NASA declines to protect the Planet Earth

On Sat, 12 Aug 06 11:33:42 GMT, in a place far, far away,
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a way
as to indicate that:

In article ,
h (Rand Simberg) wrote:
On Sat, 12 Aug 06 09:21:02 GMT, in a place far, far away,
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a way
as to indicate that:

Given two concentric spheres in zero-g, with the gap partially filled
with fluid, locate where the fluid is. Design a delivery mechanism to
ensure a flow rate of 1 gallon per minute when the tank is tapped.
Ensure that the fluid can maintain radiation sheilding properties for
the internal volume of the inner sphere.

It's called bladders.

People *really* have thought about this stuff, honest.

We don't doubt this.

If you are using bladders to deliver the water, how can it be used
for shielding? I'm assuming that you have to have stiff sides
to the shielding container; to me, a bladder implies sides that
can expand and contract. For shielding, one cannot have thin
walls.

If you're referring to radiation, the water itself provides the
shielding.

Huh? Go back and reread the _entire_ post. Your answer seems
to be just a handwave.

I fail to see the problem. Multiple bladders in layers, never let
them all get empty on any given side.

wrote in message
m...

Bite hole in corner, squeeze into mouth.

Yecho. What are the side effects of eating all that plastic?

Umm, no offense but.... you do realize biting a hole isn't the same as
actually EATING the plastic.

Geesh.


No mess, no fuss, and easy to clean up.

ermmm...not clean up. Now you have a useless plastic bag
to put into the trash pile. I don't think Waste Management
is going to do regular pickups for you.

You're going to have a bunch of garbage no matter what.

And at least for winter hiking, it sure beats trying to wash up your bowls
in the morning.

(ever see how fast oatmeal can harden to the consistency of concrete in the
winter?)



/BAH

wrote in message
m...
Note bread doesn't rise as much as expand. (the problem the astronauts
apparently had drinking soda is that there was no UP for the CO2, just
"out". And it helps to have an up to burp out the gas apparently.)

You need gravity to burp?

To a point, yes. It helps a lot if the gas in the belly collects at the top
of the belly so it can go up the esophogus. (it being "lighter" than the
fluids, etc.)

Hmm, here's a challenge for Rusty to see if NASA ever did a PDF on the
Pepsi/Coke drinks brought up in the 80s on the shuttle.



Are you assuming that no bad germs will get on this spaceship?
Why do you think people boil and cook and heat food? It's not
for the taste but for the sanitation.

Partly. Cooking some foods is required to turn them into something the
human body can readily digest also. (starchy foods like potatoes come to
mind.)

That said, most likely, the food would all be packed into aseptic packaging
to begin with, greatly reducing your fear of germs (for exactly the reasons
you mention.)

Think of the shelf-life of things like juice boxes, backpacker food, etc.

Also consider many materials like sugar or honey can generally be kept for
years w/o refridgeration or other special precautions.


Have we become so soft
that nobody thinks about this anymore?

When I was at Bed, Bath, and Beyond the other day, the salesclerk
told me she always washed bedding in cold water. No wonder
there's a infestation of bed bugs.

Are you telling me you boil your sheets?




/BAH

wrote in message
m...
In article ,
(Derek Lyons) wrote:

Vacuum seal it earthside.

This implies that the passengers' menus are planned. The reason
this thread expanded was to do the opposite.

Not exactly. The reason this therad expanded was to point out that taste is
a huge consideration.

In fact most of the meals probably WILL be planned in advance.



Or attach a larger storage bag of flour to
your working back via a hose?

This doesn't work. Have you ever made bread?

I have. And I bake every week. I don't see a huge problem with something
along the lines of the above concept.



/BAH

wrote in message
m...
In article ,

[emoticon gets hit on the head with the obvious] Density depends
on gravity? I don't remember including g in any of my chemistry
calculations. Have I forgotten?

Yes, how do you think separation would occur otherwise?

