OT: 10 smartest countries in the world when it comes to science

We won't hold that against them.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

They certainly are a busy little country:

John :-#)#

Well, they're not wasting money on the Shuttle anymore.

You should have bought a pool table.

I'm actually pretty good at pool (my first wife enjoyed it) but it's really boring.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Don't confuse engineering with science.

There's no need for any of it, a total waste of resources.

Nah. Just want to gradually retire. Not completely because circuit design is fun. Sometimes even EMI and noise hunts are.

My vacations are local, like here:

Pretty much. Currently 4000mi/year and I'd like to increase that.

We have a 7ft pool table. Conveniently it's located in my man cave downstairs where I also brew in winter (in summer I brew in the yard). Unfortunately my wife also lost interest in pool.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

For this stuff you need engineering and science. It was pushing the envelope to the point where all large semiconductor equipment manufacturers turned us down with "It can't be done". We had to develop new methods and build our own machines. When you do stuff that hasn't been attempted before there is often a serious science part in that.

Besides, engineering is applied science.

Developing technology to re-land spent boosters is a waste? Technology that will have many other applications? Yeah, right.

[...]

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

It also wasn't a real invention. We used teleconferencing in the 90's when many of the SW writers were still in school. So the technology clearly was already there, it's just that Skype got a shell written around in. And not a very good one.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

NASA already did and it's pretty big (30MB):

They have addenda for the following years and the Russians got some as well.

Some of it can be quite useful down here on earth. There is research that would be very dificult or impossible to perform under gravity conditions.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

ind-in-science-2015-12

as

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I can see the smaller rockets to put instrumentation into orbit, but you do n't need that humongous whatever it was they just launched to do that. Mank ind isn't going anywhere with this space crap, the distances involved are t oo great. The best they can do is maybe recreate displaced versions of them selves with quantum entanglement or some way out crap like that. But this r ocket stuff is stoneage crap.

Den onsdag den 14. februar 2018 kl. 18.53.37 UTC+1 skrev John Larkin:

pool is something to do while hanging out and drinking beer

It's also legit to have whiskey instead. Though I prefer beer. My home brewery and the beer stash is right where the pool table sits.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

snip

That's because you have never seen somebody like me shoot. I can run off entire racks without even touching the table.

Also, pool is usually boring to folks unable to quite get a grasp of the physics much past straight shots.

MS had a thing used h.264 or such for conference calling and it worked and I actually used it. This was like '96.

It was unable to tunnel through firewalls so it got dumped and nothing else worked up until skype and the like hit the scene.

Crickets in Space would certainly be hard to do on the surface.

Is any of this stuff actually useful, other than to keep the ISS crew busy and the project funded?

Another disaster is, sadly, likely, so the ISS will go the way of the Shuttle.

There is also no reason to put humans on the moon again (it's really boring) or on Mars.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

It's more for biological experiments and similar things where gravity really gets in the way.

Yes, risky. However, just like with airplane travel there can come a great reduction in risk as routine sets in. In the early days of aviation there was never a guarantee to get there alive when attempting a cross-country flight. Today our only concern is getting to the airport and whether they'll have Guinness on tap at the sports bar on concourse B.

340 days in space is really not necessary. That is bound to have health consequences, a human body isn't built for longterm zero-gravity exposure. It is also not built for the sedentary lifestyle many people follow and that can have health consequences of similar or worse severity.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

The experiments are there to justify the ISS, and the ISS is there to justify the experiments. Both are useless.

Imagine all the real, useful stuff that could be done with all that money.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Last I looked NASA's budget was 1/7 of the Agriculture Dept.

But if we had built only 1 shuttle and no ISS we could have had dozens more Hubbles and Galileos.