Recent content by Janus

A local garden had a specimen of this rare blooming Bamboo plant, and we took advantage of seeing this "once in a lifetime" event in person.

While a higher exhaust speed is more efficent in terms of fuel usage, there is a drawback in terms of energy usuage. Doubling the exhaust speed doubles the final velocity you can achieve with the same fuel reserve, but it requires 4 times as much energy to achieve. And while doubling the...

Tesla didn't accept that the Moon rotated on its axis either. While he contributed greatly to our understanding of electromagnetics, he was not all knowing.

Well then I guess I shouldn't mention the 6 verb types, or that cases apply to adjectives as well as nouns.( punainen omena- red apple( as the subject) Punaiset omenat- red apples (as the subject), Punaista omenaa- red apple(s) (as the object)

What's crazy about 15 grammatical cases?

This next test was to see if the Blender fluid simulator would interact properly with the new cloth feature. Particularly, how the fluid would behave with respect to the tearing of the cloth. The fluid does respond to the cloth's simulated shape, however, the cloth does not appear to react to...

Okay, this turned to out work out better than expected. What I bascially wanted to do was to have an effect where a balloon would inflate, expand, and once it reached a certain point would rip open. The first issue was mimicing the inflation. The legacy cloth simulator had a pressure feature...

Blender has released its latest new version (5.2), and as per usual, they have added a number of new features, two of which I'll touch on here. One is a material feature and the other a physics simulation feature. The material one is call "Thin wall", it is used when you want a material...

Mailing a check isn't much safer. Mail theft is a real thing. My wife and I were very carefull about only using official mail boxes to mail anything that contained a check, but still had one intercepted, and then used to forge fake checks written against our account. Our check was intercepted...

That's assuming that one knows the relationship between North, South, East and West.

I am of Finnish descent and grew up in a region of Northern Minnesota, where people of Finnish descent made up roughly 1/5 of the populace (As compared to 1/500 nationwide) This actually had an effect on the speech in the area which gave it a dialect that varied from the standard "Minnesota...

Maybe this image taken from an old Physics text may help.

He would not physically "see" a pancaked planet, that is something inferred by applying Relativity. What he would physically see is blue-shifted light coming from the planet and the planet appearing to approach at a speed greater than c. Now, he will understand that the planet isn't physically...

Not quite that old, but it was a bit small, just a two-seater. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_PA-38_Tomahawk#/media/File:Piper_PA-38_Tomahawk_3-view_line_drawing.svg The flight instruments were basic and not much in the way of avionics. ( basically a VOR and a Radio) No headset either, you...

TIL that the Piper PA-38 Tomahawk, the plane that I took my initial flight lessons and solos in ( over 40 decades ago), is, on two separate lists, considered one of the ten most dangerous small single engine planes to fly.( to the point that it was sometimes referred to as the "Traumahawk".)...