JRS: In article , dated Fri, 11
Aug 2006 18:44:00 remote, seen in news:sci.space.policy, Rand Simberg
posted :
On Fri, 11 Aug 2006 18:37:39 +0100, in a place far, far away, Dr John
Stockton made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

JRS: In article , dated Thu, 10
Aug 2006 11:45:40 remote, seen in news:sci.space.policy, Rand Simberg
posted :
On Thu, 10 Aug 2006 04:22:14 GMT, in a place far, far away,
(Derek Lyons) made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

Possibly. Rand is one of the most prolific posters to this group -

Nonsense.

DL was referring to the amount that you post; there is no need to add a
description of its quality.

There was no such description. The notion that I'm "one of the most
prolific posters to this group" is nonsense.

You are *the* most prolific in article count, though your article
content is small and of no benefit.

Over the last 11 days, and ignoring threads killed for excessive cross-
posting. I have 244 articles here. Counting (by code) I see 76 authors
represented, and the four who posted most are :

14 From: (Derek Lyons)
15 From: Pat Flannery
16 From: (Henry Spencer)
22 From: h (Rand Simberg)

That illustrates nicely that you are the most prolific, and also that
your content is typically valueless.

It's possible that my counting method underestimates EC; but I think not
enough to matter.

--
© John Stockton, Surrey, UK. yyww merlyn demon co uk Turnpike v4.00 MIME ©
Web URL:http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/http/tsfaq.html - Timo Salmi: Usenet Q&A.
Web URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/news-use.htm : about usage of News.
No Encoding. Quotes before replies. Snip well. Write clearly. Don't Mail News.

wrote:

In article ,
(Derek Lyons) wrote:
wrote:

Bread is very fussy. It collapses at the most inopportune moments.


Then you've ****ed up somewhere. Period.

I can tell that you've never done this task. Bread is fussy.

I bake bread regularly - and I've never had it collapse without a
cause, a cause of my own doing (I.E. overage yeast, bad flour/water
ratio, etc...). If your bread is fussy, you are ****ing up - because
in the real world, bread is resilient.

I haven't determined the effects of humidity. There seems to
be an effect but I haven't IDed exactly what. The problem
is that I never a control.

Humidity affects your flour/water ratio, nothing more, nothing less.
This is well known.


Properly made dough (I.E. with a developed gluten network from using
proper flours and proper dough) doesn't "just collapse".


Cake is even fussier.

Of *course* cake is fussier - it doesn't have as much as a gluten
network as bread. Again, this is well known.

I suggest that you spend 20 years making bread and you'll be able to
figure out just how fussy it is.

I've been making bread for over a decade - and studying textbooks and
cookbooks intensively during that period. Not one has classified
bread as 'fussy' or contains any cautions against collapse.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

wrote:

In article ,
(Derek Lyons) wrote:
Andy Resnick wrote:

and boiling without convection is dangerous.

One need not boil to cook.

One needs to heat to a high enough degree to cook.

For most foods, anything above 180 (F) but below boiling is more than
sufficient. You can probably get away even lower, but it would take
some research to determine if that's feasible.

Now, if you all know this stuff why don't you teach it

Huh? What does that have to with anything? This is all basic, basic,
stuff.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

John Schilling wrote:
On Thu, 10 Aug 2006 09:33:29 -0400, Andy Resnick
wrote:

Rand Simberg wrote:

On Wed, 09 Aug 2006 16:15:56 -0400, in a place far, far away, Andy
Resnick made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

As for food, the central problem that *must* be solved is availibity, of
providing sufficient caloric intake to keep the crew alive. Like it or
not, quality of food is waaaaaaay down the list of problems.

Not true. If the food isn't palatable, people won't eat it, and they
won't perform. There's a long history of this on exploration
expeditions. Don't think that just because there were survivors from
earlier trips that it couldn't have been much better with better food.

I don't know about you, but if I had the opportunity to go into space-
either the ISS, the moon, Mars, whatever; I would eat the most tasteless
gruel they serve up.


Of course you would.

