idlewords

It's demoralizing that we live in 2026 and a modest level of traffic is still enough to take down half the web.

Probably not with any technology; it's unlikely that fetal development and growth can happen properly in gravity much lower than 1 g.

Human colonies are not sustainable anywhere offworld.

Amazing discussion thread; thank you to all who shined a great white edifying light on the topic here.

Both were known to be Kuiper Belt objects, so it was expected there would at least be a family resemblance. I don't think anyone expected Pluto to be more active than Triton; that was certainly a surprise.

If there are planetologists reading the thread, I'd love to hear a more authorative perspective than mine!

No shade on New Horizons intended, but I was talking about the early 2000's revolution in understanding of ice moons/ocean worlds, and that preceded the Pluto flyby by a lot.

It was a valuable piece of corroborating evidence, but not shocking and unexpected in the way results from those three missions were. We had good reason to believe Pluto would look a lot like Triton, and it does.

Not true at all, the daily dose on Ganymede (which has a magnetic field of its own) is ~70 mSv/day, and Callisto is 0.1 mSv/day.

Io, meanwhile, is 35 Sv/day. Location really matters among the four Galilean moons.

Right. I said mountain to stress the importance of topography in the NM accident. The parent commenter may pat himself on the back for never flying into terrain during GPS outages in Florida, but there are factors in play in addition to his superior skills.

The highest mountain summit in Florida is 105 meters above sea level.

Location: New Mexico

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: to NYC only

Technologies: Yes, but you'd probably want to hire me as a writer/analyst.

Résumé/CV: https://idlewords.com/cv.htm

Email: see CV

Looking for paid engagements working on technical due diligence for investors, written communications for exec teams, privacy/trust advisory roles, and anything to do with social impacts of AI. I've run a small SaaS business for 17 years and have a long track record as a writer and speaker on topics around social media and privacy (https://idlewords.com/talks).

My core skill is making esoteric and technical things readable and engaging to the audience of your choice, but if pressed I can code.

Thank you! I realize people have subscription fatigue, and that on this site in particular there's a culture of expecting to read the full text of everything for free. So I try to make the previews substantive enough for people to participate in discussion whether or not they sign up.

I do feel like the free sample guy at Costco, confident that once people try the cube of summer sausage on a toothpick, they'll want to buy the whole thing. But I sure appreciate someone else saying it!

I am trying to be friendly with the paywall.

A lot of the work was done to a design point of 0.25 seconds, and Dyson's book says the issue there wasn't the blast clearing, but just being able to move the machinery fast enough. I kind of share your puzzlement; I can see the blast clearing this quickly in space (the debris moves at tens of thousands of km/sec) but not in the atmosphere.

> Kicks in just after it starts to get interesting.

What a funny coincidence!

Hi everyone,

The domain should be back up within the next few hours.

I had the domain set on auto-renew but unfortunately something went wrong, and I didn't get an email from the registrar about it (or it got misrouted to spam).

I've renewed the registration but it seems to be taking a while to propagate back to the .IN servers. An interim measure is setting an /etc/hosts record for pinboard.in to 64.62.134.190.

My sincere apologies for the outage. The TLS cert for Pinboard renews in October, and in my mind I thought the domain renewed at that time as well, or I would have paid closer attention. Irked at my own carelessness here.

It's fine to dump sewage overboard if you're far enough from shore. Cruise ships treat it to some extent, but ultimately it all becomes fish food.

There's a nice paper on this, ICES-2018-123 "Dimethylsilanediol (DMSD) Source Assessment and Mitigation on ISS: Estimated Contributions from Personal Hygiene Products Containing Volatile Methyl Siloxanes (VMS)". The upshot is more than half of the siloxane burden on ISS comes from God knows where (packaging, plastics, machinery, you name it).

https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/items/ff1a240e-1fb1-4b04-acb2-42e9c45...

The atmosphere has a perfectly reasonable 110 hour day/night cycle.

I thought so too, but the phosphine signal turns out to be small but real. What everyone involved in the back and forth debate over it agrees on is the need to send better sensors.

Landis has a ton of good papers around Venus for those who want to nerd out deeper.

Give it a few hours!

Thanks so much! I'm delighted you enjoyed the piece.

It's not an absurd question. The threshold value is the one that breaks surface tension and effectively pulls waste away from the body. It will be more than a few hundredths g but less than 1g.

Unfortunately we have basically no data on the effects of partial gravity, in this context or any other. We can try flying partial-gravity parabolas in aircraft and simulate a Martian toilet the same way they tested the design for Skylab; I don't think this experiment has been done.

You can try it with small capsules and tethers, but it's still a pain.

The hose is the same but there are different funnel attachments (the part looks kind of like the cup from a jock strap, and is longer and narrower for women)

It's all flat files on the server

Thank you! Like NASA, I hope to up my operational tempo.

They do not, except for some of the avionics.

I never worked at NASA. Maybe you're confusing me with Casey Handmer, who has also written on this topic?

I'm sorry it bugs you!