If you're time starved and trying to work out like this, you're doing it wrong. There are much more time efficient ways to get some exercise.
Rather than driving 20 minutes each way to the gym, just put on some shoes and run/walk from your front door. You've saved 40 minutes and a bunch of money. Plus, if your goal is to lose weight, you've a far more effective workout.
Walk/run/bike to work. I've completed 2 Ironman triathlons and 75% of my training was done on my commute (my shortest route to work is 8 miles but I can take different routes and make it as long as I want) with hardly any impact (other than exhaustion) on my personal or professional life.
I don't know if it's true, but I often think the only real solution for weight loss is eating less, and that exercise is more of a way to improve general fitness rather than losing weight.
A caloric deficit is the only way to lose weight. You can burn off the calories that you eat, if you have the time and the energy; but the most efficient way is not to eat those calories in the first place and then exercise to improve your strength, cardio-vascualar stamina and flexibility.
You're also not mentioning the other half of the equation: calorie input. If someone eats the same amount of food, and walks more, then they're burning more than before when they were just sitting on the couch. Of course what often happens that the body starts wanting more energy for the new activity level, so many people end up eating more--no net change.
It should also be noted that there's more to exercise than just weight loss.
Apologies in advance for the (hopefully not) stupid questions from a layperson...
How constant is the L2 point for the relay satellite's orbit? If I understand correctly, this is the "balance" point between the earth and sun's gravity. Does the moon's gravity affect this? If so the L2 point will shift as the moon moves towards and away from this point?
As the moon orbits the earth, presumably the relay satellite would stay put and not follow the moon in its orbit. This would mean that communication from the lander and rover to the satellite is only possible when the moon is in a particular position (between the earth and the sun), correct?
The balance is between Moon and Earth gravity. However it is more subtle than that at L2 as both gravitational forces are in the same direction so they don't apparently cancel. The way to see it is to realize that L2 is relatively stationary to the Moon but not the Earth. As the L2 point is farther away than the Moon but has the same angular velocity as the Moon, Earth gravity alone is not able to keep any object at the L2 in synchrony with the Moon. One may want to recall that Earth gravity is just right for the Moon in its orbit so any satellite further away will have a longer orbital period than the Moon. The Moon gravity therefore supplies the additional force needed to keep an object at L2 orbiting the Earth in synchrony with the Moon. This balance (Earth gravity + Moon gravity = centrifugal force) determines the location of L2.
Lagrange points are found near any couple of large bodies. They are points where a smaller object will maintain its position relative to the large orbiting bodies.
The Chinese relay satellite is orbiting the L2 point of the Earth-Moon system. That is beyond the Moon on a line which goes from Earth to Moon. Hence, this L2 point orbits the Earth like the Moon does, and the whole system orbits the Sun as well.
Now if the spacecraft would be exactly at that point, the Moon would be blocking communications between the probe and Earth antennas. So instead, it follows a halo orbit which is quite stable around that point, but goes over the Moon horizon so that there is always a direct line of sight between Earth and the spacecraft.
I just wanted to add that L2 (and L1 and L3) are unstable in that if a satellite is a bit further than the exact point it will tend to get ever further with time and a satellite that's closer will tend to get even closer. But the closer you are to the exact L2 point the smaller these tendencies are and the amount of fuel needed to remain on station is minimal, a satellite will just eventually run out some day and fall out.
The L4 and L5 Lagrange points are the stable ones. Something that finds its way there is going to stick around indefinitely. That's why many planets have asteroids in the L4 and L5 they make with the Sun. These are called Trojan asteroids and the names of the Jupiter-Sun Trojans are taken from the Trojan war.
It's a gravity saddle! From Earth's perspective it's a hill in the r direction but a well in the phi/theta directions. To orbit at a location always visible from Earth it needs to move in the phi/theta directions but moving the the r direction doesn't help, so it doesn't.
The L2 point that the satellite is orbiting is a Lagrange point [1], a place where the gravity (edit: and centrifugal forces) of the Earth and the moon balance. L2 follows the moon as the moon orbits, because the moon is what makes it exist.
It's the L2 point in the earth-moon system, it is different from the earth-sun L2 point. And yes, the satellite follow the moon in its orbit, the point in the L2 point.
Since we're all giving our UFO encounters I'll chip in with mine.
About 25yrs ago as a teenager and utterly obsessed with the supernatural and the unexplained, my family were on a fly drive holiday on the west coast of the US.
One night in a roadside motel in the Nevada desert, I was woken up by a strange, loud, rythmic, droning sound outside. Absolutely convinced that it was a UFO landing and terrified that if I moved or made a noise I'd be abducted, I laid still, sweating with my heart racing for hours until the sun came up.
Similar story here. As a kid I was laying in bed staring at a bright disk floating in the sky at night. Totally sure it was a UFO. Turned out to be a reflection of a street light in the window.
I was around 14 and also obsessed with aliens and the supernatural. I was living out in the boonies on a road that had just started to be developed (one long road with a smaller road splitting off down to a cul-de-sac with a few houses a mile or so off the main road).
