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Prince Harry’s Invictus Games, Brought To You By Arms Dealers, Figuratively And Literally

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It’s one thing to celebrate the human spirit in the face of great adversity. It’s another thing altogether to let the weapons manufacturers who helped create the adversity sponsor the celebrations. Nick Deane explains.

The Invictus Games will be familiar to all who watch the ABC, their promoter and sponsor. The Games will be taking place in Sydney in October, the participants being injured service personnel from 18 countries.

It is highly inspiring to see the human spirit triumph over mutilations of the human body. Who can fail but be impressed by the fortitude of the participating athletes? As the Story of the Games tells us, they have faced life-changing injuries but have somehow found the motivation not to let those injuries define them.

From what we can see, they appear to be in comparatively good health both mentally and physically, despite the terrible wounds they have suffered. This is wonderful. And it is entirely fitting that sport plays a positive role in their rehabilitation.

Admirable also is the skill and dedication of those who brought them back to comparative health and the ability to rejoin society – the surgeons and nurses, the technicians who create the equipment and prostheses, and the carers and family members who keep them in their current state of well-being. There is clearly a whole team of people behind each, individual participant.

This part of the story is displayed for the general public in a brilliant light. Under it, we see the heroism of the individuals who have had to face extraordinary misfortune and feel pride in their accomplishments. We are, however, discouraged from exploring the shadows this light casts, where lie aspects that would otherwise complete the picture.

Of the wounded, we only see those who have, to some extent, prevailed over their disabling wounds. Others, out of the bright light, couldn’t find the necessary motivation, or are so damaged that seeing them would horrify us.

Are they out of sight, so as to be out of our minds? Besides, there are probably some who are literally out of their own minds, suffering Post Traumatic Stress. We dwell, almost exclusively, on the heroes. An obsession with success takes our eyes away from those who can’t or won’t ‘recover’.

There is a whiff of triumphalism in this (it is in the name of the games). Their spirit may be unconquered, but they have, without exception, been severely beaten. Giving them a special name does not alter that.

All the participants have encountered life-changing trauma that they must endure as long as they live. Telling them they are admirable because they have suffered ‘in the service of their country’ is inadequate compensation – even with the promise of life-long medical and financial support.

Those words -’in the service of their country’ – have a hollow resonance. All the Invictus participants are from recent wars. In Australia’s case, we have joined these wars out of choice, not necessity. In an objective assessment of them, no service personnel can legitimately claim to have been wounded in the defence of Australia. The only time the ADF has defended Australia was during the New Guinea campaign of WW2.

Also in the shadows, but most noteworthy, is the fact that among the supporters of the Games are major armaments manufacturers – Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Leidos and Saab. There is something deeply unsettling about this.

On the one hand these companies and their shareholders grow rich through creating, selling, researching and constantly ‘improving’ weaponry and weapons systems. But it is weaponry that has produced the horrific injuries sustained by the Games’ participants.

It cuts no ice to say “Our injuries were caused by their weapons.”

The explosives in IEDs quite possibly have their origin in these multi-national companies. Those who engage in warfare are not choosy about where their weapons originate. Likewise, those who sell them are happy just so long as their clients pay up.

Weapons and explosives made by our side can easily end up injuring our personnel, and probably have. We are disturbed by the marketers of damaging products like tobacco sponsoring sporting events. What could be more damaging than weapons that are sold on the promise of their ‘lethality’?

How armaments manufacturers can reconcile their core business with supporting the Invictus Games is, at best, problematical. At worst, it is utterly cynical. It may even be a touch ghoulish. It is beyond possible that their motivation is to absolve themselves of guilt. The organisers might ask themselves why they allowed such an arrangement.

Consideration of the trade in weapons raises another, dark aspect. What of the injured on their side? What of the terrible injuries inflicted on our ‘enemies’ (enemies, who, it must be said, were never even capable of threatening Australia). Injuries like those that our people bear are, no doubt, being born by others elsewhere – in countries less affluent than Australia, with fewer resources and less sophisticated medical treatments. They may be living lives of torment and utter desolation. Will they be holding Invictus Games? ‘Affluence triumphs’ might be the hidden message.

