There is lens-cleaning paper (I used to use this in photgraphy), and facial tissue-grade paper.
The latter does tend to scratch over time, if perhaps only slighly, but the damage can accumulate.
I'm on team soft-cotton, with a very-well-worn bandana serving as my usual cleaning material, plastic lenses, no scratches.
Another sin, for glasses, is laying them lens-down, or face-up, on surfaces when not in use. Lens-down of course grinds the lens into whatever is on the surface. Face-up, as you'd wear them, is vulnerable to flipping over (most glasses are top-heavy), so upside down is preferable. Or folded, with the earpieces down and lenses up. In a case is of course preferable to either.
Leaving glasses randomly on chairs, sofas, beds, etc., is also an invitation to catastrophe.
I've lived with people doing many of the above, and their glasses were perpetually scratched and damaged. Given the high cost of a new pair for many of them, this was ... curious.
And: payphones were ubiquitous. Car parks, bus stops, restaurants, bars, other businesses, random street corners, airports, bus depots, train stations. Probably several at a given high school at different locations. So long as you had loose change they were a reliable option. These started to disappear in the late 1990s, though support continued generally through the late aughts, and in certain locales (e.g., NYC) through the late 2010s.
There's some interesting technological anthropology in The Paper Chase, a film set at Harvard Law School in the early 1970s (released 1973), there is a payphone on the dorm floor, and it is the only phone available. That and a number of other elements date the film in ways that other set-dressing (costumes, architecture, cars) don't convey as emphatically.
And based on the earlier concept by Walter Lippmann, first expressed in his 1922 book Public Opinion, which arguably birthed 20th century putatively impartial professional journalism.
That's the awesome thing about Neal Stephenson being a timelord: He could train his own LLM on his own output and then go back in time and write LLM-generated fiction before it was cool.
Archive Today presently does not, and I'm getting hung up on Captcha tests trying to submit a bug report. Present broken archive: <https://archive.is/Nv9Ik>. If someone else could submit a "Bad Grab" report I'd appreciate it.
Edit: Re-reading the archived error page: ~cks specifically blocks Archive.Today, which is unfortunate.
(In general, check popular archive tools, such as the Internet Archive (above) or Archive Today, and post a working link rather than griping about individual site access issues.)
true, but was mostly picking up on the "unfortunate" part. given archive.todays behavior, i don't think it's unfortunate. they deserve to be blocked, even if this block here didn't happen for those reasons.
jojobas and NASA's statements aren't contradictory.
NASA states: "the fragmentation of the fireball unleashes large amounts of energy, which also generates a pressure wave that can produce a very loud boom, even shaking houses."
Fragmentation of a fireball, whilst not explosive itself (the particles needn't diverge at a supersonic relative velocity) are nonetheless part of a supersonic / hypersonic particle field relative to the atmosphere they are passing through. Expanding the diameter of that particle field will increase the size of the resultant shockwave, whether the particle separation itself is "explosive" or not.
The "explosion" then is of the deceleration (aerobraking) shockwave, not the bolide separation. But the bolide separation increases the intensity of the shockwave, with more (and lighter) particles interacting with the atmosphere over a shorter distance than an intact, small-diameter bolide would.
Some of this depends on what definition of "explosion" one chooses, or whether people are intending an explosion specifically, or an explosive sound (sonic boom). That's confounded by bolide separation, the bright light emitted on entry, and sonic effects, all of which are semantically associated with other explosive events. Language is a consensus phenomenon.
I'd tend to call the event an explosion, though not in the expanding particle field sense.
Your statement is not supported by, and is somewhat at odds with, physics. As described in this source, observed terminal brightening/"burst" of a bolide is tied to the body's material behavior (fragmentation, rapid lateral expansion, ablation), and not to a free-standing "deceleration shockwave" that exists independently of the body breaking up.
Some meteors really explode, because water and other volatile substances contained in them transform from solids into high temperature gases that expand quickly and cause the explosion of the body.
This is the same like how many kinds of water containing things, e.g. raw meat, eggs, fruits, can explode in a microwave oven if the microwave power is too high.
The meteor bodies belong to several classes of chemical compositions. Some of them contain very little volatiles, and they are made either of iron alloy or of silicate rocks or of a mixture of iron alloy and silicate rocks. These do not explode, at most they fragment into many smaller bodies.
Other classes contain great amounts of volatiles, e.g. water, organic compounds and sulfur compounds, and they frequently explode, depending on their size, shape and trajectory, i.e. if there is enough time for the interior to be heated to high temperatures, causing the phase change of the volatiles to gases.
I didn't state that the shockwave is independent of whether or not the body breaks up, I wrote, emphasised, "Expanding the diameter of that particle field will increase the size of the resultant shockwave, whether the particle separation itself is "explosive" or not."
Which your article (partially read, sorry, incredibly shitty reader) largely substantiates, largely in the itemised list in section 2.2. Pancaking of a bolide through fragmentation increases frontal area, has multiple points of mass interacting with the atmosphere over a larger area and with less mass at each point, and the (undiscussed) light-emission mechanism which itself largely derives from compressive heating and ionisation of the atmosphere (rather than friction against the atmosphere or heating of bolide particles themselves). Increasing the number, and surface areas, of particles increases the region and intensity of this effect.
As your source discusses, most fragmentation is a result of mechanical rather than thermal forcing of the bolide.
Extreme agers are rare enough that they're highly unlikely to show up in median statistics. If there are people living exceptionally long, they're still a small proportion. You might get some mileage from percentile analysis (95%ile, 99%ile), and there may be robust research methodology along those lines (I'm not tapped into that).
Which actually does leverage your concept somewhat (increase the sample size to include more members, and reduce extreme outliers). There is also plenty of analysis which does benefit by median (vs. mean or maximum) analysis, or by looking closely at observed distributions and outlier characteristics.
The latter does tend to scratch over time, if perhaps only slighly, but the damage can accumulate.
I'm on team soft-cotton, with a very-well-worn bandana serving as my usual cleaning material, plastic lenses, no scratches.
Another sin, for glasses, is laying them lens-down, or face-up, on surfaces when not in use. Lens-down of course grinds the lens into whatever is on the surface. Face-up, as you'd wear them, is vulnerable to flipping over (most glasses are top-heavy), so upside down is preferable. Or folded, with the earpieces down and lenses up. In a case is of course preferable to either.
Leaving glasses randomly on chairs, sofas, beds, etc., is also an invitation to catastrophe.
I've lived with people doing many of the above, and their glasses were perpetually scratched and damaged. Given the high cost of a new pair for many of them, this was ... curious.
reply