with uncomfortable amounts of energy!

“whinging”..... it’s Ireland, show some research.

There once was an idiot from Limerick,

By “adult nerds” do you mean people who like enjoyable movies you insufferable twatwaffle?

Wow, look at these thugs destroying their own communities! How stupid!

Put simply: Due to mercury’s very short period, it spends more time closer to any other planet as the period increases the further away from the sun it is. This is merely a quirk of math and circular motion /physics.

We have a winner! Teaching facts is good, but of limited use. Teaching how to think sets a child up for the real world.

Actually, I found an issue with their numbers. Their model assumed that the orbits are circular, but Mercury has the highest eccentricities of all the planets. Its orbit varies from 0.31 to 0.47 AU from the Sun. Given their result only shows an average of about 0.11 AU difference in the average distance from Earth…

Graduate student? Hell, I could have told you this after doing rough calculations based on what I learned in 9th grade Earth science.

Couple of days? This is a 30 second pondering. 

That said, I’d love to have the equivalent of a group of world clocks on my wall that show the distance (in AU) of each planet (and possibly dwarf planet) from ours at any given moment.

On one hand you complain that the whole thing is captain obvious while on the other you complain that they didn’t use the true elliptical orbits. So you’re both peeved that they did the calculation in the first place and that they didn’t do it a high enough precision. You’re not easy to please.

What makes you think it wasn’t knocked out in a couple of days by a grad student? Look at the Physics Today article. It’s a few paragraphs and the first author is a grad student. It was probably a lunch time conversation. Assuming circular orbits let them derive a formula for the average. Using the actual positions…

This. What is the point of even doing this if you aren’t going to correctly use the non-concentric orbits.

No, but it's the difference between a rote answer and knowing you have to think about the answer.  And schools should be teaching kids how to think, not know the rote answers.

Yeah, the whole “assumed the planets orbits were roughly circular” thing kinda threw me. Has anyone told Kepler about this? He’s gonna have a fit.

This all simplifies things too greatly by assuming coplanar, concentric orbits.

Not useless, as it serves to point out a problem in how we teach people about the solar system.  

Hopefully they didn’t actually calculate the planetary positions; planetary ephemeris files are widely available (your tax dollars at work!).

True, but not so much.  Especially in these unibodies, the outer panels tend to be prone to collision, especially trucks such-as the F-series.  The aluminum skin (I put an aluminum trunk-floor in a ‘03 Maxima) absorbs very little of the impact; the mild steel inner structure?  Check out how all the inner-panels are…