Shockingly, I've met Trinidadians in America, Russia, Norway, Abu Dhabi, Gabon and Tanzania. Great guys (and occasionally guyesses) all. When it comes to organising a party for Saturday night (Friday night in Muslim countries), you really want to get to know your local Trinidadian population. What skin colour they are, doesn't matter - party people to a person.
Memo to self : must visit Trinidad one day.
Seriously - do you really think that you can tell someone's skin colour from their phone accent? Do you think it would be valid for me to think that hearing an American accent on the phone means that I'm talking to a racist. Probably a gun-carrying racist. And thinking about the content of the last American crew I worked with, a nearly 50:50 chance of being either a white, negro, or indeterminable armed racist.
I can see now that by their nature they would tend to be the strongest parts left of any larger structure.
Yep - they fall apart at the weak points, leaving the intact things as being the strongest parts of the structure.
Ever seen a really good high-speed car crash - Formula 1, or that oval ring race track they have somewhere in America? Ever seen the engine block or brake discs broken apart? I didn't think so.
On the other hand, and I'm just thinking here, using gravity's pull is attractive(wink) because you need to know little of the large scale structure of the asteroid - and statistics wouldn't be very useful for that anyway.
Exactly. Because gravity is only an attractive force, to which the asteroid is already exposed, then you don't need to know anything about the structure or distribution of the mass - just the total mass. And you can get that by measuring it's influence on your "test mass" - otherwise known as you "gravity tug".
Sorry, just had a Rule 34 moment.
You'd like some info on local structures though in order to mine enough material to increase the mass , and possibly propellant, of the pulling device. So that makes it interesting to put the focus on the applied science of mining asteroids.
Hmm, transferring (useful, or processed) mass from the DinoKiller() to the gravity tug, doing all of decreasing the problem, increasing the strength of the solution, and potentially paying at least some of the cost of the mitigation. Good point.
TBH, though, once you've put your mining equipment onto the surface, with some reasonably solid (now there's a problem) anchoring to the mass, you can start throwing off material ("grain of dust; don't want that ; throw thattaway") in a direction to counter the spin of DinoKiller. Once you've got the spin under control, you point your rail guns in directions that add up to a vector that passes through the centre of mass of the system, and start throwing unwanted stuff away, while shaping the orbit to your future desire. Two birds with one stone.
But - it's going to be pretty obvious in the flight data recorder. Either you here a big thump or not....
I'd have thought the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) more likely than the Flight Data Recorder (FDR). You might pick it up on a vibration sensor from the FDR, or if any sensor wiring was cut. But I'd think CVR a better place to look.
What's that sound? A CVR being accidentally turned on while the hanger crew are playing the radio?
That doesn't mean the FBI can fly to India and arrest someone
Even TFS didn't make that claim. They said they were "investigating". Which covers a multitude of events short of barging in with guns drawn and handcuffs at the ready.
Sorry, Mr Coypu, but "IVR" ?? Infernal Vulva Revolutions? Ives Violated Robots? A video analogue of "Interactive voice response"?
I'm assuming an acronym involving "video" since you can tell someone's skin colour during the call, instead of guessing it from your assumptions about the accent you hear.
You should try phoning a Trinidadian, then guessing if he's white or black. Man.
Don't worry, Amerikuh will have it's very own spate of truck terrorism as soon as it becomes harder for a would-be terrorist to get a gun than to steal a truck (at knife-point, if necessary). The ready availability of guns and ammunition in Amerikuh is why there hasn't been a major truck killing. Yet.
Which fucking miracles? Plenty of hard work for sure, including developing and improving engineering robots. Significant care to be taken in locating, extracting and containing (reprocessing, or moving back into the existing nuclear waste pipeline) the melted and corroded remains of the reactor fuel. Lesser issues over the hugely larger bulk of medium grade contaminated material from the original plant and Mk1 sarcophagus. But things that require the breaking of laws of physics - no.
