By the time you reached GEO, the horizontal velocity you started with on the ground would be enough to keep you “weightless”.

That assumes that you’re climbing something like a space elevator that rotates with the earth. If you built a machine that hypothetically lets you climb by pushing reaction mass down in inertial space (employing a stairmaster-style motion), then you won’t get the centrifugal effect.

But then when you do reach the moon’s orbit, it smashes into you at several kilometers per second.

If you do the space elevator, then you actually start down-climbing immediately above the GEO level. Because the centrifugal force is stronger than earth gravity, and it pulls you farther out.

A cable that linked the earth and the moon would have to not be attached to the earth’s surface. Otherwise it would wind up around the earth as the earth’s faster rotation drags the earth end of the cable around.

Well it’s straight uphill all the way, so probably pretty tiring. Imagine 10 years of stairmaster at 3 mph.

I’m still amazed, because this Hormuz script was a West Wing episode, pretty early in the run. How could you not think about that, sitting in the White House about to attack Iran?

This is for the pre-millennial dispensationalists. For the pre-millennials, the rapture will occur at the start of the 1000 year tribulation (as depicted in Left Behind). So it’s exciting if there’s a sign it might happen soon.

(Let’s just ignore the gospel passage about “ye shall know not the hour…” Etc etc.)

For the post-millenials, the rapture will occur after the 1000 years of tribulation, not before. So it’s less exciting, because you’ll probably die before then, so you won’t be eligible for rapture.

And of course the amillennials don’t necessarily think the 1000 years is a literal 1000 years, and they have various opinions about how figurative John of Patmos was, or just how many balls he was tripping.

And he still called them last night.

Linux (at least the mainline version) never supported 16-bit processors. Linus started writing the operating system on his brand new 32-bit 386 machine, and he never looked back.

Allegedly, Outlook doesn’t handle intermittent broken connectivity very well when you’re trying to configure it initially. Such as when your gateway is handing off between TDRS and the fricken Deep Space Network.

There’s a convention in theoretical physics to adopt so-called “natural” units. In the natural system of units, measures of length, time, and mass are chosen so as to make the speed of light and the gravitational constant 1. Or sometimes it’s the speed of light and Planck’s constant.

Anyhow, this makes the resulting measures of length, time, and mass completely nonsensical to any human scale problem. But it makes physics equations much shorter to write down, because you can drop all of the c’s, G’s, and h-bars and whatnot.

For example, the famous E = m c^2 becomes E = m. Energy is mass. Voila.

These planes are modified airliners with a giant spinning radar thingy stuck on. One of them can provide radar coverage over an entire region and tell all of our other planes where to go and what to do. That is too say, these planes are extremely important to modern air warfare, even if they don’t carry their own offensive armaments.

These planes also have a very custom, very unique design, and that makes them very expensive. You can’t just go buy more at the store, even if you have unlimited money. For starters, there aren’t many working Boeing 707s lying around any more to convert.

The US started this war with a fleet of 16 total airplanes. We now have 14, with one that appears to be a total hull loss, and another one confirmed to be damaged.

As an American, I am unhappy about this. This puts us in a significantly worse position if this shit escalates into the world war that some are saying has already started.

Nazi Germany famously tried to develop synthetic replacements for petroleum. In their context, they had a massive war going on, and they did not have great access to regular oil deposits or sources.

They weren’t successful at replacing non-synthetic petroleum products on a large scale. By the end of the war, their air force couldn’t fly anywhere for lack of fuel, and their army had almost entirely reverted to horse-based transport instead of trucks.

The proof is not that ancient. Pi was proven to be irrational in 1761, and proven to be transcendental in 1882.

For a long time the problem was known as “squaring the circle”: Given a circle in a plane, construct a square with the same area using a compass and straightedge. This was a famous unsolved problem in mathematics from antiquity all the way through the renaissance.

IMAX film is twice as wide as standard film. 70 mm instead of 35 mm. The IMAX film platters are physically ginormous. All that extra film gives you a bunch of extra resolution compared to regular film.

The first catch is that “IMAX standard” may not be real IMAX. I don’t know exactly what that means. Perhaps it could even be digital projection that aims to be comparable to IMAX in some ways?

Second catch is that a lot of films that are shown in IMAX theaters were not actually shot on IMAX originally. If a film was shot on 35mm, say, and then printed onto IMAX, you don’t get all of the resolution benefits, and you may also get letter boxes or pan-and-scan because the aspect ratio isn’t the same. IMAX cameras are massively more expensive and logistically difficult than regular film cameras.

Just to be clear: with a marginal tax rate, if your income is $10,000,001, you pay $0.70 tax for the $1, and the rest of the $10,000,000 is taxed according to the lower tax brackets.

The first $50,000 of that $10 million is taxed just like the guy that only made $50,000.

The US tax system is slightly more complicated than this, but there’s no situation where you can get stuck with a huge additional bill because you edged slightly into the next higher tax bracket.

I don’t think the Tolkien estate is willing to option Silmarillion or any other content. Far as I know, all of the film and TV content is based on a single, very old license agreement from before they soured on film and video. As a result it only covers The Hobbit and LOTR. The Amazon show was therefore restricted to the LOTR appendices only.

(It’s going to be a lot more than $20B to actually construct a moon base.)

Switzerland distributes a lot of firearms, particularly through their mandatory military service. But Switzerland also very tightly controls the supply of ammunition for all of those firearms they issue.

I didn’t know the circumstances, but it seems like her military service may have ended if she was 27.

Whatever it is now doesn’t matter, because they will completely rewrite the laws if they ever actually do a draft

Keith Higgins, the district attorney, did not object to the bond in court and told the judge police did not consult his office before filing the charges.

Yep. This is headed to nolle prosequi town.

I think the 0.25c claim is mostly Technical Manual content and not on-screen canon. The manual also claims that the stardate calendar is designed to cope with time dilation and relativity of simultaneity issues.