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I agree that it is a bit confusing. That number seems impossibly large. Perhaps they mean "number of passengers" which means that the same person making 2 return trips might be counted as 4 passengers? It is like saying "New York City's subway serves X million passengers per week", where every single person is probably counted multiple times based on the number of trips they make.

Are you talking about most of those false color images on that page? If so, they are actually not from this mission. Most of them (probably all except the first one) are from MRO's HiRISE camera.

Here is something to boggle your mind. You think your argument is strong with Sun containing 98% of the Solar system's total mass? It is actually something like 99.8%!! to think that stray jupiter-size brown dwarves can weigh anywhere near the total stellar masses that we see betrays complete lack of understanding of the difference of scales involved.

you are assuming that by "metal" they mean iron etc. all the examples that you cite (except H and He) are "metals" by astrophysicists' definition.

er, I think they meant $1000 per car, not per car per year! why would you ask for $1000 per year? it's not as if speeding fines are worth that much on average per car per year.

yeah, just an engineering problem. you might also want to think about a way to move at 0.9c and yet dodge all the stuff that will hit you like a hydrogen bomb...

That's not science. just statistics. What it suggests is that the subway riders in your city come from the same population as the one that CDC report is about. (and that you did a pretty good job of sampling without possible biasing factors! :) )

No, I don't think her is denying the existence of orbit degradation. The problematic part is you saying that it happens "due to gravity". gravity keeps it in orbit, lack of vacuum is what brings it down. Rahul

Mars's orbit isn't a function of its mass. It only depends on Sun's mass. you could, however, make the same point using Phobos/Diemos's orbit.

I think "Qaher" actually means something like "wrath" rather than "dominant". That is true at least in Urdu, which has a lot of influence of persian language. Can someone who knows persian confirm?

er... 10000 km is "somewhat over a quarter of the way to the moon"? if you really think that the moon is only about 4 earth diameters away from the earth, your mental model of solar system needs a serious recalibration! :)

I was also a part of a similar study. We measured the breast size of kids from grades 3rd to 10th. While there was absolutely no gender-based difference in kids of 3rd grade, by the time they reached grade 10, the difference was clearly statistically significant. The young cohort pretty much proved that there is very little gender bias in breast sizes! "

You do realize that your nice old lady can't also drive a car without killing many people or herself in the process? Yet all of us seem to be doing fine with a culture dependent on driving cars. It appears that having a license test for use of these high speed trains would be simple enough, no?