I didn’t even know about it until the next day - totally off grid, and starlink for internet access - and no mobile signal where we live to give it away either.
The common mistake is people swerve and brake, which is a terrible combination - you should accelerate through a sudden manoeuvre, as it maintains control through it, much as you should accelerate through corners in general.
Wunibald Kamm begs to differ. For his circle, it doesn't matter if the additional force that causes the friction to be insufficient is forward or backwards on top of the side force. In critical situations either use your friction for lateral xor longitudinal action, never both at the same time. Brake hard, but then sail through the curve. You want that vector to move along the circle and never leave it. As that is very difficult for an untrained driver, better switch hard between both modes.
True if we all drove unicycles - but in the real world, tyre wear is uneven, brake wear is uneven, loading is uneven, the surface is uneven, and those differential forces are what modern ABS seeks to control.
The key difference between braking and accelerating is that in the former case, independent, potentially differentially worn brakes, apply force unevenly, making the chance of a loss of traction on one or more wheels higher. With acceleration, that force is applied through a differential, meaning it will be far more likely to be appropriately distributed.
If you want to decelerate while swerving it can be done, but it should be done through engine braking - and the tricky bit there is matching revs as you drop the clutch back in, otherwise you have too much retarding force and overcome the coefficient of friction, resulting in a skid.
Easier for those of us who grew up with double de-clutching and no synchromeshes, but when you’re in a critical situation, it’s still an awful lot easier to apply acceleration.
Absolutely. I was recently driving on a motorway in Portugal when a boulder (giant chunk of granite, 10+ tonnes) fell off the back of a truck - right in front of us, in a heavily laden (7 pax and luggage) car. Immediate massive cloud of dust, I checked my blind spot, veered across two lanes, and continued our journey, unscathed. I looked in the rear view, to see the car behind us jump on the brakes instead of evading. They caught the boulder.
Nobody killed, according to the news, but several taken to hospital in critical condition.
Oh, I say unscathed but our tyre exploded the next day, as apparently we caught a fragment, and again, that’s not a “slam on the brakes” moment, but rather “trundle to a stop on the shoulder and walk to the conveniently nearby tyre shop”.
The process these days is more like publish then do editorial review. See it on major outlets all the time - break the story as early as possible, get the eyeballs and ad revenue, then get it cleaned up for posterity.
Sometimes this results in radical changes to a piece within hours of publication - yesterday for instance the BBC ran a piece headlined something like “I watched my father murder my mother”, and six hours later in slides an editorial correction saying “she did not, in fact, see her father murder her mother. She was asleep in another room at the time.”
Yes. It’s also idiot-proof enough that I sent a tech illiterate estate agent friend there with instructions to ask ChatGPT if he had any questions. He was up and running, with property listings, three days later.
Honestly, this is a solved problem - the actual problem, if you talk to folks who maintain only a FB page, is that they don’t want to pay.
It's not that they don't want to pay, but they don't want to pay outrageously. Squarespace, etc. are stupid expensive for most websites. $5/mo is the limit for a lot of businesses, especially when they can't tell if having a website will even improve their traffic over just having a social media page.
The administration and billing side can also be confusing for a lot of non-technical business owners.
And so what if they collide? This isn’t Kessler syndrome territory, it’s low enough orbit that debris would re-enter and burn up rapidly. You’d lose the colliding satellites, and that’s likely all.
Not that there has been a single starlink collision, but y’know.
> How sure are you that that would be made public?
Extremely sure. There are both numerous private, academic, and governmental agencies that are constantly searching for both collision paths, and collision debris.
The debris cloud alone would generate an extremely visible signature.
> Would it be always observed and caught outside of SpaceX?
There are a great many eyes on the sky, and you can’t hide stuff up there - even every secret military satellite is known and tracked - so something as substantial as a collision would likely be known about before it even happens, as ephemera don’t change without an input.
Large operators like SpaceX and OneWeb do coordinate with each other. Ground based radar tracking data from the government is also made available to operators, and SpaceX has developed their own optical space-based detection system (Stargaze) which makes data available to other operators as well.
There's a lot of money in this stuff, lot's of planning. It's being managed by competent people who give a shit.
It’s absolutely fine with rain, even absolutely torrential tropical downpours - from experience - I don’t know what you’re talking about. Has been sat up on my (black) roof for four years now, not a hitch - and it has seen -15 to 45C, snow, rain, wildfire, 1” hail, and it’s fine. Only service interruption we’ve had was when starlink accidentally the entire network for 8 hours or so last year.
Or they’re just offline, because their backup batteries only last a few hours, and the gensets for the backhaul have run out of diesel. Iberian blackout last year, I didn’t even know it had happened until I went to pick the kid up from school - just another day at the home office.
As an astronomer, nothing meaningful. Oh, apart from making it possible for me to have a dark sky site that’s miles from anywhere, including the nearest cell tower.
That’s basically just a bus up the coast of Uruguay and a bit of Rio Grande do Sul? I did the same route in the opposite direction, via Tacuarembo, mostly on horseback. Extremely uncomfortable, but an interesting week nonetheless.
You might be envisioning a more direct route that doesn't include the Foz do Iguaçu part (maybe crossing the border in Uruguaiana or something). I bet that exists as a commercial bus route option too, but the Foz do Iguaçu stopover is all the way up at the triple border of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. So the Brazilian border-skirting for this trip includes all of Rio Grande do Sul, all of Santa Catarina, and a bit of Parana, then back down again on the Brazilian side after crossing the border.
Edit: Yes, it looks like you could totally do that (Buenos Aires to Uruguaiana, then Uruguaiana to Porto Alegre) and save many hours of travel, or even cut more directly through central Uruguay and save even more time. We took the longer option because we wanted to visit Iguaçu Falls and the Itaipu dam, which were both spectacular.
reply