But if you didn't get them for whatever reason, you could put your ears to the holes in the armrest to hear! Made it hard to see the screen, but if you alternated, you could get most of the gist of the show.

For some reason, what really stands out in my mind is the clicky scroll wheel to change the channels.

Others have pointed out the size of the project and its likely unintended effects, but just to round it out, I'll add that engineering is about accomplishing a given goal as efficiently as possible.

So, let's say you want to move a mountain in order to get more water to a city. Let's look at a few options:

• move the mountain
• move the city
• build an aqueduct
• find another way to get water, like desalination

Even the "hard" options in that list, like desalination or moving the city, are significantly easier than moving the mountain. Throw in the climate effects, and there you go.

It's not just that it's unfeasible, though it certainly is. It's also not needed.

The parallax isn't from the solar system's rotation around the galaxy, it's from Earth's rotation around the sun.

The spoken form has vowels. The written form has them in the form of dots and lines that go around the letters (which represent consonant sounds, not whole words), but they're usually omitted other than in kids books.

For example, the word for friend is "חָבֵר" (chaver), but you'd usually see it as "חבר". It's written right to left, so if you look at the first letter, the ח is the "ch" sound and the Tetris-piece-looking thing below it is the "a". These are called "dots".

In practice, you get used to it pretty easily as a reader. Instead of "chaver", it's "chvr", but reading it still becomes second nature.

Consider that English only has 5-6 written vowels (depending on if you count "y"), but 14-15 different vowel sounds in American English. So, how do you know if an "o" is the sound in "owl" or the one in "owe" or the one in "on"? You just learn it when you learn to read. Same thing with Hebrew vowels.

There are some letters that seem vowel-y (like א, which is roughly like an "ah" sound), for historical reasons. What they actually are are consonants whose pronunciation is either subtle or silent (depending on the letter, and one's accent/pronunciation) and which are almost always associated with a particular vowel sound.

It's just like learning any other language. It's got grammar, vocabulary, and a writing system. What kind of answer are you looking for?

The one nit I have is with the very end. It implies that the time dilation at the ISS isn't measurable, but we do have precise-enough clocks to measure it, and have done so.

But overall, it's really impressive!

Thanks! Great explanation.

He's adorable! I'm so glad you were reunited.

How certain are we of that? Just from reading wikipedia, it looks like some models of dark energy are compatible with what you said (e.g. a cosmological constant), but other models seem to be more "normal" kinds of energy (like quintessence).

Would it be possible to harness dark energy to leave a black hole?

My understanding is that dark energy is the current "fill-in" to explain why the universe is expanding. Farthest away from us, that expansion is faster even than the speed of light, due to the cumulative effect. So, if we stipulate (a) that dark energy is indeed the cause for this expansion, and (b) that we can manipulate it to expand pockets of the universe at will, then would we be able to use that to essentially expand our way out of a black hole? I'm imagining a craft that could expand space behind it (closer to the singularity) and essentially ride that expansion to get out of the event horizon, without ever having to travel faster than light in its local patch of space.

I realize that "could we do this thing predicated on unknown physics" is a bit of an impossible answer; so I guess what I'm really interested in is whether the math of current theories would allow for such a thing, assuming the two stipulations above.

Thanks!

How does the sender figure out the receiver's top efficient speed? Is there some sort of "hey slow down" or "go faster if able" code (formal or informal)?