Recent content by Jonathan Scott

According to Spacenews: My non-expert guess would be that some temperature parameter was exceeded as a result of the longer burn needed for the heavier XL version.

I always wondered how they managed "synchronous orbit above the south pole of the planet".

Thanks very much - that's much better than anything I found so far. But it's a lot to digest to get the value of a simple constant! Their model for the method of acceleration seems very contrived, being a charge distribution inside the shell. I know that constant linear acceleration in free...

Linear frame dragging is the effect predicted by General Relativity that if a gravitational source is accelerated, this produces a small gravitational induction effect on other objects which tends to accelerate them in the direction of the source acceleration. The induced acceleration is a...

The bus is turning towards the left of the picture, which will take it in a loop round the station. The "Look Right" bit is one-way from the right.

I'm somewhat distracted from the mindblowing concept of a Braille gearstick by the weird arrangement of the gears, assuming I'm reading them correctly: 465 R123

I don't know if this applies elsewhere, but in the UK it is common for a trade vehicle to display a notice saying something like "No tools left in this vehicle overnight" or "Nothing of value left in this vehicle overnight" to discourage any attempts to break into the unattended vehicle. This...

This is a consequence of RFC 2324, dated April 1 1998: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2324 418 I'm a teapot Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot should result in the error code "418 I'm a teapot". The resulting entity body MAY be short and stout. The more serious-minded...

I ran into this problem recently and found this thread. I was going to say that next week was last week, but I guess one could argue that it's never next week. Hoping for a fix soon!

I mean that if you have an equilateral triangle inside a circle inside a triangle, the larger triangle is four times the area of the smaller one, and that is clear from the ratios if you rewrite ##\frac{\sqrt{3}\pi}{9}## as ##\frac{\pi}{3\sqrt{3}}## for consistency with the other ratio. The...

I'm just wondering why you don't show it in a form that makes it directly clear that the ratio of the larger triangle to the smaller one is 4, for example by making the first one ##\frac{\pi}{3\sqrt{3}}##.

Consider the analogy of a 1-dimensional universe shaped like a cone, where the distance along the axis from the point is time and space at a given time forms a circle around the cone. If you move the circle towards the wider end of the cone, is new length being created or is existing length...

Something slightly related which has always amazed me (assuming of course that I've remembered it correctly): If you roll a ball over the surface another fixed one of the same radius without slipping or twisting, the orientation of the rolling ball only depends on where it is, not how it got...

I assume it's looking for "liar" but that's not a very good synonym for the mother word "plagiarist", unlike the others.

This is a well-known puzzle often used as a joking reference to "thinking outside the box" where the task is to connect all nine points using only four straight lines (the "scientist" solution), instead of the obvious five.