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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • The $5 million is earning interest at the “judicial interest rate”. Which is 4% (and tied to t-bonds) instead of 100%. That’s how the $5 million became $5.8 million during the appeal.

    Trump was also probably required to post an appeal bond in cash or other security to cover the entire amount of the judgement plus expected interest. So when Caroll does finally get her money, the check is probably going to come from an escrow service or similar, not from Trump directly.






  • Alex Jones doesn’t own any IP any more. His bankruptcy estate owns the shares in the business that used to be his. So Alex Jones can’t sue for any infringement. In fact Alex Jones continued to illegally use the studio and the branding for months after he lost the rights to do so.

    In theory Jones’s bankruptcy estate’s liquidator / administrator could sue on behalf of the estate. But that guy was trying to award the auction to the Onion in the first place.

    The Onion tried to strike a short term lease deal, which hasn’t been approved yet. So they’re just going to make the lease payments to the plaintiffs directly for the time being.

    And they think they’re in a pretty legally defensible situation, because, hey, who’s going to sue them?




  • If you read the chart on that Wikipedia article carefully, the estimated temperature profile is based on data from two Apollo missions.

    All of the Apollo missions spent all of their surface time during the lunar morning, relatively early into the 14-day lunar day. They did this partially because the cooling systems couldn’t cope with the full heat of the day, and partially to ensure good backlighting during the landings.

    So there is going to be some “diurnal” surface heating and cooling that is probably modeled but not measured.



  • Your car radiator is actually using convection to convect heat into the air.

    The spacecraft radiators use radiation to dump heat by emitting infrared photons. Photons do not require a medium. This type of radiator works by maximizing the area of hot surface exposed to empty space (which has an effective temperature of 3 K). They have to be pointed into a dark area and away from the sun. There’s no advantage to fins, because you want to maximize area perpendicular to the dark sky.

    Both devices are called radiators, but they are different kinds of devices.


  • Solar sail effect is going to be dwarfed by regular atmospheric drag in low earth orbit. At perfect right angles the radiation pressure on the panels is 4.5 micro-Pascals. Meanwhile, in low orbit there’s enough residual atmosphere to generate a dynamic pressure (for drag) of 5 milli-Pascals, give or take (and strongly depending on the space weather).

    So atmospheric drag is around 1000 times more than photon pressure. And the drag is big enough to be noticeable over weeks and months, requiring regular boosts to stay in orbit.