Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter wrote:

My parents told me that I should not tell lies

So, your parents don't have business sense. And in business, it ain't lying, its finding the correct turn of phrase to keep you employed.

Sander Rossel wrote:

if you pay enough monkeys they'll reproduce Shakespeare

Actually the quote is an infinite number of monkeys, so there will never be enough animals or typewriters. To type out all combinations of 10 characters limiting it to just the English alphabet, single case there are 141,167,095,653,376 ways the characters can be combined and that isn't close to the number of random words and spacing the monkeys need to produce. Shakespeare produced thousands of words. I hate to think of the number of editors you'd have to hire to find the works of Shakespeare in 2x89a7 54C3 9Y2!$#a%^$^ sets of monkey produced text and the education needed to know the correct spelling of old English words. That quote predates computers so you also need an infinite number of typewriters (an 11 character word) as well.

OriginalGriff wrote:

Does that mean I have to become racist and get a comb-over?

Good one. I think I laugh more often reading your comments than any other poster on this site. Unfortunately, our nation seems to like ping-pong-ING winners and we might just get that one this time. If you wait four years we may be ready to elect another president that makes sense. (That's optimistic, we also usually re-elect the screw-ups as well as the decent ones.)

Kenneth Haugland wrote:

I'm pretty sure it was de-signed to do that

So Win 10 has removed all signed code? :)

Technically that is a program, not a computer and it doesn't teach circuit design, just how to tell the circuits to play nice. Computers are full of redundant terms so no-one really knows what you are really talking about. It is perfectly OK to call two different things the same thing, that improves confusion which seems the main purpose of having computers in the first place.

You will always encounter projects where best practices aren't followed, documentation is nil, and no one can explain what is wrong with the code as-is. But they want it fixed. They don't know enough about the problem to explain what the problem is. They don't want to to waste time moving code into best practice so it is easier to pin-point the problem. So, go fix it. You are left with ??????? and no real answers. So, do what you were hired to do and fix it. Takes patience, talking with people, finding the best informed on what the project does and what is currently desparately wrong with it. Then, isolate the problems that don't need fixing now and ignore them and work on the real problem(s), whatever it is (they are.) If it takes little effort to sneak best practices in, sneak that in, you'll thank yourself later. (God knows, no one else will.)

_Maxxx_ wrote:

the reason a top upends is because its point cannot move, but the rest of it can.

Sort of right, but not quite. The top upends because the point is not a stable platform. You try to balance a top on it's point and let go, within seconds it will have tipped over. (Unless you stick it in sand, but that just widens the support base.) It doesn't immediately topple when you release the spinning top because the gyroscopic force overcomes the natural desire to topple and the point is a quite stable platform. In fact if the top lands unbalanced it will spin in smaller and smaller circles until the point comes to a complete stop (Relative to the floor location) and spins in place. The point hitting the floor is an anchor point that tries to keep the top in one place. The gyroscopic action is the stabilizing force. It finally becomes an unstable platform as the top slows it's spin.

_Maxxx_ wrote:

so is he assuming the tidal force is great enough to overcome the gyroscopic force?

I can't know what he is assuming. A spaceship with multiple rings ranging from 0.01 G's through 1 g levels would be massive, probably in the millions of KGms of material. Yes, the closer the orbit the bigger the tidal force, but the moon hasn't come close to stopping the Earth. I'm guessing putting a 100 Gm Top spinning in a 100 M orbit around the moon would take more than a month to stop spinning because of tidal forces. (It would fairly quickly start precessing.)

Thanks for the correction of authors. Maybe H isn't as scientifically adept as I thought. "With the axis of rotation pointing directly towards the center of the moon while in orbit" Again, this station is like a top. That top continues to point to the center of the Earth against Earth's massive gravity trying to upend it. We are talking short-term so the top's refusal to drop is because the top's axis of rotation starts directly pointed to the center of the earth. If you put a gyroscope to spinning on gimbals with the axis originally pointed directly down and keep it spinning for 24 hours, that gyroscope would end up rotating close to 360 degrees relative to Earth's surface anywhere reasonably close to the equator. You put that gyroscope spinning horizontally on the equator with the axis pointed to true north, over 24 hours it shouldn't rotate it's orientation at all. Once a body is in motion, it tends to stay in motion. That rule is consistent even with rotating bodies.

I've enjoyed Robert's writing for over 40 years, but I haven't read everything he's written. My wife got "The cat who walks through walls" and as expected, I've enjoyed it, both for the enjoyable plot and descriptions that were scientifically accurate. I think he wrote Neutron star and that had a section using tidal forces that matched exactly what we know about physics if we had the equipment that could do what that spaceship was capable of doing. Now our hero is on a space "ship?" with multiple rings that has multiple gravity levels, and all that is easily explained by centripetal forces. Now for the part where all things we know about physics get's thrown out the window.

Heinlen wrote:

What does it have to do with a tidal lock on Luna; the forward end points forever straight down at the Moon.

