T+plus 33 minutes. A few seconds after solid rocket booster separation, a large chunk of something broke free from the external fuel tank. The onboard video camera mounted on the tank showed the object flying away from the vehicle without striking Discovery.
Darned Dallas newspaper printed the 10:39 time as though it were local, so I missed it. The Mission Status Center is the next best thing. Interesting tidbit: "Mission specialist No. 3 Andy Thomas... spent four months living aboard the Russian space station Mir in 1998." So he's got experience patching up balky tin cans in space...
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.
Then we tried to remove the tusks. The tusks. That's not so easy to say. Tusks. You try it some time.
As I say, we tried to remove the tusks. But they were embedded so firmly we couldn't budge them. Of course, in Alabama the Tuscaloosa, but that is entirely ir-elephant to what I was talking about.
"The Chrysler Air Raid Siren is so powerful that it can reportedly start fires with just the sound vibrations it produces. It can turn fog into rain, clearing the sky. It can produce an effective 70 dB air raid signal for a distance of two miles, and under proper conditions can be heard 30 to 50 miles away. Its advertised effective range was four miles in every direction. That's a long way!"
The point of the story is that it doesn't matter what the specific technology is (the writers picked cold fusion because it was in the news at the time) but that the population at large cannot be trusted with that much power.
Indeed. Even the North Koreans, at best, can only destroy a half-dozen cities. Maximum global impact, at a liberal estimate of five million killed by the blast and ensuing radiation, 30 million... out of 6 billion.
That means that a lunatic pouring the output of an entire country into planetary catastrophe can wipe out only nothing more than one-half of one percent of the Earth's population. Absolutely devastating losses that would be felt by every sentient being on the planet, but not enough to wipe out the species, or even the more fragile concept of "civilization".
Put a million-people-killer in the hands of every Osama bin Laden, Timothy McVeigh, Aum Shinrikyo, and Unabomber... then, you've got trouble on an evolutionary scale.
re your Beetle TDI: what mixture of biodiesel-to-diesel to you use? Some sources I've read said that any modern diesel engine can run on B100, but vw.com says VW only officially approves a paltry B5.
I've run B100 with no problems, except that the fuel economy drops from 43mpg to 38mpg. Straight BD has a lower BTU per gallon than straight petrodiesel.
B20 appears to be the best mix. The truckers at Carl's Corner report that the extra lubricity helps their big rigs run cooler, so they actually get better fuel economy (and the difference between 6mpg and 6.5mpg is significant, when your fill up is 150 gallons or more). I notice that my TDI runs better on B20, and my economy stays high.
VW's main issue seems to be that US biodiesel isn't subject to the stringent requirements of European BD. In Europe, VW warantees for any biodiesel mixture. Technically, though, VW doesn't cover any damage due to bad fuel, whether it's derived from an Illinois soybean or a Precambrian fern.
The subject is hotly discussed on the Biodiesel and "Fuels and Lubricants" forums at TDIClub.com -- everything I've stated above is stuff I learned from TDIClub.com (or from links I found there).
According to the very active Biodiesel forum at TDIClub.com, this study isn't worth the electrons you're viewing it with. One poster notes, "This Cornell fellow brings this up about once a year. Do a search on this site and see the FUD."
I run Biodiesel in my New Beetle TDI engine when I can, so I'm biased, but I agree with my fellow TDI'ers. When the study says "It takes 27 percent more energy to turn soybeans into biodiesel fuel," there's no comparison being made against the alternative. How much energy does it take to pump crude oil out of the ground? How much energy is burned loading it onto a tanker, and then refining it into useful products?
How much energy will be used to clean up the hazardous chemicals required to turn prehistoric ferns into internal combustion fuel? How many gallons of gasoline were burned in the funeral procession for the 15 workers killed near Houston when a tank of benzene exploded this year? By comparison, you can make Biodiesel in a converted water heater, with lye and methanol (hazardous chemicals, but available at any hardware store).
And I won't even touch the issue of how many soldiers must die to ensure the continued flow of addictive foreign petroleum...
Plenty of folks have noted that Tatooine only had two suns, but nobody seems to recall that the planet depicted in The Dark Crystal had three, which reach close conjunction every thousand years or so:
When single shines the triple sun, What was sundered and undone Shall be whole, the two made one, By Gelfling hand, or else by none.
You know, despite all the advances in CGI effects, 1982's The Dark Crystal still looks pretty darned good. Of course, a good story trumps fancy SFX every time (I'm looking at you, George "add some more banthas" Lucas).
