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June 1 - June 3, 2023
They say there are no stupid questions. That’s obviously wrong; I think my question about hard and soft things, for example, is pretty stupid. But it turns out that trying to thoroughly answer a stupid question can take you to some pretty interesting places.
If the Earth stopped and the air didn’t, the result would be a sudden thousand-mile-per-hour wind.
We don’t know what astatine looks like, because, as Lowe put it, “that stuff just doesn’t want to exist.”
There’s no material safety data sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word “NO” scrawled over and over in charred blood.
a trillion trillion kilograms is how much a planet weighs.
the AK-47 has a thrust-to-weight ratio of around 2.
A higher thrust-to-weight ratio than Saturn V rocket
our optimal craft would comprise a large number of AK-47s (a minimum of 25 but ideally at least 300) carrying 250 rounds of ammunition each. The largest versions of this craft could accelerate upward to vertical speeds approaching 100 meters per second, climbing over half a kilometer into the air.
If I mounted a GAU-8 on my car, put the car in neutral, and started firing backward from a standstill, I would be breaking the interstate speed limit in less than three seconds.
The reason spacecraft can overheat is that space isn’t as thermally conductive as water, so heat builds up more quickly in spacecraft than in boats.
the US government has, in some official capacity, issued an opinion on the subject of firing nuclear missiles at hurricanes.
In particular, if you change the X-Plane config file to reduce gravity, thin the atmosphere, and shrink the radius of the planet, it can simulate flight on Mars. X-Plane tells us that flight on Mars is difficult, but not impossible.
Your plane would fly pretty well, except it would be on fire the whole time, and then it would stop flying, and then stop being a plane.
Venus is a terrible place.
While Venus’s surface is awful, its upper atmosphere is surprisingly Earthlike. At 55 kilometers, a human could survive with an oxygen mask and a protective wetsuit; the air is room temperature and the pressure is similar to that on Earth mountains. You would need the wetsuit, though, to protect you from the sulfuric acid.4 The acid’s no fun, but it turns out the area right above the clouds is a great environment for an airplane, as long as it has no exposed metal to be corroded away by the sulfuric acid. And is capable of flight in constant category-5-hurricane-level winds, which are another
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Flying on Venus is hilariously horrific
humans on Titan could fly by muscle power. A human in a hang glider could comfortably take off and cruise around powered by oversized swim-flipper boots—or even take off by flapping artificial wings.
I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.
The X-wing’s mass has never been canonically established, but its length has—12.5 meters. An F-22 is 19 meters long and weighs 19,700 kg, so scaling down from this gives an estimate for the X-wing of about 12,000 pounds (5 metric tons).
Lastly, we need to know the strength of gravity on Dagobah. Here, I figure I’m stuck, because while sci-fi fans are obsessive, it’s not like there’s gonna be a catalog of minor geophysical characteristics for every planet visited in Star Wars. Right? Nope. I’ve underestimated the fandom. Wookieepedia has just such a catalog, and informs us that the surface gravity on Dagobah is 0.9g.
At current electricity prices, Yoda would be worth about $2/hour.
But with world electricity consumption pushing 2 terawatts, it would take a hundred million Yodas to meet our demands. All things considered, switching to Yoda power probably isn’t worth the trouble—though it would definitely be green.
Very punny
Delaware has no airports.
If someone produces a child on their own, it dramatically increases the likelihood that the child will inherit the same chromosome on both sides, and thus a double multiplier.
By avoiding inbreeding, a population reduces the odds that rare and harmful mutations will pop up at the same place on both sides of the chromosome.
Horned lizards shoot jets of blood from their eyes for distances of up to 5 feet. I don’t know why they do this because whenever I reach the phrase “shoot jets of blood from their eyes” in an article I just stop there and stare at it until I need to lie down.
British javelin thrower named Roald Bradstock held a “random object throwing competition,” in which he threw everything from dead fish to an actual kitchen sink.
If you’re in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space is closer than the sea.
Only a fraction of a rocket’s energy is used to lift up out of the atmosphere; the vast majority of it is used to gain orbital (sideways) speed.
km/s is blisteringly fast. When you look at the sky near sunset, you can sometimes see the ISS go past . . . and then, 90 minutes later, see it go past again.6 In those 90 minutes, it’s circled the entire world.
To get a better sense of the pace at which you’re traveling, let’s use the beat of a song to mark the passage of time.9 Suppose you started playing the 1988 song by The Proclaimers, “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles).” That song is about 131.9 beats per minute, so imagine that with every beat of the song, you move forward more than 2 miles.
the ISS is moving at 7.66 km/s. This means that if an astronaut on the ISS listens to “I’m Gonna Be,” in the time between the first beat of the song and the final lines . . . . . . they will have traveled just about exactly 1000 miles.
Brilliant coincidence
The most widely cited figure for average sneeze frequency comes from a doctor interviewed by ABC News, who pegged it at 200 sneezes per person per year.
Kind of makes me want to record how many times I sneeze in a year.
Surface gravity would have gone up by only 0.4 percent, rather than 1.2 percent, since surface gravity is proportional to radius.4 You might notice the difference in weight on a scale, but it’s not a big deal. Gravity varies by this much between different cities already.
No place on Earth has constant lightning, but there’s an area in Venezuela that comes close. Near the southwestern edge of Lake Maracaibo, there’s a strange phenomenon: perpetual nighttime thunderstorms. There are two spots, one over the lake and one over land to the west, where thunderstorms form almost every night.
Neat bit of trivia
one in 27 quinquatrigintillion.
Chance of guessing on all SAT multiple choice questions and getting a perfect score
To get close enough to touch it, you would need a very good grip on something. Really, you’d need to do this in a full-body support harness, or at the very least a neck brace; if you get within reach, your head will weigh as much as a small child, and your blood won’t know which way to flow.
the Death Star caused a magnitude 15 earthquake on Alderaan.
Magnitude -6 A key press on a lightweight keyboard
