Or a walk-on 3A college football player playing on a top NFL team.

Just being able to get a heavy downforce high-horsepower open wheel racecar around a track in a semi-competent manner is a skill few of us will ever possess (think of Richard Hammond, who certainly can drive performance cars quite competently, but was at the deep end when he tried to drive a Renault F1 car). Mazepin…

If you look at the areas of occupation at the time and the map of the path they took back, they skirted south of Japanese-occupied territory.

BTW, I was just referring to the Auckland-NYC portion. I guess when you consider the San Francisco-Auckland portion, 85%-90% of around the world.

Not when you look at this. Still, a hell of an adventure and accomplishment.

My sister was present for this one. A few USAF careers were ended in this incident.

“Have you ever parked your wiener inside of a Galaxy?”

That was used for early F-16s, but it wouldn’t be inappropriate for this . . .

And now tobacco companies have had to move onto more sophisticated camouflage like “Mission Winnow.” But, yeah, this is the same as Jordan branding their Benson & Hedges cars “Buzzin’ Hornets.”

I would argue that the secret sauce to SpaceX was more Gwynne Shotwell and Tom Mueller. At least Elon was smart enough to hire them and not get in their way too much.

Again, here I go with the pesky math.

And to make it more intuitive, think of RC scale model airplanes, which can do vertical maneuvers that would be impossible in their full-scale counterparts. Shrinking a design generally improves the propeller area/weight ratio, due to the square-cube law:

You’re not giving me any math, so let me try a little more.

Are you sure? Weight tends to scale with the cube of scale, and this miniature version does a little, but not a lot, worse than that (real B-17 is 36,000 pounds empty weight, this is 1,800, against an expected 4,000 if you use the cube rule - 36,000/(3^3) =1,333 lb expected), and propeller area (and wing area, for…

I have to dig it up, but in the book, “The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke,” he has a story that points out that making things weightless is the same as lifting them entirely out of the Earth’s gravity well, energetically. Therefore, you need to expend the same energy to accomplish this. Pushing an object into…

Now available with more duck!

I’ve ascribed most of SpaceX’s success to Gwynne Shotwell and Tom Mueller, with Elon serving as a capable front man who sets a good public vision.

BTW here’s a little article on who writes headlines at “newspapers.” I do not know what Jalopnik’s practice is. https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/40251/are-headlines-often-not-written-by-the-person-writing-a-newspaper-article

The headline writer claims that it “breaks physics.” The writers of articles are often not the ones who write the headline. At no point in the actual text did I see him claim physics was being broken (like a perpetual motion machine). So, whomever wrote the headline (Bradley or some nameless intern who posted the…

Well, yeah. No one is claiming that this “breaks physics.” It just uses physics in a way that is hard to intuitively understand. The critical element - the turbine is linked to the wheels, which permits the blades to see what sailors call the “apparent wind” that permits the seemingly impossible propulsion at greater…