The article is only about the dawn of.mp3, but within less than three years, the RIAA & co. had configured themselves to set the Evil Bit whenever they saw the.mp3 extension. Or at least, that was my experience.
In 1998, I started a little fan site detailing the history of a country group -- I won't name them, but they became famous and then infamous within the span of 5 years. As part of the site, I included some low-quality.mp3's of the group's orignal sound, from some out-of-print indie albums. But before you could say "infringement", I got a Cease And Desist letter from the group's lawyers. I capitulated, but the affair proved the perfect grist for a story in the local alternative newsweekly -- they saw the group as having sold out to Nashville, with the C&D just further proof.
But check out what the group's manager said about the nascent format:
Senior Management's Simon Renshaw, the band's manager, insists the only reason the band went after Brooks was that the sound bites were in MP3 form. "I will just say one thing: His site with MP3 files...is a huge red flag," Renshaw says. "And that's all I really want to say about that, quite honestly."
And the lawyer, on the broader issue of copyrights:
"The bottom line to me is very simple," says Beiter, whose firm was hired by Senior Management, the band's Nashville-based management company. "To me, it's just not fair. It's not fair for him to take their copyright and decide that he's unilaterally going to give it away out on the Internet. It's not fair for him to do that. He may try to cast it as David versus Goliath or Robin Hood or whatever, but it's just not fair for him to do that. He never even asked."
In the end, I got more free publicity for my little fan site than if I'd scattered flyers all over Dallas. I'll avoid whoring for hits in this post, though... I think you can figure out where to click if you're really interested.
I've felt pressure from many directions over the years, but the two biggest factors working against my business are 1: competition from mass market retailers like Best Buy and Borders, and 2: piracy.
I'm tending to side with the unsympathetic replies. Any boutique-style business must work incredibly hard to enlarge its niche.
As an example, Fried Ant Anime (in a suburb of Dallas) doesn't just keep the shelves stocked and blog on their site. They have two art classes every week -- one for anime-style drawing, and the other for manga-style comic strip art. They've invested in a rental section, so if you're not sure whether it's worth the big bucks for the Fruits Basket box set, you can rent it first. And instead of rejecting fansubs, they embrace them -- each Thursday and Friday through the summer, they're showing episodes of series that aren't available on this side of the Pacific in any form other than fansub.
Of course, location and luck play a large part. Fried Ant is the last stop for Anime between Dallas and Texarkana (or maybe even Little Rock), so they draw customers from all over East Texas. But I have to chalk up their success to their dedication and innovation. For reference, they bought the store when it was about to close -- and it's now a great success, as far as I can tell.
I suspect, though, that this combination of dedication and luck isn't exclusive to anime stores... I could probably tell the same story about a candle shop or the local Christian bookstore.
The first five posts are all riffs on the same theme -- dilation of time. Does that say more about the level of education among Slashdotters, or about our lack of creativity, or both? I guess it's all relative.
Putting a lander on Phobos should be interesting, since the moonlet is covered by a meter-thick layer of dust. When I imagine a craft making a landing, I picture throwing a rock into a bowl of flour. On the plus side, maybe we'll make the first sizable, intentional man-made crater outside the Earth.
I guess Phobos is better then Deimos... the latter is thought to have a layer of dust several hundred feet thick (or should that be "several dozen meters thick"?
Or, in other words, "I saw it on the Internet, so it must be true..."
A perfectly valid point, but that's the beauty of Google's PageRank (when it works, of course). One raving lunatic could put up a page describing how he got screwed by, say, ThinkGeek. He could detail how he bought a shirt and it arrived too small and the company refused to issue a refund, etc etc.
If it's a real problem, then others will probably have had similar experiences, write about them, link to each others blogs, and so on... until the pat-on-the-back web gets dense enough to move up the Google rankings.
If the truth is that the guy ordered a medium shirt for his 400-lb carcass, and tried to return it after a 4-hour pizza buffet binge, and sent it by carrier pigeon with a note saying "SEND ME ONE MILLION DOLLARS OR ILL BLOG!"... then nobody else will link to his blog in a "me too!" context, and it will have no effect.
So, it's not "I saw it on the Internet, so it must be true." It's "I saw it in the first page of Google results, so it must be true.":)
Foo: - All landline calls are free assuming they are local. Long distance landline calls cost long distance fees.
Bar: That's not quite correct. Phone companies usually charge a connection fee for local calls, which is something like 5 cents per call.
