Ah, the classic “all eggs in one basket” strategy.

Relevant song: Just Glue Some Gears On It and Call It Steampunk

ISO8601 / RFC3339 gang represent. You’ll have to take four digit years from my cold, dead hands.

Meanwhile in space: “We’re rich!” x Infinity

A lot of open-source software uses copyleft licenses like GPL. If a company uses that code to build its own products, then some or all of their new code may also become open source. This is an important part of how open-source projects stay open. Organizations like FSF have taken big companies to court over this and won.

AI companies trained their slop-generators on that open-source code. In many cases, it will reproduce it line-for-line. But courts currently hold that the generated code is no longer subject to the original copyright restrictions. It’s nearly impossible to publish open-source software without being scraped for AI training.

Technology Connections just published a video about this. By the end, he’s got an overclocked 6 kW tea kettle boiling water in under a minute before destroying itself.

There’s still a few days left to file comments objecting to the change. Link in the article.

Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

The extra a’s make it so much better. 😹

Digital Camera Images, Man.

Relevant Mitchell and Webb comedy sketch.

You can always build your own out of LEGO.

Imagine a large rock, suspended by helicopters a few miles up in the air.

Now drop the rock. How fast is it going when it hits the ground?

The same thing is true for a rock falling from space, but more so. Regardless of initial conditions: if it ever contacts the ground, it will be moving at least 11 kilometers per second.

Yes, they were organic dyes. At the time, those were the only kind. Maybe it’s gotten better over the years.

This is terrible advice. Most writable DVDs degrade quickly, even if they’re stored away from sunlight and heat. Every single one of my burned DVDs from more than a few years back is completely unreadable.

Update: I missed the very important line about M-DISC. This is critical. I can’t vouch for M-DISC personally, but most other optical media is garbage for archival purposes.

No, there isn’t anything like that. Big heavy objects fall. Falling objects are moving fast when they hit the ground. Further details are irrelevant.

Are you absolutely sure that you’ve seen a coin in those vortex demos just stop? Coins falling over doesn’t count, there’s nothing like that in space. Otherwise, they are moving at quite a clip when they reach the bottom of the funnel.

The one possible exception is when you detach part of the mass. If your vehicle removes some mass and launches it, you can use the reaction force to slow down. This is what a rocket engine does, for example. (Note the propellant will still impact at very high speed, as evident from the plume of any rocket landing.) The higher the relative velocity of the reaction mass, the less you’ll need to come to a complete stop. But at this point we are talking about a manmade vehicle, not a naturally occurring rock.

For anything that’s captured in an Earth-centric orbit, it’s never going to end up falling “straight down”. Closed Earth orbits barely decay at all, except from atmospheric drag. For anything that started from a closed orbit, the last few years are almost always a circle or ellipse that barely brushes against the upper edges of the atmosphere.

For such orbits, drag is mostly applied near the lowest point on the orbit (perigee), and drag forces applied there will mostly reduce the height at the other end of the ellipse (apogee). Even if you start from a highly elliptical orbit, this means the decaying orbit becomes more and more circular. Eventually, all parts of the orbit are inside the atmosphere and the loss in altitude starts getting faster and faster, but the velocity is still mostly horizontal.

The good news is that the concept of specific orbital energy applies to any initial orbit. For objects coming from outside Earth’s sphere of influence, terminal velocity remains a good lower bound.

No, it’s not possible to soft-land a large falling object, even with extraordinary luck.

Our intuition serves us well in everyday situations. I think you’ll agree that, if you have a big rock 100 meters in the air, it’s going to hit the ground hard no matter how you drop or throw it. The bigger the rock, the more we can ignore things like air friction.

The same situation applies to objects in space. If it hits the Earth, it’s been falling the whole way from space. The minimum impact velocity is equal to the “height” of Earth’s gravity well, about 11.2 km/s.

This is basically “Weekend at Bernie’s”, using the likeness of a dead man as a puppet.

It would be obvious the moment he opens his mouth. That stupid word salad is instantly recognizable.