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Post by randombloke on Feb 5, 2012 14:53:11 GMT -4
One of the things I occasionally like to do is go into the city and just wander around randomly, to see what I can find. At any given point on one of those trips, I may have no idea where I am with any kind of precision, since I don't pay attention to street names or most other references. I seldom get "lost" however, since I know with confidence how I got there from where I started.
Apparently something about being on a space-ship with very limited manoeuvrability, a known target destination, and an autopilot makes this harder (impossible even!) somehow? Not buying it, sorry.
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Post by randombloke on Jan 18, 2012 21:06:24 GMT -4
This is not a case of "If I ran the zoo ...", more like "If the chimps were throwing faces at my head ...". Faces? Man, you got some hella twisted zoos in your neck of the woods. That there is some seriously next level horror movie type stuff right there.
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Post by randombloke on Jan 9, 2012 19:24:53 GMT -4
No, Blade Runner.
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Post by randombloke on Jan 7, 2012 13:51:00 GMT -4
I love that "imposed a no-fly zone" bit; it's so absurd even on the face of it - as though NASA have either the authority, jurisdiction or even means to enforce such a thing - that it's hardly even worth pointing out that what they in fact did was ask, nicely, that future visitors to the moon not disturb two historically important sites (the first and last landings) and included some recommendations on how to do that, in the form of borders around the descent stages.
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Post by randombloke on Dec 20, 2011 16:46:32 GMT -4
I for one can't wait until it's realistically feasible* to raytrace a scene not once, but once for each wavelength of light in the visual spectrum (at nanometer intervals, or it would take forever) recalculating the refraction for each step (based on the RI selected for the materials in the scene, with subsurface scattering based on that). Still won't look quite right of course, but it would be pretty damn close.
*And I don't even mean on a non-super-computer here. Just at all would be good.
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Post by randombloke on Dec 20, 2011 16:12:20 GMT -4
I wonder if the "burly brawl" with 100 agent Smith's in the second Matrix film would pass Tsialkovsky's "good enough" test?
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Post by randombloke on Dec 19, 2011 18:03:49 GMT -4
Completely wrong - many peolpe (including real experts) have tried to deny Pokrovsky's modeling work, but so far the attempts have been either laughable or just miserable. You are hilarious. Pokrovsky's conjecture is that, at the point of staging, the Saturn stack designated for Apollo 11 is going at a certain speed, when it should have been going at a different one. Simple enough to check; figure out how fast the vehicle is going, right? The problem is that he bases his claimed velocity not on the motion of the vehicle itself (which has known dimensions and so forth) but on the motion of the edge of a turbulent cloud of exhaust. Why is that bad? Two principal reasons: First, the edge of the exhaust is travelling at an angle to the vehicle (classic "conical spread" pattern) and none of the calculations I've seen even attempt to account for this so the velocity of the smoke, even if it can be accurately determined, is only tangentially (sorry, geometry joke, couldn't help myself) related to the velocity of the vehicle. Second, of course, is the turbulence which makes the edge velocity of the cloud uncertain but almost definitely very much slower than that of the vehicle whilst also making the consistent measurement of the movement of any given portion of the cloud a practical impossibility when based solely on video. Never mind the myriad other issues like the uncertain provenance of his source video (compression artefacts etc make all of the above even worse) and the total failure to account for the constantly varying distance and angle between the vehicle/plume and the camera. Further to all the basic, simple problems with the measurements he made there is the problem that the measured acceleration at lift-off (from ground to clearing the tower) is sufficient to achieve velocities he claims were beyond the Saturn V's engine performance even with the naive (and very conservative) assumption that the vehicle does not lose mass as it travels. That is, to be doing the speeds he claimed the vehicle was doing at staging (because, according to the claim, the engines were simply not powerful enough to achieve greater ones), the engines would have had to have been throttled back from their lift-off thrust. This is exactly the opposite of not having enough power to achieve greater velocity.So, to summarise; Pokrovsky's entire model is full of holes, and the basic premise itself requires utter insanity on the part of Flight Control to be even close to true. N.B. The above is from my memory of others' posts. Any errors are entirely my own.
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Post by randombloke on Dec 18, 2011 18:03:05 GMT -4
The trouble with CTs is that they've never heard of the "sucker rule" and so keep falling for it. Quite sad really.
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Post by randombloke on Dec 17, 2011 7:33:52 GMT -4
echnaton - I understand. It's the rhetorical equivalent of "Look! Over there! A puppy!"
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Post by randombloke on Dec 16, 2011 22:38:57 GMT -4
Why the fascination with Langley? there are NASA centers spread out all over the US. Because there is a CIA facility that is also in a place called Langley and, as everyone knows, if two facilities are in the same town, or even two different towns that happen to have the same name, they must necessarily be in cahoots with each other to grind the world under their collective boot heels by oppressing The Truth.
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Post by randombloke on Dec 16, 2011 22:29:08 GMT -4
Secret Service type dudes are exactly the people you'd expect to run towards a shooter. Or at least to intersect the shooter's line to his target. They go through years of training and vetting to make sure they are psychologically prepared to place their life in danger for the sake of their protectee's, even if that means standing between them and a sniper yelling "shoot me!"
I would therefore not be even faintly surprised that a secret service agent reacted differently to a crowd of untrained civilians who were expecting a pleasant day out in the sunshine, rather than to become witnesses to a murder.
Yet you consistently manage to miss the incredibly obvious in your perpetual quest to raise confirmation bias to a high art. I don't know what that makes you exactly, but I know what it certainly makes you not: A competent investigator.
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Post by randombloke on Dec 15, 2011 10:35:17 GMT -4
Got a set of Christmas lights this year. A string of white LEDs wired in parallel, essentially. Does eight different patterns of flashing which you can cycle through with a button on the controller. Now I'm tempted to pull it apart and see what's actually running it. Bet there's more than enough spare processing power to at least run a seven-segment display for the programme number.
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Post by randombloke on Dec 14, 2011 13:20:47 GMT -4
Sinking? It never even surfaced; it popped up its periscope in the middle of a pack of Destroyers and there were already three charges in the water before it could react. Right now it's a collection of hull breaches held together mostly by hope and well on the way to being derelict.
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Post by randombloke on Dec 14, 2011 9:10:28 GMT -4
No kidding most of the pictures weren't available until the seventies; most of the pictures weren't taken until the seventies (of eighty-odd total hours spent on the surface of the moon, over seventy of them occurred in 1971-1972).
But backtracking noted. Address your original, patently false, claim that some/all/any Apollo pictures were "produced" in the 1990s or retract it please. No secret NASA time travel projects either.
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Post by randombloke on Dec 14, 2011 8:48:13 GMT -4
What is up with conspiracy theorists and their inability to post a link to anything, at all, ever?
This is the second one I've seen who's managed to post screen-captures of youtube videos instead of posting a link to the actual video, thus preventing anyone from simply clicking through and watching the video. Seriously, what is up with that?
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