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Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

nsf.gov

131–140 of 248 posts

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very similar event was depicted in Battlefield 4, surprisingly accurately as it turns out: https://youtu.be/KiOQdVvGdQE?t=38

Can anyone please characterize that accent/cadence to me?!? It reminds me very strongly of an accent I've been hearing on tech support telephone call frequently in the past 5 years but never recalled hearing before that. I have a pet theory that it's actually from a new technique for more rapidly teaching intelligible English pronunciation to folks learning it as a second language. But maybe it's just an accent from…

Sounds like a Northern to North Eastern European accent to me. But I will say that YouTubers have their own accents that permeate different genres of videos as well, which can add ambiguity.

My favourite accent tidbit is the English voice of the Shinkansen in Japan. It is voiced by an Australian, imitating a Canadian, who was imitating a British accent. The result is a totally ambiguous accent that sounds almost disconnected from geography. I say that as an Australian with a british twang.

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very similar event was depicted in Battlefield 4, surprisingly accurately as it turns out: https://youtu.be/KiOQdVvGdQE?t=38

Can anyone please characterize that accent/cadence to me?!? It reminds me very strongly of an accent I've been hearing on tech support telephone call frequently in the past 5 years but never recalled hearing before that. I have a pet theory that it's actually from a new technique for more rapidly teaching intelligible English pronunciation to folks learning it as a second language. But maybe it's just an accent from…

Fairly sure that's a native Dutch speaker. e.g. "Thingss" rather than "thingz"

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#133
post #47
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Golden Gate bridge is 887 000 tons: https://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/01/us/golden-gate-bridge-fas... So around 1000 times as heavy.

That sounds like the weight of the whole thing, not just the suspended part.

I think the Golden Gate Bridge is massively overengineered (although nobody really knows) because materials engineering wasn’t super advanced back then.

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#134

So if they knew there is no money to even maintain it and this collapse was a likely outcome why not lower the platform in advance before any cable breaks? Just from a safety perspective omitting this seems to be somewhat negligent, no?

According to the Wikipedia entry...

> The NSF made the announcement on November 19, 2020 that they would decommission Arecibo over the following few weeks after determining the safest route to do so with a safety exclusion zone immediately put in place.

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#135

It feels like the death of American ingenuity. We've fallen from the era where we sent echoes to our neighbours and the stars. When we found clearings in jungles and turned them into monuments to humanity. The time when we put our best foot forward and reached ahead, into the future, racing towards a brighter tomorrow for humanity. I mourn for what has been lost. The American century wasn't punctuated by a war, but b…

You're joking, right?

2020 is a year where SpaceX flew humans to space for the first time ever on a commercial vehicle, we created and started to distribute a vaccine for a never-before-seen virus in under a year, and we began to hook rural people who've never had access to high-quality internet up via a constellation of thousands of micro-satellites in LEO.

Sure, not everything is rosy, but we're still capable of some impressive feats of engineering.

Oh, and AlphaFold made an incredible leap in protein folding prediction. Like, a true "paradigm shift" in one of the most historically intractable problems in biology.

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very similar event was depicted in Battlefield 4, surprisingly accurately as it turns out: https://youtu.be/KiOQdVvGdQE?t=38

Can anyone please characterize that accent/cadence to me?!? It reminds me very strongly of an accent I've been hearing on tech support telephone call frequently in the past 5 years but never recalled hearing before that. I have a pet theory that it's actually from a new technique for more rapidly teaching intelligible English pronunciation to folks learning it as a second language. But maybe it's just an accent from…

Nothing new, engineered, or special about it, that's a bog-standard Dutch accent.

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#138

So now, humans are going to be the intergalactic assholes of the universe who go and change their phone number without leaving a forwarding number. When our message sent from Arecibo is finally received, their response will go to a disconnected number. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BVbyCZXc5s

Aricebo isn't the only radio telescope. The message is already sent, we have other installations that can listen.

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#140
post #30

The instrument platform was listed at 900 tons. The maximum takeoff weight of a Boeing 787 is just over 500,000 pounds, or 250 tons ... is it fair to say the instrument platform was the equivalent of three fully loaded 787s, plus two M1A1 tanks piled on for good measure? That's a lot of weight for those cables to support.

But how many football fields wide was it, and how many olympic swimming pools could you pour into it before it was full?

Libraries of Congress is my go-to unit of measurement.

/s

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