Cancer

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Among others.

Re: Complicate the Person Above Thia Halmades made his fortune by cornering the market on mashie niblicks.

Re: Submarine Aircraft carriers of the world! Just the word "SSNCV" in the page linked at the top of the thread makes me boggle.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings I stupidly left both of my calculators at my two workplaces, and I had to sit in the same room with my son to force him to work on an assignment he'd had over break (so I couldn't go use the PC downstairs). I had to crunch some numbers for a PBEM electronic soccer league I'm in, which involves some sums, products, quotients, and raising things to the 3/2 power, and very occasionally taking some tangents/arctangents. So I picked up the dirty slide rule my wife had picked up at a yard sale, and sat at the table with my son; I crunched my numbers while he gathered the facts for his report out the library books we'd checked out. He was fascinated by the non-electronic computer.

Re: How Fast Do Rogue Planets Move? True, but at that point you depart from standard orbital mechanics, and you're magically moving the planet around to suit your plot. Also, those people are making a conscious, premeditated choice to destroy an inhabited planet and everything that lives on it, because there's no natural way to get two close passes in a single orbit. You can't have that happen by accident, only by willed action and use of trans-human tech.

Re: The Last Word OK, how about Sadistic Headmaster In The Room?

Re: How Fast Do Rogue Planets Move? ... And you only get one encounter. Yes, the parabolic orbit could intersect Earth's orbit at two points, but it's utterly impossible to have the two bodies have close passes at both of those points in one orbit.

Re: The Last Word While I am the Evil Nazi Overlord Taskmaster From Hell.

Re: The Last Word Yeah, I have learned that a fair portion of the college population hasn't either.

Re: Planetary Magnetic Field Question You'll get aurorae around the magnetic poles, wherever those are. Aurorae are caused by solar wind particles making it down to the upper atmosphere and making the gas aoms there fluoresce. The magnetic field is usually strong enough stand these particles off. Except, with the usual dipole field, those particles are actually funneled into ring-shaped areas around the magnetic poles at the top of the atmosphere. If the magnitude of the magnetic field is more or less the same after changing the world's orientation, then I don't think it's any less effective in standing off radiation. FWIW, the geomagnetic field reverses fairly frequently, in a geological (not human) sense. Right now the main magnetic field of Earth is weakening at a detectable rate, and there is strong suspicion that we are heading toward another reversal event. (The timescale for this is much longer than a human lifetime ... on the order of the next million years or so.) IMO having the magnetic pole on the dynamical equator would actually aid navigation. Getting your latitude is the easy part of navigating by the stars; the magnetic compass as it is now is an aid to that, since it helps you tell which way is north (maintaining your bearing) while it's cloudy. If the compass points toward the magnetic pole and that's on the equator somewhere, then you get an indirect handle on longitude from that, something you didn't have before. To see what I mean, start with a globe with only lines of latitude drawn on it. Now pick the magnetic poles, and in a different color ink, draw circles of "magnetic latitude", that is, equal distance from the magnetic pole. One that's done, look at it, and note that on any given line of ordinary latitude (except the equator, if you put the magnetic poles on the equator), there is a variation in the direction of "magnetic west" (the direction toward the magnetic pole) everywhere on the line of latitude. That means that if you know your latitude (which you do from the stars), then the difference in direction between celestial north and magnetic north provides you with some information about where you are on your circle of longitude. Depending on where you are, it may not be much information, but it's more than the pre-1600 navigators had. The geodynamo is an insanely complex bit of physics, but it works because a part of the planet's core is liquid, electrically conductive, convecting, and rotating. Because it's liquid, it wouldn't necessarily be strongly bound to the solid part of the Earth by whatever cataclysm knocked the mantle/crust sideways. There's a good deal of coupling between core and lithosphere, of course, but I'd need to look up some stuff and push numbers around to say more.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER ***28 f***ing grams a day of ibuprofen? Sweet creeping Jesus, why would anyone think that was anything but a very bad idea?

Re: Musings on Random Musings What is this "television" of which you speak? Oh, THAT? You mean there is something on it besides PBS and sports events? No, you don't mean that?

Re: How Fast Do Rogue Planets Move? I must sheepishly admit I've never read that book, so I have only a vague idea of what those are. Never thought about them in a physical-reality sense.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Off to go buy drugs. We're out of ibuprofen at home.

Re: The Last Word Oh, I did it. But I'd got it out of my system by the 7th grade.

Re: The Last Word By the time people get to college, most have come to accept that assignments really need to be done and handed in more or less on time. That statement is by no means true in 7th grade. Now, opinions about the reasonableness of those assignments don't seem to evolve much in that time interval ....

Re: The Last Word I wouldn't call him "typical", since I don't have other 7th graders to compare him with.

Re: The Last Word Left to his own devices, he wouldn't have done it at all.

Re: The Last Word It's kind of like trying to persuade a cat to defecate gold bricks on command.

Re: The Last Word My time & energy were consumed entirely in forcing my son to finish an assignment he ought to have done before Christmas break started.

Re: Complicate the Person Above L. Marcus will never be a good physics instructor, because in his presence the laws of physics go awry. Hard to do the gravity demo when stuff flies away from him rather than falling down like it ought.

Re: Help me flesh out a kernal of a setting idea I definitely agree with you there: there are few astrophysical events that could "sterilize" an entire galaxy without wrecking the galaxy along with it. Even with this decision, though, technology has something to say about the means of extinction. The efficacy of quarantine measures (the oldest countermeasure against plague) varies greatly depending upon whether the transit time between landing points is shorter than the sojourn time of the disease, and whether there is a mode of long-distance communications faster than ship travel.

Re: The Last Word My wife & I are definitely still going at reduced effectiveness. I can think, and stand & talk for at least an hour, which is about all I'm called to do today. Thankfully.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings I could make headshots at everyone if they would conform to specifics of time & place too. Tactics, anyone?

Re: The "Nice Happy" Thread Winter Quarter has started. On the minus side, my class is for pre-meds. On the plus side, the class is really small, so small that we can get away with a single meeting for each lab section, rather than splitting the sections and running half of each in alternate weeks. This halves the amount of time spent in lab (which is good), and reduces the overhead of the lab by much more than a factor of two.