To the best of my knowledge, we've measured the mechanical properties of one asteroid with an impactor (Deep Impact) ; made a glancing contact with Hayabusa, but no attempt to measure below-surface properties. And the modelling of surface of comet 67P/Churyumovâ"Gerasimenko was so successful that all three anchoring systems for the Philae lander failed, leaving it to perform a hop-step-and-jump landing.
When you have a measurement, you have a measurement ; when you have two measurements, you have a disagreement ; when you have three measurements, you're starting to have useful statistics. Currently we've between 1 and 2 measurements (we got some limits from Rosetta) so we're not even vaguely confident on either the mean or the variance of the strngth of the materials, let alone how much these parameters change with composition.
Who builds systems capable of accurately reproducing sounds that humans cant here? That seem pretty pointless.
To quote a song of about 1960,
"All the highest notes, neither sharp nor flat,
The ear can't hear as high as that!
Still, I ought to please any passing bat.
With my HIGH FIDELITY
(I'm not sure where the "sharp nor flat" thing comes into it. I've never understood those terms despite both piano and music teachers trying to beat the idea into me.)
See how loosely packed an asteroid is for instance.
If you have some evidence to suggest that two random asteroids (or comets) have similar mechanical properties, that'd make some nice reading. So far, we have two data points and a lot of modelling.
I can imagine trying to find out how strong an asteroid is before starting to mess around with it.
You're sounding dangerously like you want to apply science to the question. This is not a politicially acceptable behaviour these days.
And since the asteroid is usually rotating it would have to be cleverly timed pushing as well.
Or you pull it, using the gravity of the spacecraft against the PHA.
By the time you get up to multi-kilometre impactors (rocky asteroid or icy comet - totally irrelevant), the "close strategic ally who would be taken out would be any one which shared a planet with the impact point. It really doesn't matter where the impact falls - the fall-back of ejecta is going to be a global problem of "death from the skies" magnitude for all continents and oceans.
Don't be upset about not getting this message at gut level. I didn't understand it until I was examining a 30cm thick bed of impact granules in Britain (which landed at something around dull-red hot) to be told that the geology lecturer leading the field trip had work "in press" at Nature deonstrating on both date and chemistry grounds that this was ejecta from the Manicouagan impact crater, 3500km away in Canada.
Would your home - or your local farmers - be able to handle having 30cm of dull-red hot rock dumped on it/ them?
I guess you're talking about putting the "shield" objects into something approaching a lunar orbit and shepherding them into the "Trojan" points (Lagrangian points L3, L4, and L5). Given a 27-ish day (Lunar-ish) orbit, that would leave you with around 9-10 days to get the astrometric measurements done and light the rockets. That sounds rather tight to me - you'll need some seriously fuck-off rocketry to provide the necessary power.
You'd need at least a couple of shields in a polar-ish orbit, to deal with out-of-ecliptic incoming. Remember Kohoutek? That was well out of the ecliptic plane. And Hyakutake too.
Of course, to build and maintain hardware on that sale, you'd need thousands of people living and working in space... at which point you're very close to securing the species against extinction simply by being out of the single basket.
the preparedness is mostly the same - be ready to provide medical care to a million people, have your lines of command and communication ready between leaders and to the public, etc.
What are you going to do about the other billion or several casualties? Oh yeah - just let them die. You can always breed more people using unskilled labour.
One popular drill in emergency preparedness is zombie apocalypse [...] If you can handle hoardes of zombies you can handle anything,
I think "scenario" is the word you're ooking for, not "drill", but that's probaby something that changes as you walk between countries that share a language.
But does zombie apocalypse preparation cover you for a multi-year crop failure over one or both hemispheres ("nuclear winter", be it nuclear or impact debris in the atmosphere) ? Zombie apocalypse is probably a choice for manageable disasters. But there are potential disasters for which the only feasible mitigation is to have multiple independent population and civilisation bases.
A global deadly virus outbreak is probably the biggest threat among those three.
