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It's called rubber-necking and it is the reason auto accidents cause 1000% more congestion than normal... people slow down to see what's going on and block the road. Good thing there weren't any police around to club these people and clear the exits.
Peugeot paint changes colour with your mood
I was looking up paints that could change colour - not because I wanted my car to telegraph my mood to the world, but because it would be nice to secretly have paint that changed colour at your will. Combined with something that could modify (or simply hide) your registration plate, it might be good enough to slip past anyone chasing/looking for you if needed.
You do realize that article was posted on April 1st right?
At 12:01 A.M
Damn.. but sweet.
Guess my chameleon car won't be an advertised model after all.
Flora polis is also an anagram for april fools..
Did anyone else watch the NASA feed of the Mars landing of the Curiosity rover? It was a fairly exciting and momentous occasion for space exploration and humankind. Here's hoping we don't have a Prometheus experience from this excursion.
Inb4 aliens.
I'm sorry, this is quite possibly one of the most science-ignorant posts I've seen here in a long time.Quote:
Originally Posted by Animeniax
What exactly is momentous about it? It's cool that we landed a 1-ton rover on Mars, but it isn't like we haven't flown past, orbited, landed, or crashed things into the Martian surface for dozens of years.
Landing mechanism: we used parachutes with the two rovers, retro-rockets in the 70s, Pheonix landed itself via rockets. The crane is the only innovative bit, but this isn't exactly untested technology either.
Power source: RTGs, used since...before we ever sent anything into space.
Mars is the most explored planet next to Earth.
Come back in 2015, the real momentous year in Terran space exploration. First close examination of Ceres ever (all we've got are blurry photos from Hubble), then a few months later, the first probe to ever go near Pluto/Charon (again, best we've got is crappy Hubble composites).
It's not about the technology that landed the rover. It's about the thousands of pounds of sensors and test equipment on the rover.
Looks like a nerd from an anime site just served all the scientists that are currently celebrating this occasion!Quote:
Originally Posted by Ryllharu
Just for the record, there's a big difference between landing a 380lb rover and a 2000lb one. You say Mars is the most explored next to Earth, but that still means virtually nothing, considering that it was only a few years ago that scientists even confirmed the presence of water underneath the planet's surface. Mars is also far more significant to us than distant planets, since we will actually have the means to colonize it in our lifetimes.
Look, I love the idea of colonizing Mars as much as the next nerd, but it's an impractical pipe-dream.
There's zero benefit to colonizing a magnetosphere-less gravity well like Mars. Anything you put down, isn't coming back up cost-effectively. The moon is better as a staging base for further manned exploration into the asteroid belt and wherever else after that. Titan is more useful to colonize than Mars, primarily due to the dramatically reduced levels of radiation. The thick atmosphere at the surface reduces the only problem to freezing to death (the major problem there), not suffocating as well like on Mars.
You and I may not always see eye to eye, but you've got it right here. That room full of scientists and the hundreds of thousands of people watching along during the landing were impressed with the achievement, but somehow Ryllharu wasn't. I guess they'll have to try harder next time, maybe add a ring of fire that the pod has to fly through before deploying the rover.Quote:
Originally Posted by Assertn
You guys don't get it. NASA folks were equally excited about MESSENGER making a proper insertion, but nobody else gave a shit about it because it wasn't hyped by the media like Curiosity was.
Cassini and the Huygens probe even moreso, but again lacking the same media hype, while being a huge deal scientifically.
It's a rover. We've sent three before this. This one was just heavy, which means a parachute and retro-rockets (which, before Phoenix, NASA wasn't even sure they possessed the expertise to do anymore).
Haha a ring of fire, that`d be kinda cool.
I'm sensing that Ryllharu is pretty mad about this.
Ceres will be interesting due to its proximity, but Pluto is way too far away and is basically nothing more than a lump of rock and ice that even lost its full planetary status. I'm surely more excited about a better and more advanced Mars rover than anything centered around Pluto, no matter if it's the first thing to go near it or not.
Some fun news out of Norway: http://news.sky.com/story/971920/bea...rink-100-beers
And then you woke up.Quote:
Originally Posted by Assertn
Hey man, moore's law, technological singularity, etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by Y