Hiya, and congratulations on Curiosity's success - just awesome! What are the chances that the sky crane maneuver will be used again? Is it robust enough to, say, deliver large modular components for a potential future habitat? For that matter, what's your opinion of manned exploration/colonization of Mars? Thanks!

I think people like to refer to Einstein in this sort of context because, whatever you want to say about him, he was an indisputable genius who elected to let people study his brain after he died. I'm not necessarily saying he was "the smartest man ever," (a very difficult claim to support for anyone, seeing as we…

Iiiii like it!

Yeah, but before it was scattered to the winds, the weighing and actual autopsy took place under supervision at UPENN. That part, at least, is well documented, photographically and through notation.

Definitely the latter, or blue whales would be the most intelligent species on earth. It's more about the brain mass to body mass ratio. Even then, larger brains don't seem to correlate with better cognition. Einstein's brain, after dissection, actually seemed to be missing portions that are normally present (though I…

I had the exact same experience with fireworks! It was at Tanglewood, and a total surprise, and one of the best displays I've ever seen, and I insisted on recording about 60% of it before I realized that this was forcing me to watch the whole thing through my iPhone!

S'true! This was the first one with anything to seriously look at, though.

Safe landing, ya' crazy bird..

Just awesome. I'll be glued to my computer during Curiosity's approach. It's landing on my birthday (Aug. 6th, EST). Previously, the only well-known historical event attached to that date was the bombing of Hiroshima, so I really, really hope nothing goes wrong, because it would be nice to share the day with something…

I think you were part of a very small minority..

Yeah, I looked it up after I posted this. The MOAB gets an 11 ton equivalent yield out of 8 tons of high explosive. The Russians claim their version of the bomb has a better weight to yield ratio, but it's still nothing like what they describe here.

It looks like the article was already changed from 200 to 500 Megatons (nope) to 200 to 500 kilotons. That still can't be right. No fuel-air bomb could have that kind of yield, which is 10-20 times more powerful than Little Boy, which leveled Hiroshima...I have to think that they meant 200-500 tons, which sounds much…

I hear that the DayZ devteam is about to implement a system that tracks users' logins and algorithmically picks out and bans people who are abusing servers. Hope it works, and that it doesn't punish people who are just seeking out a good server to play on... Personally, I think a good solution would simply be to put…

There is no "end-game," but you could absolutely"rebuild society" if you could get enough like-minded people together on a server (or several). You can build fortifications, so if you had enough members to do around-the-clock guard duty, you could set up a "safe-zone," like a trading post. You could barter medical…

That's is very cool...It's amazing what you can do with a 1MHz processor, if you're clever about it!

It really is a bizarre palette! I remember playing with my friend's C64 when I was 8 or so, and wondering why all the explosions were mustard-yellow. Still, it had some great games (there was this arena-type game, where you designed your own monster to fight with that I remember especially fondly). And I recall that…

And now I have to retract my statement, having actually looked at the color palette. Hmm...wish I could delete posts. Sorry! Drunk, like I said.

...The music's awesome, though.

I'm going to be a total pedantic buzzkill here, and I apologize in advance — I'm a little drunk. There's no way a C64 ever had the ability to display that range of colors, even dithered. And I'm speaking as somebody old enough and nerdy enough to remember it well...

But thermite is not explosive, or the most dangerous thing you can make with finely-powdered Al powder...What people should be concerned about is that this is one of the two ingredients in several varieties of flash powder - incredibly unstable, being shock and friction-sensitive - which has a detonable mass of only…