While some cut-rate carriers may charge a per-call fee, I don't believe this is widespread. However, it may be more prevalent now, especially with "get a phone! no credit check!" outfits spamming the late-night airwaves. Some examples would be in order... my rural phone company is one that does not have a per-call charge.
Odd payment structure if incoming calls are taken from your free minutes allowance. Do both parties lose minutes then?
Remember, the US is BIG. In the UK, you're as likely to get a call from France as someone in Texas is likely to get a call from Louisiana (though in both cases, the caller may parle francais). So the pricing model in the US expects primarily domestic calls.
Also, on land lines, you don't pay by the minute (generally), and incoming calls are the same as local outgoing calls. So when cell phones came into play, people expected them to behave pretty much the same way. You get charged for every minute, but it doesn't matter if the incoming call is from Texas, Tulsa, or Timbuktu.
Now, for the complicated part: According to UK contracts, if someone in the UK phones another person with a UK phone whilst the callee is abroad, then the caller doesn't pay any extra (for it being an international call) as they can't know where the callee is, so the difference (between national and international cost) is charged to the callee. But this US thing sounds even odder - can anyone explain?
Since we Americans can travel for thousands of miles in a straight line without leaving the country, pricing plans have to be different. When my daughter went to Europe and took her T-Mobile phone, her per-minute rate was us$1-1.50. It didn't matter if she made the call back to the US, or if we called her from the US -- she was charged the same buck-or-so a minute.
I suspect if she called a Greece number from her US phone while she was in Athens, she'd get charged 1) the $1.50/min normal rate plus 2) the normal rate for calling Greece from the US. However, we didn't try it, so there's a chance that 2) wouldn't have applied.
personally I find French food to be not heavy enough for my taste...
I'd prefer my butter drenched in crisco on top of my cheese and then deep fried.. preferably breaded in that mixture used to make corndogs.:)
Well, howdy! Nice to see another Texan on the board -- or at least, from your description, you'd be right at home here. Your message gives me a hankerin' for some Chicken-Fried Chicken. Or a trip to the State Fair of Texas for dessert: Fried Twinkies, Fried Ice Cream, Fried Snickers, Fried Oreos, and for the health food nuts, the not-fried Pie-On-A-Stick.
I heard the NPR report (audio only) on Morning Edition yesterday (6/13/05). Unlike the BBC article, the NPR piece focused on one extremely likely use for the nanobrushes: increasing yields in high-density chip fabrication.
As the size of the features etched in silicon decrease, the importance of cleanliness increases. A single mote of dust landing on the chip will cause it to fail, leading to decreased yields as the devices become smaller and more powerful. These nanobrushes may be useful in cleaning out those bits of dust and other debris, turning formerly useless bits of melted sand into high-dollar microprocessors again.
If the little brushes turn out to be mass-producable, you could even see a cost decrease in the end product. Say a clean room has to be 99.9999% dust free (number pulled out of my a^Hhat). This is incredibly difficult when humans are involved, with all our shedding and outgassing and such. But if you can get rid of contaminants by running the wafers through a nanobrush unit, maybe your clean room only has to be 99.99% dust free... and you save whatever the cost difference is between.99 and.9999.
"Llano" means flat in Spanish. So yes, it's not that surprising that Llano Estacado is flat. I'm also guessing the Guadalupe Mountains would be mountainous.
Don't forget the (relatively) nearby Rio Grande River. And if they called them the Sierra Guadalupe, I'm sure we'd say "Sierra Guadalupe Mountains".
I bet you get pretty irritated when sports types talk about "RBIs", when the plural of "RBI" (Run Batted In) is clearly "RBI" (Runs Batted In).
* Road geeks will appreciate the significance of this fact: Van Horn is the western terminus of U.S. Highway 90.
* Due to the lack of water, tourism and mining are the only sources of income. For details on how the county's 3,407 souls bide their time while waiting for the new spaceport to be built, see the Handbook of Texas Online.
And in the tongue-in-cheek words of singer-songwriter Brian Burns:
Welcome to Texas, Don't anybody get me wrong; We're glad y'all came to see us, Just don't forget to go back home.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, an image of the debris was posted.
Look at the shape of the debris... my first thought was that it might be Arthur Dent catching a ride.
Or for another interpretation... how long before the Weekly World News runs the headline, "Angel Photographed by NASA"?
From Spaceflight Now:
1512 GMT (11:12 a.m. EDT)
T+plus 33 minutes. A few seconds after solid rocket booster separation, a large chunk of something broke free from the external fuel tank. The onboard video camera mounted on the tank showed the object flying away from the vehicle without striking Discovery.
