perilunar

75,052 icons and no way to search any of it. All the data is in the img title attributes, so in-page search doesn't even work on the icons already downloaded.

Cool idea though.

which they need permission to do anything else with

Not really. You can run pretty much anything you want if you build for the web.

At the distances involved even the beam from a gigantic laser will be spread out enough not to vaporise anything — you won't need a magic material, just a very large, thin, and highly reflective solar sail.

you can't use these lasers to slow down the probe

You can, but you need a couple of solar sails. You beam the laser at the sails to accelerate, then at the halfway point one of the sails detaches and becomes a reflector, which lights up the now flipped probe and remaining sail to decelerate them.

Dogs are social beings and have minds. They understand cursing and thanking. Maybe not the actual words, but certainly the emotion behind them.

How old are they? I found with my parents that as they got older they became increasing incapable of using modern computerised technology. The older the tech the easier it was for them to remember how to use it. My mum can still set the time on a clock radio, and use a sewing machine, but can't remember the difference between Mail and Messages on her phone, or how to do online banking. Last in first out i guess.

So my advice: old tech. Pen and paper where possible. They will forget how to use their phone and computer, so get them a landline phone and a paper phonebook as backup.

And completely unnecessary. Should be a list of text links.

Singapore is close to the equator (1°17′N) — the days are roughly 12 hours long all year. No, it's not exact. They vary from +3 to +12 minutes. It's close enough (<2% error).

It's not entirely due to the apparent size of the sun — refraction due to the atmosphere has a slightly greater effect.

(Singapore is also in the 'wrong' timezone. The sun sets around 7 pm every day, giving it effectively permanent daylight saving time.)

But regardless, Australia is not near the equator. The timezones are mostly ok. In most of the country (for most of the population anyway) the sun sets before 18:00 for roughly half the year. No amount of solar is going to power the evening peak demand without storage.

Definitely so. Unless you are on the equator, the sun is up for less than 12 hours a day from the autumnal equinox to the spring equinox. The sun will set before 18:00 local solar time. So apart from funkiness with time zones and summer time (which extends a couple of weeks past the autumnal equinox in Aus), yes, roughly half the year.

If the connection fees get too high, people will disconnect. Then they’ll probably ban it.

you could build enough solar panels that solar output at 18:00 matches power demand

No you could not. For half the year the sun has set by 18:00.

I find the opposite: a 24 hr analogue clock shows you directly where you are in the day without any thinking or even looking at the numbers; with digital you always need to do a bit of mental arithmetic.

Also, 100,000 seconds is 27 hours, 46 minutes, 40 seconds — you could adopt a 100 kilosecond day and live on Unix time.

Be the change you want to see: start using ‘a third past’ instead of ‘twenty past’ and see what happens.

Sure you can — you just fire it went pointing ‘backwards’. But either way, you still need a burn to circularise the orbit when you get there.

Ideally, whatever time is used locally, UTC, and Unix time.

In the Southern Hemisphere Sun Clock does default to counter-clockwise rotation (because the Sun is to the North and appears to move that way). You can also set direction manually.

24-hour analogue clocks should have midnight at the bottom and noon at the top. Why? Because that's the way the sun moves. See https://sunclock.net

I think that once a large number of people are living off-Earth, we should just use Unix time to coordinate and for all technical work.

Planets can use a local solar time and calendar. Habitats in free space could just move to Unix time and use a 100 kilosecond day.

Chippy = carpenter (from wood chips)

Sparky = electrician

It seems that you hold the camera vertically to take a landscape photo, and horizontally to take a portrait photo. That’s going to confuse people.

Slow return trip to where? There’s plenty of both on Earth, so no point. But it may be easier to send bulk resources from Titan to the Moon or HEO than from Earth. I think the delta-V is lower, anyway.

when I hang it from the ceiling everything will line up with their actual azimuth to the horizon

I guess that makes sense at high latitudes. More generally, if you align the plane of rotation of the orrery with the ecliptic, and rotate it just right, then the positions of the sun and planets wrt the centre of the orrery should match their actual altitude and azimuth.

oh, yeah, that works. And double three-finger click to clear. Still, ctrl-click should also work.

I'm on a laptop with a trackpad — there is no right click. Usually Ctrl-click works as a right-click, but in this case it doesn't.

Cool.

Unfortunately long press didn't work for me with a trackpad (Safari on macOS), so wasn't able to flag at all. Maybe add a test for ctrl-click or shift-click?

Then we should have timezones based not just on longitude, but also latitude

Of course. In Australia the southern states do summer time, and the northern states don't.

If the Communists had won in Vietnam nothing would have happened to America

They did.

There's an old quip about aircraft design that "a plane isn’t ready to fly until the documentation is heavier than the airplane". Can't find a source for it though.

Wouldn't that be cholecystitis (and a cholecystectomy), not pancreatitis?

"Breaking distance": how much shorter the car is after the impact.