Posts by Queasy Rider

Re: plenty of work for lots of launches

I'm disappointed that I'm the only one to upvote you. Combined with reusable rockets, Bigelow units should be genuine game changers.

Re: Sigh... president can't change the law

Oh but, you are both wrong. Look up executive order. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order. Wars have been fought upon executive order, including the 1999 Kosovo War during Bill Clinton's second term in office. Kennedy used it against Cuba, and Bush used it to restrict funding for stem cell research; as a matter of fact it was one of his first acts upon taking office. The executive order is one of the most powerful tools in the president's arsenal. All it takes is the stroke of a pen and bamm, we have a new law. I admit that there are some restrictions, but never under estimate a president's legislative power.

Re: ¿Puzzled?

I live by the right click/context menu. NEVER use keyboard shortcuts (can't even remember my own cell phone number). So you can imagine how many times I've seen the message, "Are you sure you want to move this file to the Recycle Bin?" That damn 'Delete' needs to be well and truly moved away from ANY other selection. And maybe coloured red.

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.

Re: More Cars than Roads

I once read, (probably a decade ago, which is why I am sketchy on the details) in an article about small local communities losing their bus services, that if the long distance bus companies were subsidized to the extent that the rail companies were, the bus companies could offer their services for free. I don't know if that was hyperbole but it certainly made me sit up and take notice.

Re: 5kg is a lot of payload

Fresnel lenses are absolutely no good for imaging operations.

Re: 5kg is a lot of payload

I checked out your example. Nowhere is a weight of the system specified, however the two vehicles that were used to test lift the system were named, the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk in 2010 with a lift capacity of 9,000 pounds, and the MQ-9 Reaper in 2014 with a lifting capacity of 3,800 pounds. I suspect you are mostly right but I can't find any facts to back up your weight assertions. Sorry.

Re: 5kg is a lot of payload

Tech is not my field so I will take your statements with a slight grain of of salt, but I concede that modern cameras are amazing. I recently purchased a Mobius camera for my motorcycle helmet. It is one third the size of a GoPro, no bigger than a matchbox, one third the price of a cheap GoPro, only $80; and the resolution exceeded all my expectations. A clip recorded at 80 mph on the interstate, when played back on a 22 inch monitor will resolve every stone on the road beneath the bike with no blur at all when you freeze the playback. Really. Now, if they could just do something about wind noise it would be perfect, but in the meantime it is a superb dashcam for my bike, mounted up high. I have the wide angle lens unit.

P.S. If you want to see what this camera is capable of, check out rcgroups.com

Re: 5kg is a lot of payload

Agreed, but phones use sensors over distances measured in millimeters to meters. A drone flying above the weather will usually require sensors many orders of magnitude more powerful and usually heavier, even if the computing power of a smart phone is all that is needed, think camera lenses for example.

Re: Time to move to La Palma

From Sky and Telescope," Astronomer Dorrit Hoffleit of Yale University, well known for her work with variable stars, compiled the Yale Bright Star Catalog decades ago. It tabulates every star visible from Earth to magnitude 6.5, the naked eye limit for most of humanity.

You might be in for a surprise when you read it, though. The total comes to 9,096 stars visible across the entire sky. Both hemispheres. Since we can only see half the celestial sphere at any moment, we necessarily divide that number by two to arrive at 4,548 stars (give or take depending on the season). And that's from the darkest sky you can imagine."

So I'll eat a smidgen of crow, but I'm not eating the whole bird. And by the way, my previous numbers came from a university text published in the 1980s, so I make no apology for those numbers (6,000/3,000) because I didn't guess or even estimate them. And thank you, but, being mostly retired, every day is Saturday to me.

And yes, I've seen claims that some people can see down to magnitude 8. and therefore 45,000 stars are visible to them in the two hemispheres. I would like to meet those people, both of them. I assume they are both contributing to this thread.

Re: Time to move to La Palma

I was just going to let this go, but because somebody thumbed me down (I hope for my tone, not the verifiable facts), I feel obliged to point out that billions and billions of stars is not a slight exaggeration but a thousand thousand times exaggeration.

