Posts by Joe_H 10 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Dec 2012
Depends on which tail you are talking about.
A trail of dust gets left behind in the comet's orbit forming one tail, and this gets slowly pushed out. Ionised gases that get emitted are affected much more strongly by the sun's magnetic field and these form a tail pointing directly away from the sun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_tail
1) The damage to the normal windscreen wasn't pretty but was fairly limited.
2) The damage to a Prince Rupert's drop is all or nothing.
3) If the inner layer of the new windscreen uses the same method to get its toughness, what happens when you wind up the size or speed of the ball bearing and break through the windscreen? Does the entire windscreen explode?
( I know that iPhone screens can be broken without exploding, so maybe it would be an anti-climax, but I'd like to see it demonstrated.)
Try looking at the point-cloud for this
http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=0ef05319-4b7b-491a-8e75-040c1af4ce56
which I believe is generated purely from the photographs.
More photographs = more accurate positioning.
This studio seems like an application of the same sort of thing for movies
Gravity doesn't know about the rotation of the earth, but the rotation gives about a 1000mph start to anything launched in that direction. As the inclination angle increases, the effect reduces and you have to put more effort into getting to orbit, until you get to a polar orbit when you get no help at all from earth's rotation. Since "The biggest cost is getting the things into orbit", it's cheaper to put satellites into an equatorial orbit.
Imperial not complicated?
Where 1 pound of gold is lighter than 1 pound of coal and 1 ounce of gold is heavier than 1 ounce of coal?
(I hate people comparing gold and feathers and claiming they are the same)
Precious metals are normally weighed in Troy-weight and everything else in Avoirdupois. There are 480 grains to a troy ounce, 437½ grains to an avoirdupois ounce (gold is heavier) but only 12 ounces in a troy pound instead of 16 avoirdupois, so we have 5,760 grains against 7000 grains for the pound measurements. Both systems use the same grain, which is defined in terms of the kilo these days, so the imperial system is now based on the metric system anyway.
If you want to buy precious metals, make sure you know how heavy a pound is, or use kg.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
