Humor Random Comments Thread

[NukeET]

Mom said I watched the moon landing while sitting in our living room floor. I was 14 months old. I do remember some of the Skylab missions.

Yes, I would be have been 17!

Actually Apollo 8 seemed more significant to me at the time.
By Apollo 11 NASA seemed to have it nailed...

N.

Yeah I was there. Sat up with my Dad, around 0300hrs trying to stay awake even though I totally in to it. My bedroom wall was covered in cuttings from the papers for years after. Even after I had left home for the RAF in 1971.

I was 7 at the time, and watched the first step while sitting in my father's lap

Both 8 and 11 are significant. Apollo 8 for 1st men see Earthrise. Apollo 11, 1st men on the surface.

 

[Artlav]

Sigh. On the other side of the pond, my mother haven't even heard about it until the 80s and my father heard about it but haven't seen the broadcasts until much later. Apparently there wasn't much more than a passing mention in the newspaper at the time, and few people noticed.

No wonder so many of the older generation here believe the landings were a hoax - the 90s "documentary" about faking it was the first time a lot of them heard about it at all, and most think there is only, like, a dozen pictures total in existence - being shown hundreds of images from Apollo, good, bad, blurry, perfect, overexposed, blank and so on, was an epiphany for my aunt.

 

[Notebook]

My Mother still doesn't believe it happened even though she watched as much TV coverage as I and my father did.
She's 90 with Alzheimer so that isn't going to change!
Might have been poor education as she was growing up. Left school at 15, and during the WWII years half the school went in the morning, the others in the afternoon because of air-raids. Was never interested in science or maths.
My father had similar experience but grew up in a family engineering business that gave him a different aspect.

N.

 

[ShuttleCommander]

Apollo 11 50th

Yes. I was 22 years old at the time.

 

[Urwumpe]

I hate it. First gastroenteritis, now followed directly by a cold.

IT IS SUMMER, DAMNIT!

 

[jedidia]

I hate it. First gastroenteritis, now followed directly by a cold.

I also have a cold right now, though it's really not unusual for me, even during summer. I always get a cold when the weather shifts suddenly, even if it gets warmer. Which it didn't this weekend...

 

[Linguofreak]

I'm somewhat shocked, but wish I could say I was surprised, to find myself in the position of likely switching to KDE in the near future. When I started using Linux 10 years ago, KDE was ahead of almost all of the competition, but GNOME at that time was, by a long shot, the best desktop environment that has ever existed. Unfortunately, GNOME has spent most of that time rotting into a festering pile of Apple-esque Fisher Price ooze, and while I jumped ship to MATE years ago, the entire GTK ecosystem has been decaying at a somewhat slower pace since the GNOME project controls GTK. In the past few years, both MATE and XFCE have gone to GTK3, which brings MATE down from world class to merely good. The MATE project really should have forked GTK along with GNOME. KDE, meanwhile, isn't a lot better than what I remember, but unlike practically every other desktop out there (other than MacOS, which was already bad), it hasn't gotten significantly worse in the past decade, so it's it ahead of the pack by default.

 

[Artlav]

I'm somewhat shocked, but wish I could say I was surprised, to find myself in the position of likely switching to KDE in the near future.

Why not XFCE? Been using it since forever, it's clean and does not get in your way.

 

[Abdullah]

Imagine....just imagine...........imagine if SpaceX went bankrupt

 

[Urwumpe]

Imagine....just imagine...........imagine if SpaceX went bankrupt

I'll buy it. :lol:

 

[Linguofreak]

I'm somewhat shocked, but wish I could say I was surprised, to find myself in the position of likely switching to KDE in the near future. When I started using Linux 10 years ago, KDE was ahead of almost all of the competition, but GNOME at that time was, by a long shot, the best desktop environment that has ever existed. Unfortunately, GNOME has spent most of that time rotting into a festering pile of Apple-esque Fisher Price ooze, and while I jumped ship to MATE years ago, the entire GTK ecosystem has been decaying at a somewhat slower pace since the GNOME project controls GTK. In the past few years, both MATE and XFCE have gone to GTK3, which brings MATE down from world class to merely good. The MATE project really should have forked GTK along with GNOME. KDE, meanwhile, isn't a lot better than what I remember, but unlike practically every other desktop out there (other than MacOS, which was already bad), it hasn't gotten significantly worse in the past decade, so it's it ahead of the pack by default.

Disregard this. I started posting in this thread, then decided OS Wars would be more appropriate, and then ended up absent-mindedly hitting post on both. Mods can delete, editing posts doesn't work on my phone and our landline Internet is going to be down for several days.

 

[Notebook]

Chernobyl vodka: First consumer product made in exclusion zone
By Victoria Gill
Science correspondent, BBC News

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49251471

 

[Notebook]

Interesting chap:

 

[Linguofreak]

I've been using FRMS and parachutes to recover escape towers after jettison in KSP. I really hope that real-life space agencies start putting camera setups onto the escape towers for their manned launchers, because the view from a separating escape tower is magnificent! Likely it will be necessary to use multiple fixed cameras with 360 coverage and stitching/anti-spin in software, given that the tower is going to have off-centerline thrust to generate lateral separation from the launch vehicle's flight path, but it really does make for impressive footage.

 

[jedidia]

Likely it will be necessary to use multiple fixed cameras with 360 coverage and stitching/anti-spin in software

Since this is basically my current field of work (not for rockets, unfortunately), I'd say that your best bet is to leave the production of the final images/videos (the stitching/movement correction part) to a computer on the ground. Just hang some cameras on there that are as dumb (and light) as possible. What I wonder, though, is your planned means of delivery... You definitely don't want to clog up your telemetry stream with video...

 

[Linguofreak]

EDIT: Somehow double-posted again. Removed.

 

[jedidia]

Misadventures in procedural plot generation, part 1:

A man got mugged, and, concerned for his safety, went to a store and bought a gun (well, he bought *something* to alieviate his concern, the generator isn't actually far enough yet to tell me what it is exactly...). Then he seemed to think "nah, I need the money more", and sold it again... apparently for a profit.

The job I gave to the generator was basically "make up a story that makes this man richer".

I like how at this very early stage of development I'm already getting things I didn't see coming.
I don't like how at this very early stage of development I'm already getting things I didn't see coming that make only limited sense.

Procgen in a nutshell, I guess...

 

[Notebook]

Saturday night, time for a bit of light relief...

 

[Urwumpe]

The US Navy is reverting the user interface design back to classic switches and levers, after the new touch screen interface had been found responsible for causing the collisions in Asia:

(German article, also links to the NTSB report)
https://www.heise.de/newsticker/mel...chscreens-wegen-Unfallgefahr-aus-4493593.html


https://news.usni.org/2019/08/09/na...tles-after-fleet-rejects-touchscreen-controls

 

[Fabri91]

Helm control is being reverted, no? Otherwise being able to transfer functions between consoles is a useful capability enabled by such "use-agnostic" devices such as as touch screens.