411–420 of 515 posts
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1:4:9 is too 2000's. 1:9:49 is what you want these days.
Can you please explain the significance?
1:22:33 becomes 1:33:77
How expensive would a solid piece of metal that size be?
A quick look around the internet[0] gives 6" aluminium square bars at $1,473 for 144". The monolith is about 141" long, and has sides of about 23.5", so 16 of those bars would neatly fill it. So if it is solid aluminium, that's about $23,500 in material. [0]: https://www.onlinemetals.com/en/buy/aluminum/6-aluminum-squa...
Using the weight calculator [1], and plugging in 23.5/23.5/141 (all in inches) I am getting about 7.7K lbs, or around $15K in material costs. Given it’s unusual shape, I’m assuming that normal is producing it. This would require additional costs for machining and processing Dash I’d probably say it would be several thousand dollars in additional costs. Overall this looks to me like a $25,000 piece of metal...
[1] https://www.bostoncenterless.com/tools/metal-weight-calculat...
[2] https://fastmetals.com/collections/aluminum-extruded-square-...
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Like the Focused in the novel "A Deepness In The Sky" by Vernor Vinge.
I can’t get into Deepness after reading Fire. Too different and my expectations for the scale he set up are too big...
(deleting, because now my comment is getting pasted all over the Internet, and though it was not to my knowledge misleading, it didn't actually provide any useful information)
...
I can no longer edit or delete my parent comment here.
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...
Might as well delete that. Turns out this information is wrong. The sister later explained that she misread the coordinates which are nearby, but are not at the exact location of, the monolith. I can no longer edit or delete my parent comment here.
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If the people at the agency had integrity, they would have immediately brought these concerns up the chain or public.
Who is to say they didn't bring them up the chain, and the chain just ignored them? Try to bring issues to the public and they'll charge you with "espionage"/"mishandling classified information"/etc. Even if the charges don't succeed, you'll lose your career and the court case will ruin you.
And that is why those senior public servants with power in security agencies hate wikileaks and are willing to trash the constitutional protections for journalists to get Assange and also want to destroy Snowden so very badly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A quick look around the internet[0] gives 6" aluminium square bars at $1,473 for 144". The monolith is about 141" long, and has sides of about 23.5", so 16 of those bars would neatly fill it. So if it is solid aluminium, that's about $23,500 in material. [0]: https://www.onlinemetals.com/en/buy/aluminum/6-aluminum-squa...
That does t hold. Aluminum that big isn’t just something you’d buy from McMaster-Carr.
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Google is very unlikely to keep logs for so long.
I thought the US government decided it would be easier to pay tech giants to keep data longer than collecting it itself and storing it. That way they can just ask for it when they need it.
If it were alien, it would be made of a quasi crystal (a crystal in a higher dimension projected into 3D). Humans have no way of making bulk quasicrystals.
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Sand cast and polished...
As I noted in another response, you can't cast a rectangular prism and expect a good result. You'd need to add some angle to the edges to ensure it solidifies correctly, but doing so takes away from the monolith feel. That's also a lot of polishing for the finish you would get from sand casting.
There appear to be screw holes (or rivets), so I'm going to guess that it's three aluminium sheets screwed onto an interior scaffold.