I was walking the dog one evening, headed down the main road and turned off to walk down the side road to the cul-de-sac. It was dark and cold but as I turned down the side road, I could see a bright rectangular light floating above the ground down where the side road ended a mile away.
I was pretty freaked out and stood there squinting at it for a while, psyching myself up to go check it out. In the end, I decided that I would never forgive myself if I didn't go witness what was clearly an alien craft hovering over the road on my dark little street.
So, I walked down toward the end of the side road (with the dog to protect me of course) until about halfway down, I got one of those perspective shifts that made me laugh. In the dark (no street lights, only a few houses set a good way back from the road) I could only see the glowing light but as I got closer, I could clearly see that this was a small bus with the light from inside spilling out through the windshield.
It turns out, the local library had started a "Bookmobile" route out to our little country neighborhood so locals could check out books without driving into the city. The bus was so lit up inside and the surrounding area was so dark that from a mile away, all I could see was the bright glowing rectangle of the windshield.
Needless to say I stopped inside the bus and checked out a book or two. Probably some ridiculous fluff from Whitley Strieber or Stephen King ;)
Piggy backing off this thread for my own question.
I've a small webapp to show me my elevation based on my lat/lon. I built it with Google's API as I've used it before and it's what I know. It doesn't get much traffic so it's unlikely to ever cost much once my free credit expires but I'd like to explore other options.
What alternative (preferably free) services are there out there? I need to be able to pass lat/lon and get back the elevation above sea level of that point on earth.
That would depend on what your resolution and accuracy requirements are. Ground level or treetop? If you are willing to DIY there are freely available DEM (Digital Elevation Model) datasets that might work for you. For example ASTER[1] has global 90 meter resolution and 30 meter resolution in the USA. There are smaller, embeddable DEMs with ~1km resolution. Lots of options out there. Grab a coffee and start with an internet search for DEM.
I've been doing some interesting experiments with elevation compression recently that make it realistic to have large swathes of the earth memory-resident. If you're interested you know where to find me!
I can't decide if I think it's real or fake. It's a very good doc and Timothy's footage could absolutely be real but the people interviewed, every single one of them, just come across as fake and very very bad actors.
Whenever the film comes up on Reddit I scan the comments and I've done a tiny bit of googling but it seems I'm in the minority with this opinion which I find strange since I can't fathom the interviewees are even close to genuine.
It's real. "could be real"? hehe. Yeah, Treadwell did his filming of himself, Herzog came along after his death and put together the movie, did the interviews, voiceover etc. He often encourages the bizarre in his docos, doesn't edit it out, often leaves the camera rolling on an interviewee ages longer than anyone else would - I love that. Uses the least appropriate music imaginable (which often works brilliantly) I know what you mean, they seem very, very odd. It's mainly that every other camera person/director tries to make things/people seem relatively normal, not-weird.
I've seen almost all Herzog's docos, all worth seeing, Grizzly Man is my favourite though. The one about the internet, from a couple of years ago, is one of his best also. Try Fata Morgana for weirdness, or the bleak/beautiful Lessons of Darkness, both set in the desert.
I did some work at my previous job building a slot machine game in Phaser 2. I'd never done game dev prior to this but found it really simple to pick up.
From the knowledge I gained in this, I was able to make a simple infinite scrolling game, package it up with cocoon and release it into the iOS and Android stores all within a day from my bed on a Sunday. It wasn't the best game ever but amazing to be able to get something out there so fast (I am a JS dev)
I've not done any game dev since but may use this jam as an excuse to take a stab at Phaser 3
I built a (very simple) game in Phaser a couple of years ago and used cocoon (https://cocoon.io/) to package it up into an Android and iOS app. Basically it packages the HTML/JS/CSS app into a native webview.
Phaser is a great framework. I managed to conceive, write the game from scratch and have it in the app store within a day.
It's no longer on the iOS store as I didn't continue to pay my dev licence, but happy to share the play store link if anyone is interested.
Of course! Though, I just tried to launch it on my phone for the first time in a year or so and it just crashes at the title screen YMMV (OnePlus3 running 8.0.0)
There's a lot of this stuff around! About 10yrs ago, my dad caused a lengthy shutdown of the channel tunnel after a piece of metal (he'd assumed it was a machine gun barrel) he picked up on the Somme battlefield was found in the boot of his car during a random search. It was a live WW1 mortar. They closed the tunnel and detonated it at the terminal.
As farmers work on the fields in northern France they regularly find artifacts from the war and just toss them aside as an annoyance.
Assuming you're talking about the incident in 2005... My wife and I to got stuck at Waterloo station for hours waiting for a train to Paris while the authorities sorted things out... :-)
We were interviewed by a reporter from one of the red tops and they had to re-take our photo several times because we didn't look miserable enough.
Eh, that's the theory. The reality is more as the parent describes - they just get tossed. More often than not they'll dig a pit, drag the heap of ordnance out of the barn, dump it in, pour on petrol, strike a light and leg it. The more enterprising/brave/stupid ones strip, clean, and sell on eBay through German and Dutch middlemen.
