grant hutchison
Order of Kilopi

I buy a lot of physical books. Sometimes quite rare old books. Often they arrive packaged to within an inch of their lives. The vendor is rightly...

Never had occasion to do that, in my Former Existence. Plenty of phone consultations, though. And lots of committee meetings using video...

Ah. Having friends tell me exactly what they love about Harry Potter is why I've never read or watched Harry Potter. I knew the ending of Sixth...

Well, that's the reason I don't get the whole "spoiler" thing--for me, the effectiveness of the narrative doesn't come from some particular plot...

I feel the same way about Zoom chats. Grant Hutchison

My difficulty is with convincing friends that I don't care a whit about spoilers--in fact, I'm enthusiastic to hear what exactly they liked about a...

It depends on other things--the viscous tidal behaviour of the planet and the orbital period. In particular, the ratio of something called the...

It's all set to miss Earth in 2068. The probability of a strike is currently set at 1 in 380,000. That's about the same as a person's chance of being...

That said, my mother's care home here in the UK locked down only two weeks after Japan's did, and that's pretty much precisely the time difference...

From the JAMA paper I linked to: Grant Hutchison

Yes, I misread Jens's post in two different ways, and kicked off about care home deaths, rather than nursing home and hospital cases. The figure for...

We should also wonder why only 20% of deaths in Japan occurred outside care-homes, since that's a lot lower proportion than in Europe, where...

Well, with the same total irradiance, our planet receives only 2% of the Earth's illuminance. But the remainder of the irradiance is coming in as...

I don't think you'd see shadow bands. Plugging in values for an O3V from Lang's venerable tables (52500K, 15 solar radii), I get an apparent...

Excellent vaccine uptake in Scotland so far, as we work our way down the age tiers. According to the Public Health Scotland Covid dashboard, we've...

It seems that people are resorting to creating bots to deal with the complicated and multithreaded booking systems in the USA. Grant Hutchison

Period squared varies inversely with mass and directly with radius cubed. Grant Hutchison

Square root of the bolometric luminosity of the star, times whatever boundaries of the solar habitable zone you care to adopt. Trying to do any...

Yes, if Earth had no atmosphere and was equipped with some sort of frictionless racetrack around the equator, you could theoretically set down a...

Well, the fact these vaccines hijack cellular machinery at a genetic level was a legitimate cause for concern, a decade ago. It certainly seemed...

The mRNA doesn't directly induce an immune response. It codes for a SARS-CoV-2 protein, and uses your cells' ribosomes to make the cells churn out...

The problem in the specific setting I encountered (though it was far from unique at that time in Scottish culture) was that Scouting did all that...

That's a failure mode of jet engines, called compressor surge. I think it was a common problem with early jet engines, but I haven't checked. In a...

I had eight years of bullying by my noxious little peers as a child, but in that particular setting the adult supervisors were pretty much the entire...

Confined to a small, urban Local Authority Area by current lockdown restrictions, I've had to get creative to motivate myself to keep taking my usual...

Well, I described the "best case" I imagined from DaCaptain's description of the asteroid eventually "touching" the Earth--some undisclosed energy...

If your co-orbital satellite gets close to the Earth, it's going to be effectively in an orbit around the Earth, under the influence of Earth's...

Yes, relativistic length contraction doesn't work at right angles to the velocity vector. (I don't know what "slipstream" means in this context, but...

Yes, the relevant Horizons issues for the Collier's "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!" series are July/August 2012 to September/October 2013. They're all...

We now know that coinfection with Covid and flu doubles your risk of dying, compared to Covid alone, but that there also appears to be a protective...