Recent content by Janus

It takes a huge mass to bend light by any noticeable amount. For example, a ray of light passing just over the surface of the Sun is only deflected by 1.7 seconds of an arc. (1 sec = 1/3600 of a degree). This means that the "focus point" where light passing near the Sun would converge is some...

As Russ has already mentioned, you need to stay within the CG envelope. In essence, you don't want things to get to the point where control surfaces are not capable of achieving the correct pitch for the aircraft( especially during times like take-off and landing). It is also important to work...

Here a timeline of the Uralic languages, starting with proto-Uralic in 3000BC

To be exact, G does not need to have a value given in m3 kg-1 s-2 That's for when you are working in MKS units. You can express it in AU, solar masses and years, giving it a value of 39.478 AU3yr-2Ms-1

I went for MyHeritage as I was more likely to have matches outside the US then in, as all my grandparents were immigrants. This turned out to be the case, as out of nearly 92,000 matches, only 4000 are in the US. 55,000 of the matches are from in Finland. Another feature they have is "Genetic...

I think you might be confused as what "frame of reference" means in Relativity. In SR it generally means an inertial frame of reference. And it isn't the same as "point of view". The defining characteristic for differentiating different frames of reference are their relative motion with...

Every planet orbits around it's barycenter with the Sun. In most cases, this barycenter is close enough the center of the Sun to make little difference. The Jupiter-Sun barycenter is actually just above the surface of the Sun. There is no real difference between Earth orbiting the Sun and...

It might have helped if I had put grid lines as an reference, but that might have also cluttered the image and made it more confusing.

Consider the light clock thought experiment. But add a second light pulse going back and forth in line with the motion. If there was no length contraction, you would get this result: Note that the clock "in motion" ticks half as fast when we compare the vertically moving light pulses( the...

The sad part is that is that both my parents spoke Finnish, but didn't pass it on to us kids. If they had, I likely would be fluent in both.( though, as my Mom learned when she went back to visit relatives in the '70's, there had been some slight changes in usage from when Her parents left. For...

Tervetuola*, from a fellow Finn. Though I was born in the U.S., my grandparents were all from Finland. I also tend towards the Finnish end of the social interaction scale. At least in Finland, it is the considered the norm, unlike here. * Unfortunately, my Finnish doesn't go too much further...

The tiny specks are leftover blood that hasn't fully cleared out yet. Earlier on, If I looked at a white wall after getting up in the morning it was like looking at a negative image of a starry sky. I still do have one odd floater that is vertical in my left eye. I don't really notice it...

Follow up. Had my regular eye exam today. It been long enough that that except for a few tiny dots when I first get up in the AM, all the junk in my left eye has cleared out. Exam went well, other than a slight change in my close up vision prescription. The repair on the tear still looks...

TIL that I'm a mutant, in more ways than one. I have blue eyes, which is due to a mutation which prevents melanin from being produced in the iris. ( it is actually Rayleigh scattering that produces the blue. ) I am also missing a muscle in my forearm. ( To test for this, touch your thumb to...

There was also the Arecibo Message: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message#Arecibo_Answer Traveling at the speed of light, it has gotten much further than either the Pioneer or Voyager probes. However, seeing as it was aimed at M13, we shouldn't expect an answer back for 50,000 years...