Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror

Comment: No if we could fix this... (Score 1) 243

by Lurchicus (#32196132) Attached to: Call In the Military To Blast Rogue Satellite?
I think we would need some sort of satellite in an orbit outside of GEO so the GEO stuff would pass below it. If we have a GEO orbit rogue, our "rustler" satellite would de-orbit and slowly match up with the rouge. Now that we're there we should grapple the rogue and spin up our really big gyroscopes to keep everything stable. Next, a device on the rover would produce a localized EMP burst to electronically "kill" the rogue. At this point, using maybe ion propulsion, we could safely de-orbit the whole mess or even slowly thrust the combined rustler and rogue out of earth orbit entirely and self destruct in some other handy gravity well (moon, sun, another planet).
Space

Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88

Posted by kdawson
from the toil-and-trouble dept.
Theosis sends word that an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his colleagues have made the surprise discovery that Alcor, one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper, is actually two stars; and it is apparently gravitationally bound to the four-star Mizar system, making the whole group a sextuplet. This would make the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet the second-nearest such system known. The discovery is especially surprising because Alcor is one of the most studied stars in the sky. The Mizar-Alcor system has been involved in many "firsts" in the history of astronomy: "Benedetto Castelli, Galileo's protege and collaborator, first observed with a telescope that Mizar was not a single star in 1617, and Galileo observed it a week after hearing about this from Castelli, and noted it in his notebooks... Those two stars, called Mizar A and Mizar B, together with Alcor, in 1857 became the first binary stars ever photographed through a telescope. In 1890, Mizar A was discovered to itself be a binary, being the first binary to be discovered using spectroscopy. In 1908, spectroscopy revealed that Mizar B was also a pair of stars, making the group the first-known quintuple star system."

Comment: Re:Heaven forbid... (Score 1) 517

by Lurchicus (#29456417) Attached to: Lawyer Demands Jury Stops Googling

On a lighter note: don't forget that with only a few exceptions, the ones who end up in a jury are the people too stupid to get out of it. :)

I don't know why this is on a lighter note; this is a real problem. People on juries are people with a strong sense of social responsibility and people too stupid to get out of it. You can probably guess the ratio of the former to the latter. Given how important a functioning judiciary is to society, jury service really ought to be better rewarded, so competent people don't have such a strong incentive to get out of it.

Personally I believe jury duty is an important civil responsibility so I never attempt to get out of jury duty. On the other hand... I might be stupid too.

Often things ARE as bad as they seem!