Asteroid Florence buzzes Earth, brings two moons along for the ride Be glad that the asteroid dubbed “Florence” won't revisit Earth for many, many years: observations during its weekend fly-by revealed that the space-rock is so big it's captured two moons. Sky-watchers have been waiting for Florence (officially 3122 Florence) for some time: it was first spotted in 1981 by astronomer Schelte …
According to a lot of the 'End times ' crowd on you tube we should have needed more than a bus shelter, many of them were convinced it was going to be a judgement day impact, more of a rupture than a rapture. Can't figure out why they are so keen on our collective doom, unless they think they are going to be the only ones saved.
Back in the real news, do they have any idea what Florence is made of to give it a high albedo?
The bible mentions 144,000 people several times. They get some kind of special pass for the afterlife, but there are arguments about exactly what the pass is good for. There are several smallish sects that are convinced they will be the only ones to get into heaven because everyone else got something wrong and will not be included in the 144,000.
As the end of the world is nigh, you will not need money. Buy guaranteed entry to heaven by sending 1 Bitcoin to ...
"Yes but that was when they could all fit on a single 3.5" floppy disk..."
Do you think they could double that number if I slipped them a 2.88MB diskette? I think I still have a stack of them....somewhere.
Dave
P.S. I'll get my coat. It's the one with the 2.88MB diskettes in the pocket.
Ye Ghads! One of my very first jobs was Beta Testing controllers for the 2.88s. IBM said vaguely "wouldn't it be nice if we had double the capacity for Floppy Disks?" and TEAC and Fujitsu went about killing themselves, and each other, to make it.
My "Primary OS" at the time was SCO Enterprise, with NT 3.51, Novell, DOS 4/Win 3(something?-ish?) ,Slackware 1, and OS/2 on it ( was busy in my teens, and my machine was all SCSI, so, xNIX) which found and used the drive no problems. OS/2, no sweat. All things Micro and Soft required a damned hammer for the drivers and still wouldn't just sense and use the {edited, this is a family site} drive gemoetry and the controller Tom-Foolery (where waranted).
My first lesson in: The hardware *works*, these drivers blow. Then came ZIP Disks, which just sort of "Worked"...put that demon to rest.
"Can't figure out why they are so keen on our collective doom."
Have you met humanity?
(Okay, that's probably not /their/ reason, and to be honest, I am more into doom-by-tragedy -- in the theatrical sense of the word: a fate that would be completely avoidable except for the specific nature of those fated making it inevitable. I already have my box-seat tickets for act two of that one!).
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Agreed - the Earth as pictured is 5 times too big.
Holding my iPad at arm's length, the picture of the Earth is about the size of my thumbnail, i.e. it subtends an angle of approx. 1cm / 100 cm = 0.01 radians. (Using small angle approximation).
The actual angle at closest approach should be approx. 8 000 miles / 4 400 000 miles = 0.002 radians.
I don't suppose my arm is really 100 cm long, but I was trained in physics, so it's close enough.
"Being wiped out by something called Florence would be just sooooo humiliating."Oh I dunno,; we'd just be going with the Flo' as it were. In any event, Ms Nightingale's a bit of .a heroine to those of us who like our statistics
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