Andrew Dalke's Comments

No much. Figure average distance to Mars is 229 million km, and ignore the solar well delta V so it's acceleration 1/2 way and deceleration the other half, or 115 million km in 60 days. 115 million km / (60 days)2 = 0.0043 m/s2 or about 0.00043 g. Assuming it were slow and gradual like an ion thruster ... and I see now that I'm completely wrong about that. Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket now, and I still can't figure it out. :( My guess is, slow and steady rather than a high-g force, in order to keep the operating temperatures cool.
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Firefox's "Private Window" page says: "While this doesn’t make you anonymous to websites or your internet service provider, it makes it easier to keep what you do online private from anyone else who uses this computer." 'Course, we all know that most people don't read things like that.
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The Wikipedia entry for Gollum at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gollum#Characteristics says: In the first edition of The Hobbit, Tolkien made no reference to Gollum's size, leading illustrators such as Tove Jansson to portray him as very large.[7] Tolkien realised the omission, and clarified in later editions that Gollum was "a small slimy creature."[T 3]The Two Towers characterises him as slightly larger than Sam;[T 17] and later, comparing him to Shelob, one of the Orcs describes him as "rather like a spider himself, or perhaps like a starved frog."[T 18]
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If you need to planets to be on the same side of the sun as the Earth then there's a 0.5^7 chance on average that would happen, or on average nearly 3 days per year. Also, Pluto is very near Jupiter in the sky (see https://heavens-above.com/PlanetSummary.aspx?lat=0&lng=0&loc=Unspecified&alt=0&tz=UCT ) so potentially visible. But at magnitude 14.4 you'll need about an 8-inch telescope to see it, if I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude correctly. The next dimmest, Neptune, is mag. 7.9 which can be seen (in dark skies) with binoculars.
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"Despite claims of 90% validity by polygraph advocates, the National Research Council has found no evidence of effectiveness. ... A polygraph cannot differentiate anxiety caused by dishonesty and anxiety caused by something else." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph#Effectiveness
So many police techniques - bite mark analysis, arson detection, bullet led analysis, and even fingerprint matching - have proven more questionable than the practitioners of the field suggest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_science#Questionable_techniques
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The article says Avis Budget Group will manage the physical fleet of vehicles. I figure Avis has plenty of experience in dealing with rentable unsupervised, enclosed spaces.
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Here's one of those legal battles - who will be charged if an autonomous vehicle kills or injures someone, or causes damage, or otherwise breaks the law (eg, speeds because its internal information was wrong), in a situation where a human driver doing the same thing would be charged?
If it's a corporate entity instead of a person, what's the equivalent to, say, a sentence of 1 week in jail?
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Franzified, I think you are turning into your parents. ☺︎ I mean, as a kid in the 1980s I remember adults asking why the kids these days were buying distressed or acid-washed jeans, and couldn't understand why anyone would buy jeans with holes already in them. So this seems like more of the same.
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Looks like it's described in patent US28981A, "Process of producing smoke clouds from moving aircraft", granted in 1927. Application filed 1925. https://patents.google.com/patent/US1619183A/en . "We prefer to employ a smoke-pr ducing liquid such as TiCl₄, SnCl₄, oleum and chlorsulphonic acid. ... The effect produced is the generation of a falling smoke curtain, which reaches the ground in the form of a long, high screen. Dependent on the height at which the plane is travelling when the liquid is released, the smoke curtain may be made to hang in the air, or may be made to rest on the ground."
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Profile for Andrew Dalke

  • Member Since 2012/08/04


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