Viewing profile — nickjarboe

Galileo and helicopters? I think you mean Leonardo da Vinci.

The Earth part was just shorthand for the fact that the atmosphere and gravity of Earth add about 1.3–1.8 km/s of delta v to achieving the pure kinetic delta v of 7.8 km/s needed t…

Nit: The energy of an object going 2,000 m/s is 1/16th of that going 8,000 m/s, but since this is a rocket launching from Earth the energy for the rocket to get to 2,000 m/s is muc…

If the world decides to leave fiat currencies and return to gold, the value of gold will be much (10x?, 100x?) higher.

I would suggest getting a "Benchmak Maps" atlas of the state you are traveling in. About $25 each. The whole state at 1:300,000 with comprehensive coverage of many features. You wi…

The records before comprehensive satellite measurements are not very useful to determine a baseline.

When a city in America is destroyed by a nuclear explosion, Americans will re-learn why suburbia was so popular. Hopefully this won't happen for a long time and we will have a good…

Google bought WAZE in 2013. I wonder why Google Maps would be so much better than WAZE four years later.

Not yet.

The journal article in Nature can be found here[1]. The abstract is publicly accessible with the article behind a paywall. I'm not familiar enough with the dating method to comment…

Running a rail line point to point is cheap? More like impossible.

As per the article, Vanguard's biggest fund is the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index which tries to track the CRSP U.S. Total Market Index. That index is "Nearly 4,000 constituents…

I think the idea behind farm to table is not that the owners of the restaurant supply everything they serve themselves but know their suppliers personally, maybe have been to the s…

Individuals buying smaller amounts of stocks may not be exercising their votes or have a board member in their back pocket, but they can in the aggregate greatly influence one thin…

Farm to table restaurants are very trendy at the moment.

It seems to me that if a country has nuclear weapons and they are used in an attack, then one should desire them to be delivered by ICBM. Then there is no doubt where it came from …

When the Whole Foods opened near me, for the first year, about half the time that I would shop there I had an item where the price they charged at the checkout was higher than the …

Still over 10,000 nuclear weapons [1]. Wish it was more like a hundred. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-weapons/

Nixon created the EPA. I don't think he was generally for hippie bullshit. If one is to believe John Ehrlichman[1], Nixon put marijuana on Schedule I to try and destroy the hippies…

The DOE is the department that designs, builds, and maintains the United States' nuclear weapons. I hope there is some science going on.

Fuel cells are expensive due mostly to the cost of platinum.

Some think that money in the form of shells existed back to at least 75,000 B.P.[1]. Language and controlled fire arose around the same time. Money (easily transferable anonymous d…

Elon Musk believes this as well. In a 2012 interview by Chris Anderson published in Wired[1] on why SpaceX does not patent anything: Anderson: So what have all your creative people…

Sort of like how sometimes when government tries to solve a problem with a certain program and, if the problem gets worse, the solution suggested (and often tried) is to give even …