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NASA Selects SpaceX to develop the International Space Station US Deorbit Vehicle
  • It’s way closer to burning up (like, it’ll do it soon and uncontrollably without intervention) than a typical graveyard orbit. And if (when) it started breaking up in a poorly-chosen museum orbit, things would get very messy very fast.

    I say send up a lil robot buddy that can hover around and 3D scan the interior for a few months and let anyone with a VR headset go hang out when they want to answer emails or whatever.

  • Outstanding idea.
  • clearing the launch tower during a test launch with an experimental rocket that has no payload and no humans aboard is success

    managing to get into the right orbit without aborting using a rocket that’s launched since the 60s and is lit with giant matchsticks is success

    You, an idiot: “these are comparable”

  • Friday Facts #416 - Fluids 2.0 | Factorio
  • They sort of do, or they do in a way that makes them almost useless once they hit their final low level. Are you suggesting that instead of asymptotically going to zero, they just hit zero at some point?

  • The Delusion of Advanced Plastics Recycling
  • I don’t think articles like this help that situation. “Plastic isn’t actually recyclable” is a pretty dangerous mind virus that’s basically already running rampant.

    Pyrolysis isn’t perfect. But it is absolutely better than throwing plastic in a landfill, and can handle otherwise impossible-to-recycle mixed feedstocks.

    The process I worked on recycled PET while leaving the other materials in the mix untouched, ready to go through a different specialized process. That was kind of the whole point of it. Those sorts of technologies are harder in the sense that the tech is more sophisticated, but realistically doesn’t cost more to run once you have it going. The future isn’t all doom and gloom. That’s why I hate these “don’t bother recycling” articles.

  • The Delusion of Advanced Plastics Recycling
  • There are alternatives to pyrolysis that are slowly coming online. They have their drawbacks – it’s certainly easier to chuck a bunch of mixed plastic into a reactor and heat it up until something happens – but they’re real.

    I worked on one of them for a few years. It’s pretty cool! They’re currently building a pilot plant to demonstrate the technology at scale.

  • Gavin Newsom wants to change the US constitution to stop gun violence – will he succeed?
  • Yes. Muzzle loaders. Shoot once, then spend a few minutes loading a powder charge and a bullet down the barrel. They weren’t flintlock muskets like it was the 1700s, they were modern rifles. Just loaded through the muzzles. It gives the deer a fighting chance. You have to hit on the first shot. Did you know that people also hunt with a bow and arrow? Those have been around since the Neolithic. Sometimes not using the most advanced tech is the point.

    It’s funny that you typed all that stuff trying to explain firearms to someone who you assume knows nothing about them. I’ve shot everything from pellet guns to the aforementioned muzzle loader to a .30-06 to, yes, an AR-15. I can pick up most guns and check to see if the chamber’s clear. I can disassemble and clean and put them back together.

    I want these things to go away. Not just AR-15’s. Anything semiautomatic with a magazine that can hold more than, let’s say, six rounds. Anything beyond a revolver is over the top for personal protection, and if you think that’s not true you’re a lunatic or just want to cosplay army guy. Duh, AR-15’s are the most commonly used firearm in shootings because there’s a lot of them. How about we make there be less of them and other guns that can kill so many people so quickly?

  • Gavin Newsom wants to change the US constitution to stop gun violence – will he succeed?
  • Okay, then. I guess I’ll ignore the muzzle loaders my dad and all his friends used to hunt with until the AR-15 became such a symbol of the “cold dead hands” crowd that they all went ahead and got one. And then a few more.

    I think the AR-15 should be banned because I think any semiautomatic rifle and pistol with a magazine capacity of more than a few rounds should be banned. That’s enough for the “guns are easier than getting medicated for anxiety” crowd to feel like they can engage in deadly personal defense without making it easy for someone to walk into a school or church or business and just unload.

  • Gavin Newsom wants to change the US constitution to stop gun violence – will he succeed?
  • same as any other rifle

    I’m sure the use of AR-15s in shootings has nothing to do with its magazine capacity, firing rate, and deadliness at relatively short out to intermediate range. Not a lot of kids in elementary schools getting killed by people wielding muzzle loaders.

  • Looking for cross device RSS reader (not self-hosted)
  • Inoreader worked okay for me, syncs with the client apps I use, and was fairly Feedly-like. But I eventually went to a self-hosted FreshRSS install due to the ads that got inserted into feeds.