Why restrict yourself to worying aout virus outbreaks. We're doing a pretty good job of reeding up lots of bacteria resistant to all presently produced families of antibiotics.
when we know the orbits of a large chunk of the ~30-40m impactors and a fair minority of the ~20m (Chelyabinsk-sized) impactors. Because those hit often enough somewhere on the planet (generally very remote) that people could actually travel to see them, like people do with eclipses. And that would be a really neat experience:)
It would be neat, for sure.
My uncle is trying to build a radio meteor detector - a New Year project - which would pick up RF emission from ionospheric trails. Two or more such detectors over a region should allow triangulation for the trajectories of the larger (well, more RF-bright) fragments, reducing search areas.
You can also have your electromagnetic ejection of sintered chunks be the kick that causes reentry in the desired location [...] You're not just talking about kicking chunks back to earth with a coilgun that runs on easily-acquirable electricity; you're talking Big Freaking Rockets.
From the point of view of Newton's third law, electromagnetic ejection of chunks, using a coil gun, and being a Big Freaking Rocket are interchangeable. Some mass goes one way, the "electromagnetic ejector", the "coil gun", or the expansion nozzle of the rocket go in the opposite direction. Momentum is conserved.
Einstein agreed.
Psyche is 3.3 to 2.5 AU from the Sun, so by ejecting matter (composition irrelevant ; mass velocity does matter) in the right direction you can increase the orbital speed and decrease the asteroid's heliocentric radius. Manage it correctly and you should be able to drop it into either an Earth-Trojan (or Earth-Greek - trailing Trojan point) position, or a Moon-Trojan (similarly Moon-Greek) position without it ever being in an Earth-crossing orbit. So, you do that with the undesirable debris from your on-asteroid processing, possibly with small amounts of iron as cladding for the magnetic coils to get a grip on.
What are you expecting to find in your regolith that is worth processing once in space (to form your "sintered" landers), then landing on Earth and processing again?
They had a ThinkPad with a second physical screen before [lenovo.com], it didn't exactly set the world's collective hearts aflutter.
That may have been the one I was looking at a few years ago - I definitely remember discussing with Lenovo over getting a small (10-ish) order made which were equipped for radio-silence operations (there had been a fatality, assigned initially to an RS violation).
We never ordered, but we did give it serious consideration. In the end, multiple laptops and external monitors were a more resilient solution.
I'm also pretty sure this isn't the first such system. I was looking at ideas like this for work back in the 2000s - and we rejected it in favour of two laptops and as many external monitors as we could beg, borrow or steal. Or even buy locally, if there were computer shops within a few hundred kilometres of the site.
Work involved skilled people going to remote locations (typically with up to 1 satellite phone data link maxing out at 9600bps), carrying equipment for (1) our in-house software (which needed data massaging as well as comparison of data from multiple sources, simultaneously, so two screens) and (2) data acquisition from one or several local networks (each needing a separate screen for actually seeing what was going on). So two laptops plus Sneakernet worked, and if (when) one burned out (very dirty power with megawatt load changes within seconds), it wasn't too hard to fankle up a temporary fix using local or personal equipment.
While the details vary from job to job, I can see plenty of similar situations where a multiple-screen portable computer is well worth considering.
Slashdot Mirror
Memo to self : must visit Trinidad one day.
Seriously - do you really think that you can tell someone's skin colour from their phone accent? Do you think it would be valid for me to think that hearing an American accent on the phone means that I'm talking to a racist. Probably a gun-carrying racist. And thinking about the content of the last American crew I worked with, a nearly 50:50 chance of being either a white, negro, or indeterminable armed racist.
Yep - they fall apart at the weak points, leaving the intact things as being the strongest parts of the structure.
Ever seen a really good high-speed car crash - Formula 1, or that oval ring race track they have somewhere in America? Ever seen the engine block or brake discs broken apart? I didn't think so.
