ISS Fender Bender

wjsteele writes "Seems that the Space Station has had a minor fender bender. Sounds kind of scary... being in a space craft and hearing metal crunching (like an aluminum can.) Apparently some 'Minor' space debris struck the station around 2:30am this morning, while the astronauts were eating their wheaties." Update: 11/27 16:31 GMT by M : Looks like an experiment may be to blame.

Comments

Re:30,000 km/s can do a lot of damage

[cybergrue]

So anyone who still think the movie Armageddon is based on scientific facts.
Your kidding right. Armageddon is possibly the worst SF movie in recient years in respect for the correct protrayal of science. Normally I go to see big budget SF movies and privatly chuckle everytime a scientific law gets broken. Most movies I rate in "minutes between screwups", however in Armageddon, it was how many screwup were there per second. My favourate one is when they doc with Mir, start it rotating to create artificial gravity, and then walk up the docking tubes. :-[ If they got this wrong, then don't expect the Hollywood producers to be able to calculate the damage from a two body collision correctly.

The Mods Got A Clue

[thelizman]

It's now rated funny. It's not that funny, but I meant it to be a little funny. More of an ironic statment on the lackluster technological assemblage of a spacestation built by the lowest bidder, and running on Windows NT. Yeah. that's what I want floating in a tin can 60 miles above earth: to hear a crunching noise, followed by all screens displaying the infamouse BSOD.

Rant of the month

[Wolfrider]

--Y'know, this is a case where your vaunted "education" really kills the ENTERTAINMENT value of a movie. I thoroughly enjoy Armageddon every time I see it, because -IT'S A MOVIE- and I try not to read into it too much. Yeah, I recognized the "Mir gravity" as unrealistic, but it didn't get in the way. They did a great job on the plot and visual effects. I even got emotional over Liv Tyler's scene with her dad making the heroic sacrifice.

--Cut them some slack, at least it wasn't as bad as Battlestar Galactica. (And if you lower your expectations, you could probably enjoy even that, too.)

--You could pick apart the whole LOTR trilogy too, if you wanted to; but personally I figure it's better to just sit back and try to enjoy the ride. Don't over-analyze everything.

--People are just getting too "sophisticated" these days. Everybody's got their nose up in the air and we all walk around thinking how well-educated and how great we all are. Yeah, we've "sophisticated" ourselves right out of a good imagination and we can't enjoy anything anymore. And Hollywood keeps making crappy movies because idiots keep paying to see it.

--All our base are belong to India while stupid people over here work 12+ hour days, when more people should be hired to spread the work around. No wonder the economy is so damn bad.

"2:30am this morning" ?

[Dun Malg]

[irritated pedant]
"2:30am this morning"? As opposed to, say, 2:30am in the evening? ARGH!!!! Either use "am", or "this morning". Not both. I may be the first person to notice this, but the [grammar/spelling/repost/factuality] checking of the is often very poor! Has anyone else noticed this?
[/irritated pedant]

Re:"2:30am this morning" ?

[Dun Malg]

Dun, you must have some kind of spelling phobia. Dude, just relax. A more appropriate way could be: 2:30AM Today (or 2:30AM Thursday, or this morning at 2:30), but a lot of people do get confused when it comes to that. 2:30AM this morning is not that bad, it actually is easier to understand.

Yeah, but it's still WRONG! :) I realize that it is probably unreasonable to expect everyone to be perfect all the time; this one just gets to me because I hear it conversationally and read it in print all the freakin' time. I figured /. is probably the best place to vent about it because no one here will fire me for shouting like a lunatic about such an small thing.

Plus you have to understand that slashdot is a site run by geeks, and you know geeks are not the best when it comes to grammar. You have to forgive them sometimes

This is what boggles my mind the most. No geek would tolerate illogical source code like:
int number;
*(&number) = 5;
but they do tolerate illogical grammar! I mean, this one isn't even excusable by English as a second language, as the redundancy would be wrong in ANY language. Then again, the percentage of geeks nowadays who even do any programming isn't what it used to be, so the tendency to not have the "precision in language" trait has been on the decline.

Yeah, I'm just a nutcase. I should just get over it.

Re:"2:30am this morning" ?

[Dun Malg]

You know all languages? In some languages double negatives make a positive while in others, Russian for example, a double negative is still a negative. What I can tell you however is that there are no languages in which a double positive makes a negative.

Funny you should bring it up, as I was actually going to mention the multi-negative thing in Russian (I was a Russian linguist/translator in the army). The concept of "morning" isn't as frequently used as negation, so it's unlikely to exist in the form of a modifier to other words. "am" and "morning" here only affect the time, whereas negatives modify the entire clause. Whether or not negatives "stack", causing a true/false flip every time one happens (English), or whether EVERYTHING in the clause must be modified to be gramatically correct (Russian), is pretty low-level language mechanics. "Morning", being a noun and being non-integral to phrase constructing, is unlikely to have multiple forms in any language. The ante-meridiem and post-meridiem notation for time is used almost exclusively in the United States (24-hour time being the norm elsewhere), so English is really the only language that has the opportunity to form a doubled prepositional phrase sort of thingy with regard to "morning".

Re:"2:30am this morning" ?

[Dun Malg]

I am sure an embedded spell checker for grammar inside the compiler would be extremely useful, so when you run your compiler it would also point out your spelling mistakes, but then that raises a whole other array of issues.

Yeah, I've been tempted to search-replace misspelled words used as variables in source code, but that's a pretty nasty can of worms.

However unpleasant, as long as I understand what they are trying to say I am fine with it. After all, I have people I work with which I cannot understand 40% of what they are saying

Yeeesh. Is it an ESL problem? I worked with one fellow who was Pashtun whose accent was so thick he often had to write out what he was trying to say. Fortunately he was very patient and also worth listening to. Wish I could say the same about some of my current co-workers.

so compared to this little *mistake* it's a by far a much bigger problem.AM This morning at Google

You're trying to drive me mad, aren't you