be stable enough in the short axis. You *could* just go ahead and build a platform instead of a ship, with deep ballasts well below wave action attached by legs to the main platform well above the waves, but that expense, inconvenience of access, and greatly reduced mobility is apparently undesirable.

Off-shore in deep water, there is absolutely no danger whatsoever from a tsunami. A tsunami is only a problem as it reaches shore, as it's there that the very long period waves just keep coming and coming and piling up water. In deep water, there's just a very, very long swell of minuscule amplitude.

Storm waves are vastly more significant. Their period is short enough and their amplitude great enough to potentially cause significant damage to oceangoing vessels. Considering also the occasional rogue wave (a wave or short set of waves at several times the amplitude of the prevailing wave conditions at the time), and having lifeboat/evacuation drills every so often would be best practice. At least the area in question is outside the hurricane belt, so hurricane evacuations (such as those from Gulf of Mexico oil rigs) shouldn't be required.

The Space Shuttle had a launch window of approximately plus or minus five minutes from in-plane, but for the Falcon 9/Dragon COTS-2/3 launch to ISS, they have an instantaneous launch window. From the comments on the COTS-1 webcast, it sounded as if Dragon flights to ISS would have instantaneous launch windows, but I have no data to know whether this is merely a constraint for the initial flights or a constraint for all future COTS/CRS launches.

For the April 30th window (which will not be used), there was also an instantaneous launch window on May 3rd (with the days between those two blocked by ISS orbital constraints, I believe -- SpaceX has additional requirements for the test launch and recovery than for an operational launch). The next set of instantaneous launch windows would be May 7th and May 10th (with the days between blocked), but the May 10th window would mean that in the event of an aborted docking, there would be only time for one additional attempt before Soyuz conflicts (which would push the Dragon docking beyond May 17th, which may or may not be possible depending on fuel constraints, which I am not privy to).

Regarding the failure probabilities, from last week's press conference, it sounded as if SpaceX is the primary driver of mission assurance for this flight, i.e. they want to be sure they have as many of their waterfowl properly queued as possible. A cynic might note that if they don't get it right this time, it costs NASA nothing and SpaceX the full cost of another attempt. Someone with a brighter outlook would likely just say that if *everyone* on earth were watching you (most hoping you'd succeed, some hoping you'd fail), you'd *really* want to double-check everything one last time.

Sure, it may be a bad idea to disclose things like the actual number of aliases one has. On the other hand, what's wrong with disclosing the reported number of aliases one has? Nobody ever said we couldn't omit the secret set from our count, now, did they?

(To borrow a line from "Beethoven's Last Night" by Trans-Siberian Orchestra: "My dear, he's the devil. He lies.")

I was watching the test on a friend's Cox Communications cable service, and they also switch to a shopping channel (cable channel 8) for emergency alert activations. Their cable system apparently is incapable of showing the alert on all the (digital?) channels, so they simply show it over analog shopping channel 8 and have a system in place to switch everyone to that channel automatically whenever an alert is triggered. It's a bit annoying if a test is scheduled during, say, an important football game... er... episode of Mythbusters... whatever. On the other hand, it is even more jarring than the alert tones, so you'll certainly know something's afoot.

If you have one of their Motorola digital cable boxes, when it goes into emergency alert mode and auto-switches to analog shopping channel 8 for the message, the front clock display changes to "EAS" as well. If you're suddenly watching the shopping channel and "EAS" is displayed on the cable box *and* you have the wonderfully annoying (and intentionally so) alert tones, you *should* be able to figure out that now's the time to read or listen. At least, that seems to be the general idea.

I did notice that I didn't get the alert over cable until after I'd finished watching it on OTA TV (and chatting about it afterward), so chalk up a minute or two of additional latency to the cable company.

Actually, as was explained in detail in the video, random is easy. Completely devoid of repetition is vastly more difficult. This was not simply random, this was mathematically non-repetitive. Using random numbers outside of the audible range would not necessarily preclude repetition, and using random frequencies is atonal sound, not tonal non-repetitive "music" as was the intention of the piece.

Completely random is trivial. Mathematically-sound aperiodic and repetition-free is a completely different kettle o' fish.

Note that the composition used the 88-tone chromatic scale of the standard piano keyboard. Without that constraint, you could make a much longer atonal composition, of course, but the point of the exercise was to use discrete mathematics and music to create a tonal composition completely devoid of repetition.

I was afraid you were going to tell me there were five researchers, but you don't even *look* Cardassian.