No... if that meteorite was in an orbit 30,000km radius from DA14 (which it would have to have been in order to hit Russia when it did), its orbital velocity would necessarily have to be very low. As in, so slow it would take millenia to complete even one orbit. Since DA14 is moving at a whopping 30km/second relative to Earth, anything orbiting it that far out would be moving in virtually the same direction and speed with respect to us.

In short, there's no way that meteorite could have been orbiting DA14

Let me annotate and complete it:

Which means:

See?

You missed the whole point. "E=mc^2" works in metric because the units are coherent. Use the SI base units (kg, m, s) and everything works out. If you use old stuff like slugs or pound-force for mass and btu for energy, you're going to need some arbitrary conversion factor in the equation depending on which particular units you used.

The "10" business is a very small part of it; that's just to make it easier to do the math when you scale stuff. What DOES matter is that the unit of Force (for example) is exactly related to the base units: F=ma, so the base units are kg*m/s^2, and that is how you define the Newton.

In the bad old days you had to decide what units "mass" was (slugs? oz? lb? tons?) and then acceleration (ft/s? yards/s? inches/s?) and in the end you end up with some funny conversion factor depending on what you want "Force" to be in. So instead of "F=ma" you end up with "F=kma", where "F" is "poundforce", "m" is "oz", "a" is "ft/s" and "k" is some stupid conversion factor just to make the numbers work out with the units you happened to choose. And so you'll get a different conversion factor depending on which particular units you chose for mass and acceleration. Ouch.

"Slugs" are in fact the old unit of mass created to try to sort out this idiotic mess for mass, but hardly any Imperial fanatics even seem to be aware of it. In the end it was best to throw out all that garbage and realize that you only need three basic measurements: mass, distance, time. Everything else can be derived from that through physics equations. And so SI was born: "kg, m, s". Everything else is a derived unit, and so no conversion factor is EVER necessary. The multiple of 10 stuff is just to make it easy to scale numbers, and you can scale the meter down as tiny as measuring atoms to as big as measuring galaxies, but it's still just a meter with a prefix for an exponent.

Thank you! I was trying to remember what finally drove me away from K5: It was that garbage "Fuck Natalee Holloway" post and the crap that followed.

I'd been there since 2001, and I think that really was the deathknell. I went back occasionally, but it was nothing but the same small gang of trolls flaming each other

Good riddance to that site

I'm not sure why dicks are modding you down; that turned out to be a wonderfully interesting and noncommercial site which (gasp) is news for nerds like me and stuff that matters. I'm glad I caught your post before the "Offtopic" sourpusses did.

That said, I wasted most of the day on it and am at challenge 11, but I'm finding it's turning out to be less and less about python and more and more about silly logic games. Still, the widely different solutions people come up with are amazing.

If you look back at my original post, my whole point is that I don't give a flying fuck how people indent their code as as long as don't have to scratch my head to figure out how they liked their tabs. Which is why tabs are annoying.

You're the Nazi here, not me. I have to figure out what your tabs mean. Gee thanks a lot.

And why should anybody pander to your bizarre fetish?

Use Unix "unexpand" and shove in tabs everywhere you want. Whack off while changing the indents; I don't care. But for the source code I have to deal with, why must I try to figure out what particular tab setting made you orgasm?

If you are truly obsessed with a 7-space indent, then go ahead and use that but don't make me have to try to guess it.

Well maybe that's going to be fixed. Let's see:

>>> from __future__ import braces
File "", line 1
SyntaxError: not a chance
>>>

Nope.

PS: That's real, try it yourself

I don't use tabs, so this does not apply to me.

But the main point is, I have seen tons of code over the past 20 years of my coding experience with this problem. The very existence of the Unix "expand" program which converts tabs to spaces per choice is concrete evidence of this.

So, since apparently most everybody uses tabs incorrectly, and there does not seem to be any point at all with using tabs instead of spaces, then why use tabs at all? Are there really people who get their jollies by changing the tab value to make code look different on their screens?

Tab (ascii 9) goes back to typewriters and teletypes and is effectively an 8 indent because terminals and printers and other devices assume it by default. So if you don't want an 8-space indent, don't use a tab. If you do want an 8-space indent, you can't assume the viewers device will treat it that why, so why bother with a tab at all?

.

Tabs do not work. Don't use them. Consider this, where there's a tab before the "int" and the "//" comment using the 8-space standard and the intent is to get the comments to line up. I'm using "_" instead of spaces to get around slashdot formatting grief:

________int_a;__________//_Hello
________int_Whatever;___//_Yeah

If you set your editor, printer, viewer, whatever to use 4 space tabs it becomes this:

____int_a;______//_Hello
____int_Whatever;___//_Yeah

I for one am sick and tired of having to reverse engineer what some frustrated artistic genius decided to use for their tab offset. Set your editor to expand tabs to spaces to whatever you want and save everyone the grief of trying to figure out what you were trying to do, because I really don't give a damn if you use 2, 3, 4, 6 or 8 space indentation; I just don't want to have to guess my way to making your code line up.

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

- John W. Garner