    If you’re concerned about things like FOSS, you should consider finding a way to self-host, either on hardware you own or using a cloud VPS. Any service that can sync and keep client compatibility updated is going to incur costs, and they’ll extract that value from you somehow - ads, data slurping, whatever. Better to pay for it yourself so you at least have a clear idea what the relationship is.

  • Do you think people would be okay with 'Recall' if Apple did it?
  • It was a scan during upload to their cloud photos system. Everyone else does it on their servers, Apple was going to run the scan before so they didn’t have to ever have them. To not have images scanned before upload, a user would just not have to use their cloud photos service.

    The messaging was really badly handled. They almost certainly just scan all the same photos on their servers instead now.

  • How dense would the atmosphere need to be to result in a cataclysmic chain reaction during a nuclear explosion?

    Famously, Oppenheimer and co worked out how close a nuclear bomb test would be to causing a chain reaction of nitrogen fusion in the atmosphere. They made a lot of worst-case-scenario assumptions and still came to the conclusion that no, a nuclear bomb test wouldn’t scour the surface of the world.

    But let’s say the atmosphere was twice as dense as it is. Or ten times as dense. At what point would that calculation turn very, very scary?

    Obligatory xkcd

    Edit: man, seriously, most of the people ‘answering’ this question didn’t even read it.

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    People will find anything to be upset about
  • Plastic that’s got a lot of color (especially black) is very, very hard to recycle. Getting the color out so you can make like-new, colorless plastic makes the economics pretty much impossible.

    Should recycled plastic that isn’t colorless be accepted? Yep. But basically every manufacturer that uses recycled plastic only accepts colorless stuff. Even if they’re going to turn around and dump a bunch of pigment and dye into it! (Or especially if they’re going to do that. They have specific color targets.)

    So, for now, if you buy something that’s made from recycled plastic but isn’t clear and colorless, that plastic is now outside of the recycle-able ecosystem. It’s a bummer.

    But there are ways to get around that coming online. One is to turn the plastic polymers back into monomers (the building block molecules). It’s sometimes easier to separate out the pigments and dyes once you have a chemical soup of monomers instead of a block of plastic. Then you take the purified monomers and repolymerize them. Bam, you have recycled plastic that’s nearly indistinguishable from new.

    I worked on a chemical recycling / depolymerization project for a couple of years. That tech is currently being scaled up into a big plant that’ll actually churn out like-new plastic from really crappy input material. Pretty exciting stuff. (As long as the business and engineering guys running the project now don’t ruin it.)

  • me_irl
  • Not… really? Like, nobody strung up Washington for being a tyrant. Cromwell ruled England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland until he died. Castro ruled Cuba until he died. Stalin was one of Lenin’s lieutenants, and ran the Soviet Union until he died.

    The French Revolution (of 1789, the big one) was infamous for this. The original batch of revolutionaries were mostly liberal-ish nobles and lawyers. The second wave (of what the original guys considered to be street trash) sent many of those guys to the guillotine if they didn’t get out of town fast enough. The third wave sent a bunch of second wave guys to the guillotine. Et cetera, until Napoléon grabbed the reins.

  • Pretty Bummed to Lose Minshew
    www.nfl.com Raiders agree to terms with QB Gardner Minshew on two-year, $25M contract

    The Las Vegas Raiders have agreed to terms with quarterback Gardner Minshew on a two-year, $25 million deal with $15 million full guaranteed, NFL Network Insiders Ian Rapoport and Tom Pelissero reported Monday.

    Raiders agree to terms with QB Gardner Minshew on two-year, $25M contract

    Clearly, AR is the way forward. And Minshew played as well as he could last year and has been rewarded with a likely starting role.

    But man, I’m gonna miss that guy. And if AR gets hurt again it’s hard to imagine a backup who will step up like Minshew did.

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    We’ve lost both Frank Borman and Ken Mattingly in less than two weeks. ☹️

    https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-administrator-remembers-apollo-astronaut-thomas-k-mattingly-ii/

    https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-administrator-honors-life-of-apollo-astronaut-frank-borman/

    It’s really sad to see this generation of astronauts slip away.

    0
    Request: Comment and Post Filters by Domain

    Not everyone wants to defederate with trolls, which is fine. But I’d like to hide posts and comments from instances that never seem to make Lemmy a nicer place.

    For instance, it would be cool to configure Avalon such that any comment by a user from hexbear be hidden until tapped. (And I’d probably never tap it.)

    2
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)BE
    becausechemistry @lemm.ee
    Posts 5
    Comments 94