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Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

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191–200 of 248 posts

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#191
post #77
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they must have known it was imminent, it seems unlikely they had a drone over it 24/7 given the available hover time.

For a use case like this, I'd imagine that tethered multicopters could be a very nice fit. If you can just plug the base station into a power outlet, suddenly 24/7 doesn't seem that crazy. PS: Apparently I'm not alone with this idea, search engine comes up with hits. https://elistair.com/ even have a tether kit you can plug into some DJI models (and others) instead of the conventional battery pack. Out of Lyon, Franc…

Please decide, Lyon or Nice?

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would not consider this representative of any Dutch accent I've heard from living in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, or Nijmegen. Nor even for the strange Zeeland Belgian accents. This sounds like an odd Russian Dutch English combination.

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could build an entirely new one from scratch if we decided to manufacture one less F-35.

Well, the F-35 is actually a useful instrument which maintains US hegemony. A better comparison would be the movie Cats, which had a budget of 95 million, and serves no purpose to society.

Just so we're talking apples to apples, what value is that hegemony to society?

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing with Arecibo it's not the design you want in in a microwave observatory at all. Same as the Space Shuttle which spent decades siphoning off a good chunk of of the budget for space stuff. It was white elephant.

Did anybody tell FAST?

Arecibo isn't FAST

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#200

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…

So many people commenting about Spacex and such but I feel they're missing the point. This marks the end of an era where publicly funded science was driving the frontiers of human knowledge faster than ever before. We went from having never left the ground under power to the moon in 65 years. 65. Years. And in the subsequent 51? We've gotten really good at making cheap electronics and our consolation prize is a low c…

Not only that, but all of the cheap electronics/computers that we have now are because of the money spent on Apollo.
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