The missing link: Spaceflight Now's Mission Status Center (text version).
... spent four months living aboard the Russian space station Mir in 1998." So he's got experience patching up balky tin cans in space...
Darned Dallas newspaper printed the 10:39 time as though it were local, so I missed it. The Mission Status Center is the next best thing. Interesting tidbit: "Mission specialist No. 3 Andy Thomas
I'm just glad that Google was able to draw the map in time for their new employees to find their cubicles.
This seems to be the appropriate thread for this:
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.
Then we tried to remove the tusks. The tusks. That's not so easy to say. Tusks. You try it some time.
As I say, we tried to remove the tusks. But they were embedded so firmly we couldn't budge them. Of course, in Alabama the Tuscaloosa, but that is entirely ir-elephant to what I was talking about.
Groucho Marx, Animal Crackers
I see your folded horn and raise you one flatbed-mounted horn.
I see your flatbed-mounted horn and raise you by the world's largest air raid siren.
"The Chrysler Air Raid Siren is so powerful that it can reportedly start fires with just the sound vibrations it produces. It can turn fog into rain, clearing the sky. It can produce an effective 70 dB air raid signal for a distance of two miles, and under proper conditions can be heard 30 to 50 miles away. Its advertised effective range was four miles in every direction. That's a long way!"
The point of the story is that it doesn't matter what the specific technology is (the writers picked cold fusion because it was in the news at the time) but that the population at large cannot be trusted with that much power.
Indeed. Even the North Koreans, at best, can only destroy a half-dozen cities. Maximum global impact, at a liberal estimate of five million killed by the blast and ensuing radiation, 30 million... out of 6 billion.
That means that a lunatic pouring the output of an entire country into planetary catastrophe can wipe out only nothing more than one-half of one percent of the Earth's population. Absolutely devastating losses that would be felt by every sentient being on the planet, but not enough to wipe out the species, or even the more fragile concept of "civilization".
Put a million-people-killer in the hands of every Osama bin Laden, Timothy McVeigh, Aum Shinrikyo, and Unabomber... then, you've got trouble on an evolutionary scale.
re your Beetle TDI: what mixture of biodiesel-to-diesel to you use? Some sources I've read said that any modern diesel engine can run on B100, but vw.com says VW only officially approves a paltry B5.
I've run B100 with no problems, except that the fuel economy drops from 43mpg to 38mpg. Straight BD has a lower BTU per gallon than straight petrodiesel.
B20 appears to be the best mix. The truckers at Carl's Corner report that the extra lubricity helps their big rigs run cooler, so they actually get better fuel economy (and the difference between 6mpg and 6.5mpg is significant, when your fill up is 150 gallons or more). I notice that my TDI runs better on B20, and my economy stays high.
VW's main issue seems to be that US biodiesel isn't subject to the stringent requirements of European BD. In Europe, VW warantees for any biodiesel mixture. Technically, though, VW doesn't cover any damage due to bad fuel, whether it's derived from an Illinois soybean or a Precambrian fern.
The subject is hotly discussed on the Biodiesel and "Fuels and Lubricants" forums at TDIClub.com -- everything I've stated above is stuff I learned from TDIClub.com (or from links I found there).
According to the very active Biodiesel forum at TDIClub.com, this study isn't worth the electrons you're viewing it with. One poster notes, "This Cornell fellow brings this up about once a year. Do a search on this site and see the FUD."
I run Biodiesel in my New Beetle TDI engine when I can, so I'm biased, but I agree with my fellow TDI'ers. When the study says "It takes 27 percent more energy to turn soybeans into biodiesel fuel," there's no comparison being made against the alternative. How much energy does it take to pump crude oil out of the ground? How much energy is burned loading it onto a tanker, and then refining it into useful products?
How much energy will be used to clean up the hazardous chemicals required to turn prehistoric ferns into internal combustion fuel? How many gallons of gasoline were burned in the funeral procession for the 15 workers killed near Houston when a tank of benzene exploded this year? By comparison, you can make Biodiesel in a converted water heater, with lye and methanol (hazardous chemicals, but available at any hardware store).
And I won't even touch the issue of how many soldiers must die to ensure the continued flow of addictive foreign petroleum...
Plenty of folks have noted that Tatooine only had two suns, but nobody seems to recall that the planet depicted in The Dark Crystal had three, which reach close conjunction every thousand years or so:
When single shines the triple sun,
What was sundered and undone
Shall be whole, the two made one,
By Gelfling hand, or else by none.