By its emphasis on triumph over adversity through ‘the fighting spirit of our wounded servicemen and women’, Invictus provides one more example of the culture of war and the warrior that runs so deep within Australian society.

Like ANZAC Day and Remembrance Day, the Games fit neatly into the myth of the glory and value of military service. However, the time when wars were fought by heroic warriors are long past, overtaken by the march of military technology.

By far the majority of the victims of today’s wars are innocent, non-combatant civilians. It is high time they were recognised, alongside the military ones. Focussing exclusively on military personnel ignores the single, greatest impact of modern warfare.

Rather than let the games re-assure us, the battered people taking part should remind us that joining unnecessary wars comes at a terrible cost. No matter how ‘complete’ their ‘recovery’, these athletes’ lives have been changed forever – and for questionable reasons.

It is paradoxical that one can support the games, admire the inner strength of those taking part and regret the fact that they are necessary. One can be glad that the Games are taking place, appreciate the positive role they play and enjoy the spectacle, whilst at the same time experiencing anger at some of the sponsors and at the very fact that the games are needed at, courtesy of the ‘culture of war’ we continue to nurture.

The post Prince Harry’s Invictus Games, Brought To You By Arms Dealers, Figuratively And Literally appeared first on New Matilda.

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jordanbrock
2220 days ago
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“Our injuries were caused by their weapons.”
Perth, Western Australia
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Self-doxxing

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Thought experiment: is it possible to write a paragraph about your life so filled with minor but important facts that someone could figure out how to answer every challenge question possible and retrieve your password from almost any system on earth? Screenshot 2018-10-10 16.18.55.png

(to be clear, nothing above is true)



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jordanbrock
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Lunations

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Our Moon's appearance changes nightly.  Our Moon's appearance changes nightly.


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jordanbrock
2252 days ago
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Fantastic graphics. Would like to see the Southern Hemisphere version.
Perth, Western Australia
darthcurt
2251 days ago
Turn your monitor upside down. :)
jordanbrock
2251 days ago
ʍou puɐʇspuɐɥ ɐ ƃuᴉop
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jordanbrock
2253 days ago
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Perth, Western Australia
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2257 days ago
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ScottInPDX
2258 days ago
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I'm incorporating this for my captchas from now on.
Portland, Oregon, USA, Earth

Unfollowing Everybody

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Unfollowing Everybody

At this point, there's nothing novel about noticing that social media is often toxic and stressful. But even aside from those concerns, our social networks are not things we generally think of as requiring maintenance or upkeep, even though we routinely do regular updates on all the other aspects of our digital lives.

Keeping in mind that spirit of doing necessary maintenance, I recently did something I'd thought about doing for years: I unfollowed everyone on Twitter. Now, these kinds of decisions are oddly fraught; a lot of people see their following relationships on social media as a form of status, not merely an indication of where information is flowing between people. But I decided to assume that the people I'm connected to know that me unfollowing everyone isn't personal, but really just a response to the overwhelming noise of having more than 5000 accounts sharing info with me on a single network.


How I did it

Okay, this part is gonna get slightly geeky, if you're not a coder, but I thought I'd explain the process in case anyone wants to repeat it.

Years ago, Twitter used to have a command-line interface for performing bulk or automated actions on an account. They abandoned it after a while, so Erik Berlin created a new command-line tool for power users of Twitter, simply called "t". It's written in Ruby (a language I basically can read but not really write) so it's easy enough to get running if you follow the few simple setup steps.

As Erik mentions in that documentation, you'll then need to set up a new Twitter app on your account, and get the credentials that will let the t tool perform actions on your Twitter account. (Note: I got some errors while updating and authenticating; making these edits to one of the ruby libraries that t depends on fixed the issue immediately.)

