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Science & Space

The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 68 posts.

2011
43

Can you see the flag on the Moon with a telescope?

The answer is basically "not a chance". No Earthbound telescope can see the flag on the Moon. Why not? For openers, the Earth's atmosphere is never steady enough to allow resolution below about one arc second for most locations. Beyond that, the telescope required to "see" the flag would need to be absolutely huge!…

49

Plutonium is Forever

I have been doing business in Japan for 20 years, consulting for big and small companies, speaking at conferences, writing for Japanese publications, and helping both American and Japanese companies do business with each other. For years I flew to Tokyo once a month, generally in my role as giver of bad news, which I

60

Closed access means people die

Jenny Molloy and I have been representing the Open Knowledge Foundation at the Open Science Summit and we presented the Open Research Reports (ORR) project. The slides we used are at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6280676/orr.pptx . I expect that at some stage we’ll be on the video record (last year’s was very useful and…