You know, despite all the advances in CGI effects, 1982's The Dark Crystal still looks pretty darned good. Of course, a good story trumps fancy SFX every time (I'm looking at you, George "add some more banthas" Lucas).
I would think that the new e-paper technologies would be better suited as they maintain the image with the power off.
Now there's a real-world problem.
Tech Support: Welcome to Bombay Computer Support, how may I help you?
Consumer: When I turn on my computer, it says 'BIOS ERROR, Press F1 to configure'.
TS: What happens when you press the F1 key?
Con: I don't have an F1 key! My keyboard is blank!
TS: Tell your roommate to give you back your key caps.
Con: ?!?
In 1998, I started a little fan site detailing the history of a country group -- I won't name them, but they became famous and then infamous within the span of 5 years. As part of the site, I included some low-quality
But check out what the group's manager said about the nascent format:
And the lawyer, on the broader issue of copyrights:
In the end, I got more free publicity for my little fan site than if I'd scattered flyers all over Dallas. I'll avoid whoring for hits in this post, though... I think you can figure out where to click if you're really interested.
I've felt pressure from many directions over the years, but the two biggest factors working against my business are 1: competition from mass market retailers like Best Buy and Borders, and 2: piracy.
I'm tending to side with the unsympathetic replies. Any boutique-style business must work incredibly hard to enlarge its niche.
As an example, Fried Ant Anime (in a suburb of Dallas) doesn't just keep the shelves stocked and blog on their site. They have two art classes every week -- one for anime-style drawing, and the other for manga-style comic strip art. They've invested in a rental section, so if you're not sure whether it's worth the big bucks for the Fruits Basket box set, you can rent it first. And instead of rejecting fansubs, they embrace them -- each Thursday and Friday through the summer, they're showing episodes of series that aren't available on this side of the Pacific in any form other than fansub.
Of course, location and luck play a large part. Fried Ant is the last stop for Anime between Dallas and Texarkana (or maybe even Little Rock), so they draw customers from all over East Texas. But I have to chalk up their success to their dedication and innovation. For reference, they bought the store when it was about to close -- and it's now a great success, as far as I can tell.
I suspect, though, that this combination of dedication and luck isn't exclusive to anime stores... I could probably tell the same story about a candle shop or the local Christian bookstore.
100 years according to which observer?
The first five posts are all riffs on the same theme -- dilation of time. Does that say more about the level of education among Slashdotters, or about our lack of creativity, or both? I guess it's all relative.
For example, a new road might be public use; a new Wal-Mart is private use, or at least will be until Wal-Mart merges with the government.
I think, effective with this ruling, that the merger you suggest has already begun.
Putting a lander on Phobos should be interesting, since the moonlet is covered by a meter-thick layer of dust. When I imagine a craft making a landing, I picture throwing a rock into a bowl of flour. On the plus side, maybe we'll make the first sizable, intentional man-made crater outside the Earth.
I guess Phobos is better then Deimos... the latter is thought to have a layer of dust several hundred feet thick (or should that be "several dozen meters thick"?
Or, in other words, "I saw it on the Internet, so it must be true..."
:)
A perfectly valid point, but that's the beauty of Google's PageRank (when it works, of course). One raving lunatic could put up a page describing how he got screwed by, say, ThinkGeek. He could detail how he bought a shirt and it arrived too small and the company refused to issue a refund, etc etc.
If it's a real problem, then others will probably have had similar experiences, write about them, link to each others blogs, and so on... until the pat-on-the-back web gets dense enough to move up the Google rankings.
If the truth is that the guy ordered a medium shirt for his 400-lb carcass, and tried to return it after a 4-hour pizza buffet binge, and sent it by carrier pigeon with a note saying "SEND ME ONE MILLION DOLLARS OR ILL BLOG!"... then nobody else will link to his blog in a "me too!" context, and it will have no effect.
So, it's not "I saw it on the Internet, so it must be true." It's "I saw it in the first page of Google results, so it must be true."
Foo: - All landline calls are free assuming they are local. Long distance landline calls cost long distance fees.
Bar: That's not quite correct. Phone companies usually charge a connection fee for local calls, which is something like 5 cents per call.
While some cut-rate carriers may charge a per-call fee, I don't believe this is widespread. However, it may be more prevalent now, especially with "get a phone! no credit check!" outfits spamming the late-night airwaves. Some examples would be in order... my rural phone company is one that does not have a per-call charge.
Odd payment structure if incoming calls are taken from your free minutes allowance. Do both parties lose minutes then?