For maybe six months, tops.

Nine months, and you'd still be eating some, but not enough, and you'd
be looking kind of pale and skinny.

A year, and you're an emaciated husk lying in your bunk, still once in
a while reaching over to pick up a handful of gruel, but without the
energy to do anything or even really care as you lie back and watch the
system status lights on your spacehip turn from green to yellow to red.

Cause of death would probably be something like asphyxiation, rather
than actual starvation. Bottom line is, though, if you'd been eating
real food the previous year, you'd have bothered to change the air
filter.


And if you want to claim that no, *you* wouldn't act that way, then
sorry, but you're damn well going to have to prove it, by actually doing
it. Spend a year eating *absolutely nothing* but nutritionally optimal
mush, and report back to us.

Because history suggests that you are full of it. Some of us here have,
e.g., read the accounts and records of the early Arctic and Antarctic
explorers. Men of iron will, often under military discipline and/or
with strong leadership, and a year is about the limit of how long they
could remain even remotely healthy eating nothing but preserved food.

You want to claim you've got the Right Stuff that they all lacked, hey,
go ahead and make the claim. We can use the laugh. But you might want
to consider that, through their experience, you might learn something
you didn't know about how human beings really work.

It was the lead in the cans you idiot.

When are you going to quit talking out your ass?

http://cosmic.lifeform.org

In sci.physics,

wrote
on Sat, 12 Aug 06 09:15:43 GMT
:
In article ,
Ben Newsam wrote:
On Fri, 11 Aug 2006 00:13:43 GMT, (Henry Spencer)
wrote:

In article ,
Ben Newsam wrote:
The Great Depression happened in 1929, the war started in late 1941.

No, the war started in 1939. You were late as usual.

1939 is usually given as the starting date (except by Americans :-)), but
you can make a case for it having started as early as 1933, when Japan
began making its move into China.

I'll still take 1939, as being the date of the start of the declared
war.

Sigh! That was _declared_ war. Do you honestly think that nobody
knew it was coming? [emoticon pauses to consider today's idiots]
Well, 5% knew.


/BAH


Considering that anyone born in 1921 (if one considers
age 18 to be the minimum age at which one can worry
about war) would now be 85 years of age, there's some
issues here. :-) In any event, European combat probably
started in 1939-09-01 with Germany's invasion of Poland
(it's doubtful that the Sudetenland put up much resistance
in October 1938; certainly the Czech goverment didn't),
but the seeds of war may have been planted 1919-06-28,
when the very unfair Treaty of Versailles was signed
(presumably under duress), and the coming fruit may
have become obvious during either Germany's annexation
announcement with Austria 1938-03-12/13, or Kristallnacht,
which was 1938-11-09/10. If not then, then 1939-01-30,
when Hitler gave his Reichstag speech. One could make
a case that the evil war plant first came to light
1935-03-16, when Hitler violated the Treaty, or during
the Berlin Games in August, 1936.

For its part the US declared on 1941-12-08 on *Japan*,
1 day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, but US
involvement in the European theater didn't effectively begin until
sometime in January (the timeline indicates 1942-01-26 as
the time troops arrive in Great Britain) and may not have
been done in earnest until sometime that summer (it's hard
to tell from just this timeline).

http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar...ne/ww2time.htm

Also, Germany declared war on the US 3 days later, presumably
because of their alliance with Japan at the time.

The above Webpage doesn't go into much detail into the Pacific theater;
http://www.historyplace.com/unitedst...r/timeline.htm
apparently doesn't either. WTF?

http://history.acusd.edu/gen/ww2Timeline/1917-45.html

did cough up a timeline which among other things mentions the death
of Ambassador Saito in 1939.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_War

mentions Manchukuo, which lasted all of 13 years as a Japanese puppet,
and the Mukden or Liutiaogou incident (1931-09-18). Today we would
probably call this a terrorist action. The League of Nations was
extremely unhappy about Manchukuo.

It gets complicated at this point. :-)

--
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