Tubul, Jerakeen, Berilia or Great T’Phon might actually be larger than the moon (yes, I had to google them).
They’re bigger than the sun. Seeing as one or another of them has to cock their leg when the sun passes through on its orbit.
In The Light Fantastic, their sun is said to be about a mile across. I’m less certain of the discworld moon. All I really know is that one side is covered in lunar dragons to provide the moonlight, while the far side houses all the moon goddesses.
I mean, what good is the space station Howard Johnson’s that we saw in 2001 if it doesn’t have a gift shop? Hopefully you can at least get HJ’s famous fried clams in the cafe, though.
Just curious. What type of company is it?
If Tim Peake HAD brought a piece of the moon back from the ISS, he wouldn’t be the first person to do so. (-:
A piece of the moon collected by Neil Armstrong was flown to the ISS aboard shuttle mission STS-119, and later returned to Earth aboard STS-128. See, f’rex, Mika McKinnon’s That Time a Chunk of the Moon Went to the Space Station at Gizmodo.
After a ‘celebrity tour’ of the US, that same(?) chunk of rock was carried to the summit of Mt. Everest by astronaut and adventurer Scott Parazynski, who then gave it, and a rock collected from the summit of Everest, to the commander of STS-130, who then carried it back to the ISS, where (I believe) it still resides today, perched on the edge of a window of the ISS cupola, looking down on Earth.
So (if I haven’t crossed up my timelines) there WAS a piece of the moon onboard the ISS during Tim Peake’s tour of duty, and he COULD have brought it back to earth — but he didn’t. (-:
And that’s super useful on Christmas eve: check when it’s flying over, hustle the kids outside, and with a touch of awe in your voice point to the iss as iut steaks overhead and tell them “Kids! Look! It’s Santa! He’s coming!”
[I presume you’re familiar with Chris Hadfield’s version of Space Oddity?
Gotta love those Canadian astronauts. (-: ]
I did this to a Introduction to Computing class I taught at the New York Institute of Technology, circa 1993.
More or less the same answers.
Well, he was being very confusing by wearing a blue outfit, so what Gene Rodenberry series even is that? He’s not red, or he’d have been eaten, not psychic and black eyed…go on, just ask about corruption on the ISS. When you occult Uranus, how much d’ye charge? You explore everything at speed, do you take some kind of zinc supplement then? If your flight suit shows that much wear, how bad must those others involved in in-flight collisions have it? Morning angels, keep 'em on the run? You visit yesterday so often, do you manage a fee getting things done…yesterday?
If I were to spend time in the Space Station, I would be very happy to return to Earth without having crossed paths with a rock.
This was a small software company with a few wise-ass PHDs for collegues
No, but science literacy, while seemingly better in the UK, isn’t, ah…stellar.
Either way though, I’m not sure I’d blame the interviewer so much as the poor state of science education in the West. Most people really probably aren’t taught even the very basics of astronomy and physics.
Major Peake did a gracious job of shifting his answer in a way that drew attention away from her error, which was kind of cool.
You say, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question” for two reasons. If a person has a legitimately stupid question, it means they’re missing information that – realistically - they probably need. Or at least, it would be good for them to have.
But you also say there’s no such things as a stupid question, because you want people to ask questions. It’s good to inform people. And most people tend to equate an information gap as “being stupid”. So, a person may not want to ask a stupid question (“How many states are there?”), but the whole point of an information gap is that the person doesn’t necessarily know the difference between a smart question and a stupid question.
I think “when it comes to spacetime” may be redundant. I’d imagine they also are generally innumerate and have difficulty with orders of magnitude no matter the field: astronomical, economical, computational, whatever.
Can they accurately describe the difference between a million and a billion? I’ve met plenty of people who can’t, and aren’t entirely sure which is bigger, and I mean people with two and four year college degrees. Keep this in mind the next time you see people discussing the cost of some proposed government policy change, before you point out the relative size of (for example) the defense and foreign aid budgets. They may literally not know how to evaluate the information properly.
Did you ever moon the earth?
should have gotten the picture of the century of ‘flat earth’
Can my 10 year-old son come and live at your house for a while?
Not redundant, but perhaps unduly specific. (Is there an “I am a pedant” emoji?)
It would be a good test as to whether or not people should have the vote.
