Posts by Dom 3 357 posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
A very hand-wavey argument:
If you want to be 95% sure that all of your rover's modules are still working after 90 days, you need to ensure that each one has a 99% chance of still working after 90 days. And if that's the case then there's a 66% chance that a component will be working after ten years.
Which is more or less what we saw - some bits stopped working.
Megatsunami debunked here:
https://blogs.agu.org/landslideblog/2013/12/13/canary-islands-tsunami/
An article here explaining that the lack of recent pandemics does *not* increase the likelihood of a new one:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2007/02/severe-pandemic-not-overdue-its-not-when-if
Yes, governments and large employers should have (had) contingency plans in place.
"agencies are just automatically assigning deaths with unreported causes as Covid-19" - which? where? evidence? Here's the current guidelines for England and Wales:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/877302/guidance-for-doctors-completing-medical-certificates-of-cause-of-death-covid-19.pdf
tl;dr:
"doctors are expected to state the cause of death to the best of their knowledge and belief"
"risk of dying"??? Ryanair has an excellent safety record.
Anyway - Ryanair has changed. I think Mr O'Leary realised that some of his policies were so extreme as to alienate passengers to the point that they would refuse to fly on his planes. And I still meet^W used to meet people who hold this position. I fly with them four to eight times a year, because they are the only option using my nearest airport and going where the rellies are. I've had reason to phone them a couple of times to get a name changed (cos I didn't make the booking) to match the passport - done without quibble and without charge, despite their Ts & Cs. And they no longer really enforce the cabin bag size rules. I have yet to see someone get pulled over, even when their backpack is clearly *way* outside the 55x40x20 limit. As long as it is "cabin-size", it's fine.
Thanks for the links. Shame that Nick Cook raises the "doughnuts on a rope" contrail. I've got my *own* photos of one of those. After taking the photos I checked on flightradar24 and found that the contrail corresponded *precisely* with the flightpath of a 747 that had just gone over. Another couple of minutes prodding the web produced this:
https://epod.usra.edu/blog/2015/05/hybrid-contrails-with-crow-instability.html
At which point I was done with *that*.
Regarding the weather satellite photo (which doesn't actually explain how they calculated the speed) an aircraft travelling at those speeds would also have to be up at about 200,000 feet or something, unless built of unobtainium. But contrails form between 25K and 40K (source: Wikipedia). Seems unlikely (but not impossible) that they would form at 200K.
The thing that really stands out about that "contrail" is that it is absolutely straight (bearing in mind curvature of earth - but it mirrors the state boundaries that are based on latitudes). In other words, a ballistic trajectory. So a meteor would seem a more plausible explanation. Would an aircraft - even unmanned - travel for *thousands* of miles without a course correction?
The other stuff is essentially speculative. It would be extraordinary for this aircraft to be in operation for three *decades* without any concrete evidence coming to light. It would take hundreds, nay thousands of personnel to build and operate it. Yet nobody credible has come forward.
Having said that, I had an airline pilot describe seeing a weird triangular aircraft to me. As he said, he was used to looking up at aircraft and identifying them. I can't ask him about it any more as he "shuffled off" about five years ago.
And then there's the compelling argument that the US military wouldn't have given up the SR-71 unless they had a replacement.
The anti-vaxxers are taking advantage of CV19 to further their agenda (WTF *that* is I am not really sure; I can only assume that *somebody* is making good money out of it). Bill Gates is a vocal proponent of vaccination in third world countries. His logic is simple; if parents know that their children will live to adulthood, they'll have two instead of eight, and those kids will be healthier and better educated, and poverty will be reduced.
Does the difference really need spelling out? The father and son are already exposed to each 24/7. The two lads could lead the infection to spread from one family to another.
Meanwhile I want to know why people think it's okay to go shopping in pairs. It means I have to queue for longer and it makes it more difficult to observe the distancing once inside.
I hate prejudice and discrimination. Saying that the next crew to go to the Moon *will* include a woman is prejudice.
The next phase of Moon exploration will not require the test pilot skills of the 60s.
"Anyone who completes the training program" - really? At that level there is still competence vs. incompetence. I cringed when Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper dropped her toolbag, particularly *because* it would fuel sexism.
It depends what you're doing - read Chris Hadfield or Tim Peak or "Riding Rockets".
If you're looking at Mars, small women make sense - they need much less food.
So they've already decided that the next landing will have a woman on board? Isn't that a bit sexist? From what I've read about NASA's female 'nauts, they want to be there on merit.
Of course doing the *logical* thing - factoring in body mass, food consumption etc - would most likely lead to an all-female crew, but that ain't happening either.
The ALSJ has:
102:45:31 Duke: 30 seconds (until the 'Bingo' call).
102:45:40 Aldrin: Contact Light.
The "Bingo" moment was the last possible moment for an abort. An abort required five seconds of full thrust from the descent module before it could jettisoned and the ascent module take over. At hover thrust those five seconds would be an additional twenty seconds. So the Commander *could* have decided to carry on past the bingo point if he was within seconds of touch down.
The US definition predates the other. Discussion at the end of this page:
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/X-Press/stories/2005/102105_Schneider.html
Essentially the 50 mile point is where it's no longer an aeroplane - there's nothing for *control* surfaces to work on. The 62 mile point is where - in order to maintain altitude - you've got to be doing orbital velocities anyway for your wings to generate sufficient lift.
I had a go a few years ago. Any new password was first run through this:
https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/1-pwqcheck/
which recognises that a long password of only two character types is as strong as a short password of four character types. (I didn't use the defaults, FWIW).
After that I ran it through a dictionary checker against a common password list, and a standard word list. If the last (up to) four characters were digits they were stripped before this test. And leet-speak variations were also tested, e.g p455w0rd would fail.
And people *still* managed to come up with piss-poor passwords.
I would like to have gone full john the ripper on it but I wasn't going to be able to sell that one to the customer.
"he couldn't handle picking a new password every 30 days" - nor should he have to. The environment where this was a good idea has not existed for decades. Even .gov.uk have caught up:
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/articles/problems-forcing-regular-password-expiry
Nor is it difficult to teach (even CEOs!) methods for creating strong but memorable passwords. No, not correcthorse(...) but using the initial letters of a phrase, or using the strong stub + domain-based suffix method.
Channel 5's been showing a two-part documentary on Concorde recently. So if any of the following facts are wrong, blame C5. Concorde *was* a loss maker at the beginning of the 1980s. Lord King gave the whole thing over to Brian Walpole (chief Concorde pilot) and gave him two years to make it profitable. The first thing they did was a bit of market research. They discovered that the majority of passengers had no idea how much the tickets cost, and when asked to guess, significantly under-estimated. So they simply put the prices up. And from then on it *did* turn an operating profit. Not to mention the marketing benefits of making it the star of their advertising.
https://theadaptivemarketer.com/2012/01/14/a-pricing-lesson-from-the-concorde/
As for "sold for a £1" - the last one or two, not the whole lot. My google-fu has failed and I cannot find a good link.
"we're ALL going for a Donner Kebab or a Vegan Curry". Great comment but I would take it further - the choice was between "a kebab (again)" or "something else". Having opted for "something else" the stag / hen party are then told that they have overwhelmingly rejected all animal-based foodstuffs and *must* go vegan.
"NASA also recruited 13 women who passed the necessary tests but weren't allowed to be considered because they were not test pilots" - cobblers.
Wikipedia is quite clear:
"thirteen American women who, as part of a privately funded program, underwent some of the same physiological screening tests as the astronauts selected by NASA on April 9, 1959 for Project Mercury. [... they] were not part of NASA's astronaut program, never flew in space and never met as a group"
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