The engine manufacturers likely make a profit per marginal engine sold, and these things aren't cheap. They're developed for a targeted price point of something like $10M/apiece. If Merc had done all their R&D and manufacturing budgeting planning on selling 24 engines/year and then RB wanted to buy another 8, that'd…

I read a write-up (or listened to a podcast, I don't remember), and the main problem that they didn't expect is that instead of having lose boulders strewn about like spirit/opportunity encountered, Curiosity's site tended to have embedded boulders that didn't yield as the wheels went over them, and instead punched…

Arguably the moon environment is more difficult than the martian environment - you get completely heat-soaked up to several hundred degrees during the 14-day "day", then completely cold-soaked during the night. Since rovers are made of many different metals, and metals have different thermal expansion coefficients,…

I think a lot of mining facilities are powered by electricity (underground, want to avoid fumes and sparks), so they could theoretically be powered by solar power.

Ah ok. So assuming Horton never plays again, on opening day each year they need to be $5M short of the cap (to make room for Horton's corpse), but once opening day passes they can hire $5M of help for 99% of a season?

[cap newbie here. Didn't know what I didn't know].

Plus - since Horton is on LTIR, he doesn't count against the Leafs' cap.

[in middle-eastern or eastern-european accent]
"Is crappy plane. Retire it immediately"

"Dress up like lance fucking armstrong for a bike ride"

Running in unpadded shoes (or going barefoot) just tends to cause injuries in different joints. Someone untrained at running barefoot (or running in non-running shoes) _will_ get shin splints or otherwise hurt themselves unless they gradually build themselves up. Even fivefingers recommend you don't do long runs in…

Torque does not matter. To some extent gearing does, because you need the engine to be producing the right amount of power at the right point in your run.

Do you have a source for the deck-melting? I thought the giant fan system would've been more deck-friendly than, say, the harrier. I'd like to read about an F-35 failure mode I wasn't previously aware of.

On the plus side, if they anger enough customers they'll just end up shipping it to themselves :)

I think the blobs were the inside of the 2nd-stage fuel tank, so they were probably kerosene or O2. When it was burning they were all at the bottom from the G-forces, and they started floating upwards just as the announcer said "SECO" (second stage cut off).

One of my favourite moments in my "intro to astrophysics course" was when we went from calculating a Quasars apparent luminosity, then calculating its absolute luminosity (since we could figure out its distance), then calculating the sheer energy it was putting out. The energy output is astounding.

The problem is that the IOC votes go towards cities that promise the biggest/fanciest/newest stadiums. Boston might be able to put on a fantastic frugal games like LA did in 1984. Unfortunately, that's not getting the votes, and it'll go to some 3rd-world dictatorship that promises everything to everyone.

Minor correction: If there was a surface to stand on at Jupiter's apparent surface, you'd actually only feel just over 2Gs and so wouldn't get crushed. Why is that? Because Jupiter is enormous and isn't particularly dense (30% denser than water), so its gravitational field isn't actually that intense at the surface.

The new Miata is a bit of a pig.

I enjoy the Google Trends chart for "Gamergate".

The cost is the eventual loss of access to space. As quoted in the article, many experts believe we're actually past the point of the debris problem self-intensifying as debris already in orbit collides with other objects, creating more debris and so on. So even with perfect behaviour on behalf of all launching…