Starship Asterisk*

http://xkcd.com/1633/ wrote:

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xkcd: Possible Undiscovered Planets
Randall Munroe

• What if I tried to re-enter the atmosphere in my car? (a 2000 VW Jetta TDI).
  Would it do more environmental damage than it is already apparently doing? — Casey Berg

• What if you built a siphon from the oceans on Europa to Earth? Would it flow once it's set up?
  (We have an idea for selling bottled Europa water.) — A group of Google Search SREs

• How long would it take for a single person to fill up an entire swimming pool with their own saliva? — Mary Griffin, 9th grade

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spittoon wrote:
<<The United States Senate has spittoons spread across the Senate Chamber as they are considered a Senate tradition. Similarly, each Justice on the United States Supreme Court has a spittoon next to his or her seat in the courtroom. However, the spittoons function merely as wastebaskets; the last time the spittoon was used for its customary purpose was in the early 20th century.>>

• The Taming of the Shrew: III, i

• Can you use a magnifying glass and moonlight to light a fire? — Rogier Spoor

• I understand that the New Horizons craft used gravity assist from Jupiter
  to increase its speed on the way to Pluto. I also understand that by doing
  this, Jupiter slowed down very slightly. How many flyby runs would it take
  to stop Jupiter completely? — Dillon

• What would happen if one tried to funnel Niagara Falls through a straw? — David Gwizdala

• What percentage of the Sun's heat (per day) does the population of Earth
  eat in calories per year? What changes could be made to our diets for the
  amount of calories to equal the energy of the Sun? — James Mitchell

• My boyfriend recently took a flight on a plane with wifi, and while he was up there,
  wistfully asked if I could send him a pizza. I jokingly sent him a photo of a parrot
  holding a pizza slice in its beak. Obviously, my boyfriend had to go without pizza
  until he landed at JFK. But this raised the question: could a bird deliver a standard
  20" New York-style cheese pizza in a box? And if so, what kind of bird would it take? — Tina Nguyen

• Since rainbows are caused by the refraction of the sunlight by tiny droplets of rainwater,
  what would rainbow look like on Earth if we had two suns like Tatooine? — Raga

• How many fireflies would it take to match the brightness of the Sun? — Luke Doty

• Since Death Valley is below sea level could we dig a hole to the ocean and fill it up with water? — Nick Traeden

• Earth’s atmosphere is really thin compared to the radius of the Earth.
  How big a hole do I need to dig before people suffocate? — Sam Burke

• What if the entire continental US was on a decreasing slope from West to East.
  How steep would the slope have to be to sustain the momentum needed to ride
  a bicycle the entire distance without pedaling? — Brandon Rooks

• Would a toaster still work in a freezer? —
  • My Brother, My Brother and Me, Episode 343,
    discussing a Yahoo Answers question

bystander wrote:
Toaster vs. Freezer

bystander wrote:Toaster vs. Freezer

• Would a toaster still work in a freezer? —
  • My Brother, My Brother and Me, Episode 343,
    discussing a Yahoo Answers question

• I used to work on a fisheries crew where we would use an electro-fisher backpack to momentarily stun small fish (30 - 100 mm length) so we could scoop them up with nets to identify and measure them. The larger fish tended to be stunned for slightly longer because of their larger surface area but I don't imagine this relationship would be maintained for very large animals. Could you electrofish for a blue whale? At what voltage would you have have to set the e-fisher? — Madeline Cooper

bystander wrote:Electrofishing for Whales

• I used to work on a fisheries crew where we would use an electro-fisher backpack to momentarily stun small fish (30 - 100 mm length) so we could scoop them up with nets to identify and measure them. The larger fish tended to be stunned for slightly longer because of their larger surface area but I don't imagine this relationship would be maintained for very large animals. Could you electrofish for a blue whale? At what voltage would you have have to set the e-fisher? — Madeline Cooper

BDanielMayfield wrote:
But all ol Chaptain Nemo did was tic the squid off. They still had to surface and fight it off with whaling harpoons.

• Nemo should have put all that electrical current into lights:
  http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php? ... 16#p212516