Jim: How can a critical word be said about something perfect?
Shadeburst: Altitude Zero, if you go to Handmer’s page he is a major Muskrat. He correctly identifies SLS as a POS, then fails to say a single critical word about Starship.
Rog: Sounds like this shrink wanted to have sex with Hitler.
Bomag: …“vehement, sweeping and personally abusive” attacks. Specifically tailored assaults to their egos, cherished ideas, and beliefs were used to cause high levels of stress and distress. The subjects then viewed recorded footage of their reactions to this verbal abuse repeatedly. Now we get this every day on the internet.
Adar: MK Ultra as originally conceived to be confined strictly to what was called the interrogation problem. That problem being: 1. How to get a person to talk when they didn’t want to talk. 2. How to know the person was telling the truth when they did talk. That single best solution to the “problem” was found to be prostitute coached.
Jim: Freddo: “So the good thing about a dome is that while you are doing the extensive foundation engineering, you can cheaply add a number of underground levels.” You can cheaply add a number of underground levels? Interesting…
Longarch: Okay, the link is not very relevant, but if you love 1970s sci-fi aesthetics, you will probably love the images at this link: https://www.djfood.org/f antasy-jodorowsky-tron-v isualisations-by-johnny- darrell/
Longarch: Actually, the key-change mafia were propping up key-change practices in pop songs until Casey Handmer proved that there was no key-changed song written in orbit that could profitably replace a single-key song written on earth. Then the key-change mafia had to diversify into bored-ape tokens and helium-lifted airships.
Anomaly UK: Regarding Grasspunk’s comment above, the degree of impact of one songwriter on pop music is easy to underestimate and worth looking into. Max Martin wrote or co-wrote: Britney Spears’s “…Baby One More Time” (1998) the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” (1999) Bon Jovi “It’s My Life” (2000) Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” (2008) Maroon 5′s “One More Night” (2012), Taylor Swift’s “Shake...
Grasspunk: You move the song key around not so it sounds better but so it fits the characteristics of your singer, for example to make the belted notes of the chorus line up with the power range of the singer. I’m kinda bugged by the lack of mention of disco, EDM and especially Max Martin and cohort, which drive the patterns of a lot of modern pop music. The data he provides for disappearing key changes shows a fall starting in the late 90s which lines up with Max Martin’s Swedish invasion,...
EB: “I will resist the temptation to take easy shots, but point out merely that every real-world attempt at implementation of libertarianism as the dominant political culture has failed, quickly and predictably.” I’m curious what real real-world implementations have been tried? I’m not disputing the point, just curious of knowing about some examples.
Bob Sykes: The average distance between asteroids in the Belt is about 100,000 miles. Exploratory space ships/satellites have passed through the Belt without contacting anything other than dust. Then there is the gravitational potential between Earth and the Belt.
Altitude Zero: Yes, Caleb, and that’s a best case scenario. This guy reminds me of a guy in 1902 telling us why heavier than air flight is impossible, or in 1958 explaining why we will never reach the Moon. The late Jerry Pournelle thought that space-based solar had potential, and he was at least as smart as this guy. Also, it seems that Handmer has a “Everything Elon Musk believes is wrong” agenda. He may be right, but it pays to keep his predispositions in mind.
Caleb Camargo: Handmer is probably right, but my impression reading these posts so far is that he is playing fast and loose with his numbers to get to his desired conclusions, and the more I read, the less I trust him. Whether it’s using NYC (?!) subway tunneling (instead of cut-and-scrape…?) numbers for underground construction on Mars, or lopping numbers in half he doesn’t like, or implying that space power would involve the same number of panels necessary on earth…
Senile Old Coot: 1. Time passes. Memory fades. When the space shuttle program was initially funded the projections were that it would reduce the cost of lifting payloads into orbit tenfold. Was it from 5,000 dollars a pound down to 500 (with even greater savings later on)? Something like that. Mostly BS? Mainly to shift NASA dollars over to companies that were friends of Nixon? Every trip was putting the weight of the shuttle into orbit just to bring it back down again. I seem to remember much of the...
Michael van der Riet: Hindenburg anyone? I read a blog about some British engineers looking at replacing domestic gas with hydrogen. From experience they learned to build their experimental apparatus in a small shed in the middle of the countryside and retreat a good distance before pressing the Go button. The shed was usually demolished. Domestic gas used to come off the tail end of petroleum refining. Over more than a century there have been very few disasters. Hydrogen has very low energy density...
Michael van der Riet: On the other hand there are a lot of burrowing animals. Most plants prefer to dig under the surface. Microbes are fairly evenly split between those that like the outdoors and those that are happiest underground in a host. Perhaps we’re not looking at this the right way.
Wang Wei Lin: Hydrogen is a very reactive gas and atomically tiny. Hydrogen storage is complicated by these two factors. If it doesn’t react with is container, it creeps out because of its size. Storing it in pellets doesn’t solve those problems. From a humorous point of view this process makes hydrogen pop rocks like the kid’s candy.
That is fantastic!