Exactly. Because gravity is only an attractive force, to which the asteroid is already exposed, then you don't need to know anything about the structure or distribution of the mass - just the total mass. And you can get that by measuring it's influence on your "test mass" - otherwise known as you "gravity tug".
Sorry, just had a Rule 34 moment.
Hmm, transferring (useful, or processed) mass from the DinoKiller() to the gravity tug, doing all of decreasing the problem, increasing the strength of the solution, and potentially paying at least some of the cost of the mitigation. Good point.
TBH, though, once you've put your mining equipment onto the surface, with some reasonably solid (now there's a problem) anchoring to the mass, you can start throwing off material ("grain of dust; don't want that ; throw thattaway") in a direction to counter the spin of DinoKiller. Once you've got the spin under control, you point your rail guns in directions that add up to a vector that passes through the centre of mass of the system, and start throwing unwanted stuff away, while shaping the orbit to your future desire. Two birds with one stone.
I'd have thought the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) more likely than the Flight Data Recorder (FDR). You might pick it up on a vibration sensor from the FDR, or if any sensor wiring was cut. But I'd think CVR a better place to look.
What's that sound? A CVR being accidentally turned on while the hanger crew are playing the radio?
That's not too bad a return rate for a scam.
Therefore the scamming will continue.
Even TFS didn't make that claim. They said they were "investigating". Which covers a multitude of events short of barging in with guns drawn and handcuffs at the ready.
You should try phoning a Trinidadian, then guessing if he's white or black. Man.
Don't worry, Amerikuh will have it's very own spate of truck terrorism as soon as it becomes harder for a would-be terrorist to get a gun than to steal a truck (at knife-point, if necessary). The ready availability of guns and ammunition in Amerikuh is why there hasn't been a major truck killing. Yet.
Which fucking miracles? Plenty of hard work for sure, including developing and improving engineering robots. Significant care to be taken in locating, extracting and containing (reprocessing, or moving back into the existing nuclear waste pipeline) the melted and corroded remains of the reactor fuel. Lesser issues over the hugely larger bulk of medium grade contaminated material from the original plant and Mk1 sarcophagus. But things that require the breaking of laws of physics - no.
Ask a second musician (or your original musician under a different state of hormones or intoxicants) and get a different answer.
When you have a measurement, you have a measurement ; when you have two measurements, you have a disagreement ; when you have three measurements, you're starting to have useful statistics. Currently we've between 1 and 2 measurements (we got some limits from Rosetta) so we're not even vaguely confident on either the mean or the variance of the strngth of the materials, let alone how much these parameters change with composition.
These air filters are going to come into your bedroom, pull the duvet off, kick you out of bed and chase you down the street with a bullwhip?
To quote a song of about 1960,
"All the highest notes, neither sharp nor flat,
The ear can't hear as high as that!
Still, I ought to please any passing bat.
With my HIGH FIDELITY
(I'm not sure where the "sharp nor flat" thing comes into it. I've never understood those terms despite both piano and music teachers trying to beat the idea into me.)
Since you're specifically talking about someone who is using Tor, I'll add the relevant FTFY :
If you have some evidence to suggest that two random asteroids (or comets) have similar mechanical properties, that'd make some nice reading. So far, we have two data points and a lot of modelling.
You're sounding dangerously like you want to apply science to the question. This is not a politicially acceptable behaviour these days.
Or you pull it, using the gravity of the spacecraft against the PHA.
Don't be upset about not getting this message at gut level. I didn't understand it until I was examining a 30cm thick bed of impact granules in Britain (which landed at something around dull-red hot) to be told that the geology lecturer leading the field trip had work "in press" at Nature deonstrating on both date and chemistry grounds that this was ejecta from the Manicouagan impact crater, 3500km away in Canada.
Would your home - or your local farmers - be able to handle having 30cm of dull-red hot rock dumped on it/ them?