Remember, the US is BIG. In the UK, you're as likely to get a call from France as someone in Texas is likely to get a call from Louisiana (though in both cases, the caller may parle francais). So the pricing model in the US expects primarily domestic calls.
Also, on land lines, you don't pay by the minute (generally), and incoming calls are the same as local outgoing calls. So when cell phones came into play, people expected them to behave pretty much the same way. You get charged for every minute, but it doesn't matter if the incoming call is from Texas, Tulsa, or Timbuktu.
Now, for the complicated part:
According to UK contracts, if someone in the UK phones another person with a UK phone whilst the callee is abroad, then the caller doesn't pay any extra (for it being an international call) as they can't know where the callee is, so the difference (between national and international cost) is charged to the callee. But this US thing sounds even odder - can anyone explain?
Since we Americans can travel for thousands of miles in a straight line without leaving the country, pricing plans have to be different. When my daughter went to Europe and took her T-Mobile phone, her per-minute rate was us$1-1.50. It didn't matter if she made the call back to the US, or if we called her from the US -- she was charged the same buck-or-so a minute.
I suspect if she called a Greece number from her US phone while she was in Athens, she'd get charged 1) the $1.50/min normal rate plus 2) the normal rate for calling Greece from the US. However, we didn't try it, so there's a chance that 2) wouldn't have applied.
personally I find French food to be not heavy enough for my taste...
:)
I'd prefer my butter drenched in crisco on top of my cheese and then deep fried.. preferably breaded in that mixture used to make corndogs.
Well, howdy! Nice to see another Texan on the board -- or at least, from your description, you'd be right at home here. Your message gives me a hankerin' for some Chicken-Fried Chicken. Or a trip to the State Fair of Texas for dessert: Fried Twinkies, Fried Ice Cream, Fried Snickers, Fried Oreos, and for the health food nuts, the not-fried Pie-On-A-Stick.
Don't read the overview. Just more ad revenues for him. (Info on Roland Piquepaille)
Perhaps he's saving up for a trip to Mars, to enjoy the tres, tres haute cuisine.
I say we all pitch in, send him up, then cut off his web connection. Or his oxygen, whichever is easier to grab.
I heard the NPR report (audio only) on Morning Edition yesterday (6/13/05). Unlike the BBC article, the NPR piece focused on one extremely likely use for the nanobrushes: increasing yields in high-density chip fabrication.
.99 and .9999.
As the size of the features etched in silicon decrease, the importance of cleanliness increases. A single mote of dust landing on the chip will cause it to fail, leading to decreased yields as the devices become smaller and more powerful. These nanobrushes may be useful in cleaning out those bits of dust and other debris, turning formerly useless bits of melted sand into high-dollar microprocessors again.
If the little brushes turn out to be mass-producable, you could even see a cost decrease in the end product. Say a clean room has to be 99.9999% dust free (number pulled out of my a^Hhat). This is incredibly difficult when humans are involved, with all our shedding and outgassing and such. But if you can get rid of contaminants by running the wafers through a nanobrush unit, maybe your clean room only has to be 99.99% dust free... and you save whatever the cost difference is between
They could send them CNN or Fox News. Surely those signals are as unnatural as any.
But wouldn't they also need to be coherent?
"Llano" means flat in Spanish. So yes, it's not that surprising that Llano Estacado is flat. I'm also guessing the Guadalupe Mountains would be mountainous.
:)
Don't forget the (relatively) nearby Rio Grande River. And if they called them the Sierra Guadalupe, I'm sure we'd say "Sierra Guadalupe Mountains".
I bet you get pretty irritated when sports types talk about "RBIs", when the plural of "RBI" (Run Batted In) is clearly "RBI" (Runs Batted In).
So do I.
As a public service, here are some facts about Culberson County, Texas.
* The county seat is Van Horn.
* As you can see by the satellite photo, the rugged Guadalupe Mountains meet the barren, flat Llano Estacado.
* Culberson County includes the highest point in Texas, part of Guadalupe Mountains National Park.
* Road geeks will appreciate the significance of this fact: Van Horn is the western terminus of U.S. Highway 90.
* Due to the lack of water, tourism and mining are the only sources of income. For details on how the county's 3,407 souls bide their time while waiting for the new spaceport to be built, see the Handbook of Texas Online.
And in the tongue-in-cheek words of singer-songwriter Brian Burns:
Welcome to Texas,
Don't anybody get me wrong;
We're glad y'all came to see us,
Just don't forget to go back home.