First off, on a spinning ship, where would the forward end be? To me, it would have to be on the center axis line that the ship is spinning on and forward would arbitrarily be one direction or the other. There is a way that the orientation of the ship wouldn't fight the tidal forces of gravity and that is with the axis of the the orbit and the axis of the spin being parallel. (Well sort of, then the moon would be using tidal forces to slow down the spin of the ship. Just like it is trying to do with the earth, but more successfully because of distance and mass.) With a Top, it has a pointed end and a body you wrap a string around and throw it while holding on to the string. Immediately, earth's gravity tries to get the Top to topple, but it fails. If you throw it right it stays pretty stationary at first and then it starts to precess as it slows down. That speeds up the slow-down of the spin until the top does topple and quickly loses all its spin. But the spin has to slow significantly, to get it to topple. Yes, tidal forces have slowed down the moon until it's rotation matches it's orbit around the Earth. The sun is putting tidal forces on the moon but they are ignored because the Earth's tidal force is MUCH greater. The moon is applying tidal forces to the Earth and it is slowing it's rotation down (about as much as a mach truck is slowed down when it hits an ant). It is much better at slowing the water on the surface of the earth down. (Creating tides) The moon would try to slow the ship's spin, but if it succeeded in stopping the spin, the whole ship would be in zero gravity. If the axis wasn't parallel to the station's orbit, the station would precess like

I'm contradictory? I intentionally made it that way because of the web link that synchronized two clocks and kept one on earth and installed the other one on a ship going nearly the speed of light. The web site certainly didn't explain how gravity or speed affects time. I believe gravity affects it because space around a heavy body is bent changing the speed light moves through space near a heavy body and that somehow affects time. I certainly don't know enough about it to properly explain how it all works, but I know enough to recognize when I see a poorly made example that doesn't really explain anything.

The speed of light is 299792458 m/s, 299792458*0.9994~=299612582 14 m diameter is about 43.98 m circumference,distance traveled about 17592 m 17592/299612582 is about 5.872e-5 seconds or just under 60 microseconds. I'm surprised there is a measuring device accurate enough that it can count 400 loops being made on a 44 meter track in about 60 microseconds. I know muons is or is like a light emitting particle, so, how do you get it to stand still so you can measure the 2.2 microsecond lifespan it normally has when it isn't moving? Doesn't the Heisenberg principle apply when making these measurements? I can't help but think that running a car into a brick wall at 60 mph (m is miles here) would severely shorten the lifespan of the car. (wrong analogy if muons are normally stationary.)

Should have said, "Other than light, we aren't seeing anything in space close to us, moving near the speed of light to us."

Quantum physics seems full of self-contradictory statements. That's why I self-contradicted myself. The examples always have spaceships going near the speed of light without ever explaining how you got the ship moving that fast. Nor do they use the math needed because the ship is already moving that fast when you start measuring the time effects. Of course they have proof they are right. The great wizard of OZ knows all, just ignore the man you see behind the curtain. The theory of relativity was and still is a theory. Even though the light shifting effects of binary stars can be seen and measured as their orbital positions shift relative to us, we aren't seeing anything in space moving near the speed of light to us. The speed of light is about 300000000 m/s, Earth gravity is about 9.75 m/s^2. The time to reach the speed of light in "normal" physics accelerating at "Earth gravity" would approximately be 300000000/(9.75*3600*24) or about 356 days. You being in the space ship using quantum physics, the perceived time becomes less than the actual time so you need to slow the acceleration down to match perceived time. (You would start at a force of 2 Gs so the initial acceleration is 1 G away from earth and cut down on the force as you reach escape velocity.) This also ignores how your propelent can work since it is almost stationary as you near light speed. There isn't any way to reach the speed of light using quantum physics because as you near the speed of light, the power needed increases exponentially to maintain the perceived 1G acceleration until the power doesn't exist. I don't know the math to calculate it, but if you perceive one object from earth moving at 0.6 times the speed of light (SOL) in one direction and another moving at 0.6 SOL in the opposite direction, it appears like they are approaching at 1.2 times the SOL while each object sees the other object is moving at less than SOL towards them. (These "ships" should have view screens with stickers saying "objects you see are moving faster than they appear to be moving")

The problem with the time dilation examples are the inaccuracies in it make almost everything unknown. Where is the orbit relative to Earth? Once you get far enough out, the orbit with earth will lose to the orbit around the sun. How long does it take to get a three minute change in time? What's the mechanism for tracking time? If it is a grandfather clock movement, it will take 3 minutes in orbit to get a 3 minute time difference. If it is atomic resonance, I'd guess (WAG) it would take 3 million days to get 3 minutes difference in synchronous orbit. Being able to accelerate infinitely while reaching 99.9999999999% of the speed of light it would take 1.5 minutes out, reverse direction and 1.5 minutes back to get a 3 minute difference and it would have to have an incredibly strong machine to withstand the G forces and very fast computing to be able to tell when you are 1.5 light minutes away to stop and come back. If you went with it, you would be gelatinous goo when you get back. IE The web site doesn't do any real explaining of what is happening to cause the dilation or how long it takes to see that dilation.

Mario Vernari wrote:

that's why I hate C/C++!

Yea, I kind of agree with that sentiment, however, I have yet to run across the language that will supply me with a great lunch, but I do admit to sometimes having fun with it. (Not C++ and does that mean I'm cheating on my partner?)

Mario Vernari wrote:

that's why I hate C/C++!

Yea, I kind of agree with that sentiment, however, I have yet to run across the language that will supply me with a great lunch, but I do admit to sometimes having fun with it. (Does that mean I'm cheating on my partner?)

Daniel Pfeffer wrote:

Amazingly, the amount of sniping and backbiting is kept to a minimum!

Hear Hear (Or is that Here Here? :laugh: ) Sometimes I find myself biting my tongue, but not on this thread. (Yet, and this thread is starting to grow a beard)

That's what I like about this forum. You go in thinking programming and you get a bit of Latin training. Hope I remember what the phrase means next time I see it.

Daniel Pfeffer wrote:

IMO, this is a quite useful C++ paradigm.

...and that makes me even happier to barely being able to read C++ :laugh:

I'm not keeping current on acronyms. Now isn't this one unfortunate for the good doctor: "Dr. Salem Foad is a rheumatologist in Cincinnati" I bet he came by it long before the common web usage did.