I guess you're talking about putting the "shield" objects into something approaching a lunar orbit and shepherding them into the "Trojan" points (Lagrangian points L3, L4, and L5). Given a 27-ish day (Lunar-ish) orbit, that would leave you with around 9-10 days to get the astrometric measurements done and light the rockets. That sounds rather tight to me - you'll need some seriously fuck-off rocketry to provide the necessary power.
You'd need at least a couple of shields in a polar-ish orbit, to deal with out-of-ecliptic incoming. Remember Kohoutek? That was well out of the ecliptic plane. And Hyakutake too.
Of course, to build and maintain hardware on that sale, you'd need thousands of people living and working in space ... at which point you're very close to securing the species against extinction simply by being out of the single basket.
What are you going to do about the other billion or several casualties? Oh yeah - just let them die. You can always breed more people using unskilled labour.
I think "scenario" is the word you're ooking for, not "drill", but that's probaby something that changes as you walk between countries that share a language.
But does zombie apocalypse preparation cover you for a multi-year crop failure over one or both hemispheres ("nuclear winter", be it nuclear or impact debris in the atmosphere) ? Zombie apocalypse is probably a choice for manageable disasters. But there are potential disasters for which the only feasible mitigation is to have multiple independent population and civilisation bases.
Why restrict yourself to worying aout virus outbreaks. We're doing a pretty good job of reeding up lots of bacteria resistant to all presently produced families of antibiotics.
It would be neat, for sure.
My uncle is trying to build a radio meteor detector - a New Year project - which would pick up RF emission from ionospheric trails. Two or more such detectors over a region should allow triangulation for the trajectories of the larger (well, more RF-bright) fragments, reducing search areas.
From the point of view of Newton's third law, electromagnetic ejection of chunks, using a coil gun, and being a Big Freaking Rocket are interchangeable. Some mass goes one way, the "electromagnetic ejector", the "coil gun", or the expansion nozzle of the rocket go in the opposite direction. Momentum is conserved.
Einstein agreed.
Psyche is 3.3 to 2.5 AU from the Sun, so by ejecting matter (composition irrelevant ; mass velocity does matter) in the right direction you can increase the orbital speed and decrease the asteroid's heliocentric radius. Manage it correctly and you should be able to drop it into either an Earth-Trojan (or Earth-Greek - trailing Trojan point) position, or a Moon-Trojan (similarly Moon-Greek) position without it ever being in an Earth-crossing orbit. So, you do that with the undesirable debris from your on-asteroid processing, possibly with small amounts of iron as cladding for the magnetic coils to get a grip on.
What are you expecting to find in your regolith that is worth processing once in space (to form your "sintered" landers), then landing on Earth and processing again?
Abso-fucking-lutely.
The leading asteroid is a lump of rock with no brain and no imagination. This gives it a better understanding of gravity than the average human.
That may have been the one I was looking at a few years ago - I definitely remember discussing with Lenovo over getting a small (10-ish) order made which were equipped for radio-silence operations (there had been a fatality, assigned initially to an RS violation).
We never ordered, but we did give it serious consideration. In the end, multiple laptops and external monitors were a more resilient solution.
I beg to disagree.
I'm also pretty sure this isn't the first such system. I was looking at ideas like this for work back in the 2000s - and we rejected it in favour of two laptops and as many external monitors as we could beg, borrow or steal. Or even buy locally, if there were computer shops within a few hundred kilometres of the site.
Work involved skilled people going to remote locations (typically with up to 1 satellite phone data link maxing out at 9600bps), carrying equipment for (1) our in-house software (which needed data massaging as well as comparison of data from multiple sources, simultaneously, so two screens) and (2) data acquisition from one or several local networks (each needing a separate screen for actually seeing what was going on). So two laptops plus Sneakernet worked, and if (when) one burned out (very dirty power with megawatt load changes within seconds), it wasn't too hard to fankle up a temporary fix using local or personal equipment.
While the details vary from job to job, I can see plenty of similar situations where a multiple-screen portable computer is well worth considering.