Absolutely fascinating video about chains in space, but I'm grateful to A. Adair B. A. :rebelverified: (npub1ptm…jjuj) for reminding me about Poe's Law, originally about Creationists:
> Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article.
During the Bush II years, that got generalized to "you cannot parody the Republican Party without sounding like the Republican Party" and now "the reason we must all put /s at the end of our snarky comments, no matter how obvious we think they may be."
The thing is, by indicating humour, you end up killing the joke. Yes, it's true, satire is dead.
Alright, I've long been stuck on the idea that people on spacecraft won't be sucked (or more accurately, blown) out of an airlock nearly as dramatically as Hollywood would make us believe.
(For the curious, from the time the hatch opens? You'll probably die within 30 seconds, but with most airlocks that humans design, it might be a few weeks before your body makes its way out the hatch...)
Anyways, I think I might have a new topic to mull over when it comes to crewed spaceflight: Chains.
In the short term, a link in a chain in motion will continue to follow the path that previous links had traveled.
Links in a chain have very little friction between them, so where a rope will tend to stick out straight, chains will instead orient themselves along gravity gradients.
And, evidently the behavior of chains in null G are absolutely hell for people to predict. (This might be an interesting point in a story.) Our intuition when it comes to removing energy from a chain is to stretch it out... but elastic potential energy (even from a metal chain) will quickly prove that intuition wrong.
Whelp, the ISS has helped to do experiments with chains in null G, thanks to some random Youtuber (Poe's Law warning: I'm fully aware that Steve Mould is more widely known that the astronauts he talks about), the planning done by my favorite astronaut of this era, Samantha Cristoforetti who commanded the ISS for expedition 42, and the playfulness and curiosity of astronaut Don Pettit. And, well... here's the highlights:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtZaP8VMv0c
I'm going to CC Winchell Chung ⚛🚀 (npub19tt…6nnr) , since he's a hoopy frood who knows where his towel is.