Trains must have stopped derailing, all we hear about now is planes. /s

(Proving the point about the news and its tendency to focus on the currently popular issue)

The actual website, since the article fails to link to it: https://visdeurbel.nl/en/the-fish-doorbell/

I’ll bet you one upvote, and I’ll pay it right now!

OTA update: https://www.local10.com/business/2023/12/13/tesla-recalls-over-2-million-vehicles-to-fix-defective-system-that-monitors-drivers-using-autopilot/

Exactly. Or, using the adaptive cruise control and lane keeping that many cars have these days. (Regular) Autopilot is becoming less of a unique feature of Teslas.

I would like to believe (but lack data to point to to support it) that ADAS is making roads safer overall. There are cases that aren’t covered yet, and driver complacency is a problem for those, but so is complacency in a driver’s belief that they can stare at a phone in their lap but not drift out of their lane and cause an accident, which is something ADAS will protect against.

Seeing an annular eclipse is an excellent application of orbital mechanics! Enjoy!

Drop a ball. It goes fastest just before and after it hits the ground, and slows down until it gets back to near the height you dropped it from

The probe is the ball, and slingshotting around the sun is like bouncing off the ground. The potential energy (height of ball/distance from sun) gets converted to and from kinetic energy (speed).

They’ve since corrected it:

Correction: A previous version of this post incorrectly stated that the max apogee of the flight was 49.7 miles. In fact, the VSS Unity reached a max altitude of 55 miles.