The nuts thing is that quite often they're chemical weapons they do this with - but it's not much different to what the military do - but nobody wants a cordon sanitaire around a productive field, so DIY it is.
I spend all my youth in the north of France. I have never heard of the behavior you describe. AFAIK, the rules are rather well applied and children are well informed to avoid accidents.
Children, totally - I lived in Alsace for about six months as a kid, and was repeatedly warned not to touch any weird looking objects in woods, fields, etc., not that it stopped me from ferreting around in old bunkers.
I've never seen it done, but I did meet a farmer with an impressive array of ordnance stacked in his grange, some of which he sold, the rest of which he said he burned in a deep hole. Sure, single data point, but he definitely held the "this is what we do" attitude. This would've been '93.
In the early days after world war 2 - working at the sugar refinery in my town was considered a suicide job.
Many of the sugar beets had some mixend in ammonition with them, so there where days where the washing assembly or the hacking machine would blow up- sometimes killing people.
For privacy's sake I won't link to the story, which is not hard to find since the Channel Tunnel doesn't get closed that often, particularly over bomb scares, and I will delete/edit this post if the poster wants, but wow:
The bomb went undetected as he travelled back to the
UK through the Tunnel but later, as he attempted to
return to France to show the device to a war expert
friend, he was stopped for a routine check.
Apparently a Stokes mortar. To be honest, with enough rust I probably wouldn't have recognised it as that either. But doesn't mean it's wise to transport that in your car.
while WW2 left a lot of munitions around that did not explode as well as some impressive architecture WW1 left its mark on France with Zone Rouge which was considered too costly and too dangerous to clean up. The issue in this case wasn't just explosive ordinance but chemical weapons.
The eastern side where the main soviet attack came from in the battle of Berlin in 45 - there was massive bombardment a lot of which went into the ground and did not detonate.
If you don't know anything about ordinance, it's easy to assume to explosives go inert after 70+ years of lying dormant. "If it hasn't exploded in all this time, why would it go off now?"
> "If it hasn't exploded in all this time, why would it go off now?"
This explains why someone might be (erroneously) confident that it won't spontaneously go off, but even if that was right, saying it hasn't spontaneously gone off doesn't tell you anything about what will happen if you instead activate the mechanism. Why would they conclude it's inert from the fact that it hasn't spontaneously gone off?
Even if their understanding of explosives is wrong, they must still understand that it's an offence to have these munitions?
Statistically, some percentage of the people will get it wrong. Instead of railing against them for being stupid, why not just accept that "people being wrong" is an inevitable natural phenomenon?
Most mechanisms break down and stop working after decades of sitting in a field with no maintenance. The fact that bombs might still work is surprising.
Also, picric acid was a popular filler for WWI shells, and picric acid tends to react with metal casings over to form picric acid salts, which are very shock/friction (and potentially vibration) sensitive.
Also, be careful of first aid kits from that era, as they sometimes used picric acid as an antiseptic on gauze, often in contact with a metal case...
> In the early 20th century, picric acid was stocked in pharmacies as an antiseptic and as a treatment for burns, malaria, herpes, and smallpox. Picric acid-soaked gauze was also commonly stocked in first aid kits from that period as a burn treatment.
On the slightly positive side, picric acid also sublimates, but I'm not sure how long it would take for evaporate from the first aid kit. On the other hand, sublimation also increases the surface area of any metal container for forming metallic picrates.
I'm in the same as you. I've been dumping a few hundred a month into BTC, ETC and LTC for a few months and at the time of writing (BTC is currently hovering around 14k) my investment is worth 3x what I've put in.
While I'd love to see crypto disrupt the current financial system, it's just fun to be a part of the ride. I see this as play money. It's fun to track the price up and down.
It will have to do a repeat of the 2012-today run up for me to make huge money - something I'm not expecting - and unless it does this, I'll not be cashing out. If it happens then awesome, if it crashes tomorrow then I've spent a bit of money for a bit of added excitement in my day.
> While I'd love to see crypto disrupt the current financial system
Late reply. I don't agree. I think a disruption of the financial system will create only trouble. Taking back control from the banks is something else, and stopping split second speculation by algorithms would result in more stability. If you mean that by disruption, I agree of course, but for me this is not a disruption, as it fits in the current system.
Also back in the 90s, a friend of mine - who was interested in reptiles - used a much less sophisticated method to steal books about snakes. He'd drop them out of an open window and go outside and pick them up.
Rather than driving 20 minutes each way to the gym, just put on some shoes and run/walk from your front door. You've saved 40 minutes and a bunch of money. Plus, if your goal is to lose weight, you've a far more effective workout.
Walk/run/bike to work. I've completed 2 Ironman triathlons and 75% of my training was done on my commute (my shortest route to work is 8 miles but I can take different routes and make it as long as I want) with hardly any impact (other than exhaustion) on my personal or professional life.