Posts by Paul Campbell
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I've flown big rockets for fun for over 20 years - mostly out in the Black Rock desert in Nevada back when I used to live in the US (it's harder here to find places to fly that are both fire-safe and easily recoverable).
We were always limited by the US 100K law that limited flights to 100kft (about 20 miles) under FAA control (above that you need to do a ton of paper work and calculate the chances of falling somewhere unsafe - you have to do the statistical math and calculate what fraction of a person you will likely kill) and I must admit I never flew over 15kft personally (about 5km) as it basically costs too much for an individual of ordinary means - friends have flown to just under 100k and others have launched from balloons at 100k.
Since it's friday here's some video from blackrock some friends made a week or so ago
I wish the Rocket Labs guys well - flying rockets is hard - absolutely everything has to be perfect under conditions you can't really simulate prior to that first flight - it's way too easy to screw up - and doing it publicly is IMHO just asking for Murphy to step in ....
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A problem with "Alternative Medicine" is that over time, as the genuine cures and treatments contained within it (think "willow bark" for example) are adopted and subsumed by the official kind of medicine it slowly becomes more and more dominated by quackery - it wont get better over time, only worse until eventually quackery will all that will be left
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Remember that immigrants anywhere are self selected - they're the bunch of people who managed to get off their arses and move to another country - that's not easy, it takes a bigger world view, money, gumption ....they're often the best and brightest (of where ever they came from compared to where ever they've moved to - doesn't much matter where either of those places are)
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I think you call the British Embassy and explain your quandary - they're not trying to catch you out - it's more a matter of 'sometimes mistakes are made'
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I have to offer this wonder, originally from Boing Boing
My sort of people! -
"Home" is a funny word - for the longest time it referred to where I wasn't - living in the US Dunedin was home, after we moved back Oakland was home for a while, now I think I'm back to Dunedin being home again
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Dunedin is enormous - the city itself is much denser than that (for the longest time South Dunedin was the densest place in NZ - before all the high rises went up) - but we're talking about the area way up to Middlemarch and North through the Silver Peaks
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and look at the Chathams now too - I hope it's the data that's late
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you know I think the data on the tsunami warning map is running an hour or so later than real time ....
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"How you can profit from the new beach front real-state boom after the tsunamis ..."
oh wait, that's the SST