SteveInCO

@Umar

The recent activity page is usable, but generally I have to load six or seven pages of it to see everything that has happened since I was last on. It’s an exhaustive list, showing every single reply, therefore touching each thread more than once, and includes notifications of friendships, etc.

Another thing about it that’s bad is if you…[Read more]

Total solar eclipses wouldn’t be nearly as magnificent, either.

It’s difficult in the extreme to imagine life evolving on Pluto’s surface (it absolutely would not have any kind of biochemistry) but there is a significant chance that it once had an under-the-ice ocean like Europa does, given that before Pluto/Chiron became tidally locked the…[Read more]

Either way, you don’t want to smack into some small fleck of something or other at the speed in question.

A typical rifle bullet is well under one mile per second, I typically see numbers like 3000 feet per second for a round like .308 (7.62×51 is near equivalent).

@Davis

Sure.

But do you honestly think I was going to pass on the “geezer” pun? 🙂

The size of the text (once displayed) is actually larger for me than on T|A, for some reason. [Edit. I take that back. They are almost identically sized.] But the gray sucks.

The preview you see while typing is quite good–it’s black, oddly enough. Though it’s a bit smaller, and I could imagine people having trouble with it.

[edit add] The…[Read more]

@Davis, Oh and I should point something else out. Charon, as seen from Pluto, is 7.5 times the diameter of the full moon as seen from Earth. It would look MUCH larger than seven and a half times as big, because the area of the disc in the sky is proportional to the square of that number, so it would appear 56+ times the size of the full moon.

With as many moons as Pluto has (they keep finding more and more) they must have been scratching their heads wondering just exactly how much crap there was flying around out there, and any impact at 10 km/sec will be worse than getting hit with a rifle bullet. It was a smart move on their part. The spacecraft will be collecting daata far more…[Read more]

@Davis:

Actually, he said “Geez” not “Geeze”. The philosopher is clearly one of those who “Geez”es. You know the type, “geezers.” 😛

@Unseen, having the clock set to UTC doesn’t bother me much (though I had to experiment to determine the timezone). As I said, I’m used to using UTC in certain contexts. It could very well confuse someone else, however.

Non-threaded topics have a distinct advantage (which this forum *doesn’t* exploit properly, ironically enough) in that for a…[Read more]

Well if a lightning bolt came down and smacked that SOB right in the forehead, I might be tempted to believe it.

If, on the other hand, that lightning bolt turned out to have a diameter of 0.223, 0.308, 0.338, or 0.50 inches (among others), I’ll ascribe it to human agency. [*metric equivalents, 5.56, 7.62, 8.58, or 12.7 mm]

@guest1, I don’t disagree whit that conclusion. We see atheism, or at least not being in a church, on the rise in the US. The young in particular have got to be extremely worrisome to Xian leaders (they might have to get off their fucking sanctimonious asses and get real jobs instead of being bloodsucking parasites–wait, did I say that out…[Read more]

We’d need to know more about your situation, Ethel. What is it, precisely, you are trying to obtain that their religion won’t let them do?

I’m going to guess, from the color of that picture, that it is of Charon, not Pluto.

I was born just over 50 years ago. I don’t think I remember Apollo 11, but I do remember Apollo 12. And Pioneer 10 and 11 probes to Jupiter and Jupiter and Saturn, respectively. And the two Voyager probes (and I still want to call them V’ger, but that’s…[Read more]

I call it mystical because it’s the traditional domain of mysticism, and also because nobody seems to get it.

We get it. What we don’t get is why you persist in using the word “mystical” for it. Even if I were to grant your premise that the mystics got there first, it has nothing to do with the essence of mysticism.

Not sure where else to put this question.

If there’s a place (say in the profile area) to control the timezone that times are displayed in, I still haven’t found it. It appears to be set to UTC at the moment (an adjustment I am used to making, but others might not be).

You are quite correct. In fact, this is much more a “double planet” than the Earth-Moon system ever dreamed of being.

I could do the calculation, if I knew the distance and diameter of Charon.

(*checks Wikipedia, which must surely be getting edited hourly on this topic right now.)

1207 km wide at a distance of 19571 km (center to center).…[Read more]

Right way to mention someone is using his/her username that you can find in his/her profile url http://atheistzone.com/members/bellerose/ For example @bellerose

…Yet the only way to determine that name is by going to their profile page? That seems a bit inconvenient, it should go off the display name because that’s what we’re looking at on…[Read more]

Note: this reply assumes a United States context.

I know many people are saying yes, and have been for years (in other words, they weren’t waiting for this SCOTUS decision, in the least). Really the two situations don’t depend on each other, though they are similar in form; both groups have been (and still are) treated with contempt, contempt…[Read more]

Backing up @Strega on both points.

I don’t know why Simon persists in trying to create an Atheist “religion” or insert mysticism in it, when really, it’s a catch all word describing everyone who does *not* have a certain characteristic. It says nothing about the characteristics that they do have. Thus there are at least as many ways to “be an…[Read more]