Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Curious Droid" channel.

  1.  @anthonyowen1556  Worth pointing out that the Soviets had their own home-grown smarts. They managed quite fine without von Braun.
    12
  2. You would know, I suppose...
    11
  3. I wonder if Trump believes the Moon landings were real?
    7
  4. The Bernoulli effect doesn’t give much lift. Deflecting off the lower surfaces of the wings would give more lift--simple conservation of momentum, really.
    6
  5. Bell Labs was a groundbreaking place ... as long as it was funded by a Government-controlled monopoly. After that monopoly was broken up (during the Reagan era), it lost most of its brilliance.
    5
  6. The moon-landing deniers never explain how the Russians were made to go along with the “hoax”. Remember there was this whole big “Cold War” thing going on at the time? Cuban missile crisis, people being shot trying to cross the Berlin Wall, all that kind of thing?
    5
  7. +1 for a throttle you can turn on and off. Firecrackers are something you light and then stand back. Not climb on top of...
    5
  8. They never understood the Internet, though. VoIP was a complete mystery to them.
    4
  9. Here: https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-greatest-newspaper-correction-ever-written-49-year-1491590487 -- the editorial was from 1920, basically saying Robert Goddard was an idiot. The retraction was published 49 years later -- the day after Apollo 11 landed on the Moon.
    3
  10. A “nautical mile” is no longer defined in terms of latitude/longitude angles, since that was never very accurate. Since about 1976, it has been defined as exactly 1852 metres. See--everything comes back to SI units!
    3
  11. Fun fact: all the astronauts who went to the moon (and crossed the Van Allen belts) developed cataracts.
    3
  12. Some countries do this already.
    2
  13. If the US military has all these amazing sci-fi technologies at its disposal, why does it keep getting its arse whipped, in places like Vietnam, Somalia and now Syria?
    2
  14.  @Procrastinater  What a load of nonsense.
    2
  15. 12:20 In space, the stars cannot tell you where you are, only which way you are facing. Doppler radar is important, and also measuring the apparent sizes of the planets, and possibly also the Sun.
    2
  16. Ah, but then, he said “atomsphere”, not “atmosphere”. ;)
    2
  17. 6:28 Do you think cross-Channel duty-free might come back after Brexit? #AlwaysLookOnTheBrightSide
    2
  18. Good explanation of the “1202 alarm” and “1201 alarm” that happened during the Apollo 11 moon landing here: https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/07/no-a-checklist-error-did-not-almost-derail-the-first-moon-landing/
    1
  19. A bit earlier than that, they published an (in)famous editorial arguing that rockets would never work in space, because there was “nothing to push against”. They didn’t retract it until much later.
    1
  20. The LVDC was made of hard-wired logic gates, so it wasn’t a programmable computer as such. And it worked in conjunction with an analog computer, which handled the low-level stuff (like adjusting the rocket nozzle gimbals) and could respond much faster.
    1
  21. No doubt someone said something similar to the folks on the Mayflower ...
    1
  22. Were there issues with maneouvrability? Namely, how to turn without the wings hitting the water?
    1
  23. 12:42 Tracking the positions of stars can only give you your orientation, not your position within the Solar System.
    1
  24. 13:18 Actually I think the sunlight itself exerts more pressure than the solar wind does.
    1
  25. 10:26 “Upward”? You mean “northward”?
    1
  26. First yakaboo!
    1
  27. Lateral thinking FTW!
    1
  28. Why not electromagnetism? Some years ago, I saw an item on TV showing a frog levitating in the presence of a very strong magnetic field. This field would have been even stronger than the one in an NMR machine, and was sufficient to magnetize the frog. Being made of predominantly diamagnetic materials, it was then repelled by the surface below and floated in the air (inside a bell jar). The animal seemed to suffer no ill effects afterwards. But I never heard of any subsequent developments of this experiment.
    1
  29. 2:29 2.54² = 6.4516 cm²
    1
  30. Goddard was not really the cooperative type. He wanted to own all the intellectual property. So he was never more than a little side show in the whole development of space technology.
    1
  31. You are winning so much, your Republican Party has taken control of the Government and shut it down. Are you sick of winning yet?
    1
  32.  @rogerdodger8415  Funny how you blame the Democrats for getting in the way of Trump’s promises. It’s like he didn’t win the election after all.
    1
  33.  @rogerdodger8415  The good old Honda NSX runs rings around your Corvette, at a fraction of the price.
    1
  34.  @rogerdodger8415  Interesting you admit that the Honda has the more efficient power train. It was the first Japanese supercar, underrated simply because the Japanese don’t have a reputation for making supercars. Americans have no idea about “supercars”. They think only in terms of large, gas-guzzling engines that are only good with straight-line performance.
    1
  35. They were both racing to the patent office on the same day. Somehow, Gray’s application got held up, while Bell’s got through. Actually, neither one is officially recognized as the inventor of the telephone.
    1
  36. Have you heard of this idea of “airship to orbit”, where you use engines like ion drives, which have low thrust but can keep firing for days or weeks on end, to get into orbit from high altitude? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/02/space_airships/
    1
  37.  nasty buzzard  I haven’t. What’s yours?
    1
  38. 2:34 Velocity, not speed. I.e. speed + direction.
    1
  39.  @christopherbrooks1402  Did they scream like turboprop aircraft?
    1
  40. 10:19 This ! Their tendency to believe in multiple conspiracies is their weak spot. Simply point out the logical contradictions between the conspiracies, and watch them fumble about and try to rationalize all these. 8:48 Pushing lots of proofs and evidence in their faces is certainly not the way. But science isn’t about that anyway: it’s about asking the questions that led to the uncovering of those proofs and evidence. So ask them a few probing questions about these “conspiracies”, to make them think a bit more critically about them. Bringing up contradictions between their different beliefs is particularly helpful (see above).
    1