Re: Time to move to La Palma

I may not be a scientist, but I can be pedantic, and posts like yours really frost my ass. Why, because you insist on claiming there MUST be at least 5,000 visible stars because you THINK so. When I originally got interested in astronomy over thirty years ago, the first factoid of many to astound me was the number of stars visible to the naked eye. 6,000 was the number given for the whole globe, of which only half, that's 3,000, can be seen by any individual (unless they can see over the horizon, or through the earth with neutron ray glasses.) So give it up and let science do the talking.

Re: Easy patent reform

I think ARM would have an objection to that.

Re: you know...

And it's not just the bits of knowledge lost, but the great minds snuffed out, their potential discoveries postponed for untold generations, Archimedes comes to mind as just one example. What a waste.

Re: you know...

I've been saying something similar for decades, except I go back ever further. Knowledge is cumulative. What if warring mankind hadn't made a habit of utterly destroying their vanquished enemy's cities? Think of all the bits of knowledge locked up in all those cities, turned to ash, having to be discovered again. I believe Jesus could have been preaching to Romans on the moon.

Sol has only a finite life

I am really getting tired of that reference. Here we are, in this discussion, talking about our hopes and aspirations over the next few generations, (2-100 maybe) when somebody has to interject about the end of Ol' Sol. Talk about bad vibrations! We might not be around, but Sol is expected to be around for another 200 million human generations, so get with the program... how long can we last, and how far can we go?

Re: 'Without life rafts'

Maybe they were small sharks, or the screams were from those in the water seeing their fellows being attacked one by one all around them. I wasn't there.

Re: 'Without life rafts'

Add to that shark attacks. There are numerous stories from the world wars about navy men in life rafts helplessly watching in despair as their fellow sailors in the water were eliminated by encircling swarms of sharks. I remember one particularly harrowing account relating how lifeboat survivors observed hundreds of men floating in their life jackets at dusk, only to be all gone by dawn, and the only evidence of their departure was the sound of their screams in the darkness as they were picked off one by one.

Pompous Git

Yes you are for your use of the three dollar word 'conterminous' in place of the correct and accepted word 'contiguous'. As adjectives the difference between conterminous and contiguous is that conterminous is meeting end-to-end or at the ends while contiguous is connected; touching; abutting. So spit out that thesaurus before you gag on it. By the way, I do respect many of your other opinions expressed in many other threads, and your point here is well taken.

Re: Finally, a genuine slippery slope fallacy

I just want to slip this obvious prediction in before anybody else. If Trump loses the Republican nomination, some unimaginative editor of a magazine, newspaper or tv spot will lead with the headline, "You're Fired" and if he wins, "You're Hired."

No groaning out there, folks, we all know that it's coming.

Re: foaming agents for beer

Don't know and don't think it was the same Dow, but I get your point.

foaming agents for beer

Brings back misty memories from when I were a lad. Dow ale was selling like hotcakes in the sixties thanks to their wildly popular TV commercial which went something like this...

SCENE: Western frontier town, local saloon

ACTION: Huge bar brawl, cowboy gets tossed out into dusty street.

CUE: Drop-dead beautiful actress (probably in mini dress, can't remember). As cowboy, sprawled out on his belly looks up to honey, she purrs, "Wouldn't a Dow go good now?

That's all it took to launch Dow into the big leagues with Carling, Molson and Labatt in Canada. Unfortunately, three heavy Dow drinkers in Quebec died in quick succession. It turns out that Dow was adding some agent to their brew to make the head last longer. It had been tested and approved for consumption, but nobody allowed for the amounts that these three boozers gargled, (over 24 pints a day).

When the national media showed thousands, or maybe even millions of gallons on Dow beer being poured into brewery sewers, running down the street, that was it for Dow. Their sales fell off a cliff and never recovered. In 5 decades of chugging in Canada, I never saw another person drinking Dow. Lesson... don't mess with our beer.

Re: Brilliant

I understand "Chicken on a Rotisserie" is very moving.