Zeropoint

I'm with you, Michael. Social justice is worth fighting for. It's hard for me to look at this thread's topic and not think about racism in our world. I see people in this thread who want to be able to, in game, designate whole groups of people as other, as less than, and as without the right to life, based only on their race, utterly without regard for their personal qualities. When I see someone who wants to be able to, in a game, kill people with impunity and no moral qualms because their skin is green, I can't help being reminded of the people who, in the real world, want to be

Dynamite, specifically, is an explosive composed of nitroglycerin absorbed in diatomaceous earth. It's actually well known for being unstable and subject to shock detonation. According to Wikipedia, "Dynamite is moderately sensitive to shock. Shock resistance tests are usually carried out with a drop-hammer: about 100 mg of explosive is placed on an anvil, upon which a weight of between 0.5 and 10 kilograms (1.1 and 22.0 lb) is dropped from different heights until detonation is achieved.[8] With a hammer of 2 kg, mercury fulminate detonates with a drop distance of 1 to 2 cm, nitroglycerin with

You're looking at footage of Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2, taken on April 24 of 2020, between 8:37 PM and 9:14 PM (UTC). It's notable because "It is one of the brightest and therefore largest potentially hazardous asteroids known to exist," and also because "According to observations by the NASA IRTF telescope during the ExploreNEOs Warm Spitzer program, 1998 OR2 is a rather rare L-type asteroid." L-type asteroids are distinguished by their reflective spectral profile, although I can't work out what that means in terms of what they'd look like to human eyes. (527

We've known that this is how planets form for some time now, but it's still awesome to finally have pictures of it!

You've got it on your hands. You don't have enough of it. You've got it on your side. You're pressed for it. You spend it. You waste it. It's in. It's out. It's now. It's past. It's running out. It's drawing near. Chrono Trigger. It's about time.

I'm kind of more impressed by the thousands of dollars worth of Heroscape tiles.

Are you familiar with the principle of conservation of energy? What you're describing violates it quite badly.

That is the obvious sticking point, isn't it? There's been a lot of work being done on "small modular reactors" and I have to wonder if it might not be possible to put one of them in a crash-rated box and still come out ahead of fossil fuels. I may be remembering wrong but I seem to recall that TMI involved a control panel where a valve position was indicated by the position the valve had been ordered to go to, and NOT by reading the actual position of the valve. As I understand it, a valve got stuck and operators didn't know what position it was actually in, and this led

It really sticks in my craw that public opinion of nuclear power has been permanently damaged by a few isolated incidents that all stemmed from egregiously poor decisions. The people behind Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths via the effects of global warming, and in all three of those cases, it's because they blatantly failed to follow good engineering principles--deliberately, knowingly, and culpably failed.

I'm a little unclear on how a sack of flour is dangerous, but I agree with pawsplay in principle. Firearms are, I suppose, kind of easy to use for mass killings, and in this country they definitely have some weird status as a symbol of . . . I dunno, toxic masculine power and virility or something. America has an unhealthy relationship with firearms, that's for sure. However: Anyone, on any side of the issue, who thinks that firearms are the best way to kill a bunch of people simply lacks imagination. For obvious reasons I'm not going to describe better ways to kill peo

It's time to stop asking nicely and start making the government do its damn job of caring for the citizens.

A small nuclear power plant would be the obvious choice.

Yeah, the line between "long dagger" and "short sword" is kind of blurry.

I note that swords are not on that list. But, like pawsplay said: "Daggers, though. You can always find a justification for a dagger."

I find it a bit strange that a person is legally allowed to "shack up" with as many people as they want, but marrying more than one person is forbidden.