The Plan

At that point, I wanted to follow a few simple steps. These took a little longer for me because I was following over 5,000 people on Twitter, but if you're following a more reasonable number, none of these steps should take more than a few minutes to complete. This was my plan:

  1. Copy all the people I was following to a Twitter list, so I could still access them in my Twitter apps on all my devices, and I could still see my old timeline at any point if I wanted to.
  2. Archive all of the people I was following into a spreadsheet, so I could sort through them and filter for geography or how many followers they have or whether they were verified or not — basically any criteria that might be interesting when deciding who to follow (or not follow).
  3. Actually unfollow everybody and start over.

As it turns out, each of these steps is pretty easy.

Copying all your followers to a List

If you want to back up all of your followers, you only need to make a list and then populate it. You can make lists in most regular Twitter apps, but to do it at the command line it's simple: type in t list create following-`date "+%Y-%m-%d"` to make a list named after the current date, so you can easily remember this was a list of who you were following as of today. You can pretty easily understand the t syntax here — commands like list create are pretty self-explanatory.

Next, we have a slightly more elaborate command to copy all of your followers to the new list; you'll dump out a list of everyone you follow, and then pipe that into another t command to add them to your new list. It works like so: t followings | xargs t list add following-`date "+%Y-%m-%d"`. (If you're like me, you'll be doing all this stuff around midnight, and the date will change in the middle of it, and you should just type in the current date instead of using date variables.)

That's it! Now you've got a list of all your followers, and if you browse that list in your Twitter client app, you should see the exact same thing as your regular timeline. Do note, though, that Twitter lists don't function well with more than a few thousand followers. It took hours for all 5,000+ of my followers to show up on the list, and in the interim the counts of how many people belonged to the list were often incorrect.

Archiving your followers into a spreadsheet

This one is just a fun thing to do in general, if you like to slice and dice data about your social network. t supports exporting a pretty broad set of data about your followers, not just their names and Twitter handles, by allowing for a "long format" export with complete data. You get stuff like how many favorites (likes) they have on Twitter, when their account was created, and how many people they follow or are followed by. Frustratingly, Twitter no longer makes it easy for this data export to include whether that person follows you or not; that requires an additional query.

You'll use CSV (comma-separated values) as the format for exporting your data into a spreadsheet. And good news! t supports that natively. So your command will look like this: t followings -l --csv > followings.csv which basically says "Export my followings, in long format, to a CSV file named 'followings.csv'." Once you do that, you can open it up in Excel or Google Sheets in a few clicks, and you're all set.

Unfollowing Everybody

After all the people I followed were in a spreadsheet, I was able to sort by how many followers or followings they had, and also their last update, and I found friends who'd passed away whose accounts had been dormant for years, or joke accounts whose relevance had expired, or quiet voices with small networks that had been drowned out amongst the cacophany of the many other voices I was hearing each day. I found this part to be a really worthwhile exercise, and definitely decided to follow fewer people with huge networks and lots of reach.

Actually unfollowing!

Then, it was time for the main event: actually unfollowing everybody. I don't think this will be as much of a problem for other folks, but trying to run a single process of unfollowing everybody had me repeatedly running into Twitter's rate limits, where they try to keep any app from performing too many actions on your account in too short a period of time. I ended up writing a simple script to do the unfollowing in batches, then pausing for a few minutes, then starting up again.

But with a more reasonable network, the command to unfollow everyone is extremely simple:

t followings | xargs t unfollow

It'll chug away for a few minutes, and then that's it! You're not following anybody anymore. Except it might still look like you are.

In my case, my follower count was wrong for days, and kept showing wildly inaccurate information like insisting that I was following one of Mike Pence's official accounts. (Needless to say, that was never the case.) All of this is due to a architectural decision called eventual consistency, which helps enable Twitter to scale to its massive size, but doesn't do as good a job of handling unusual circumstances like being able to immediately see the correct list of followers for someone who has just unfollowed thousands of accounts.

Nevertheless, the deed was done. I refollowed a few essential accounts (my family, @Glitch and @Prince, and was ready to start anew.

Lessons learned

It's been about a week and a half, and, well... Twitter is a lot more pleasant. I've chosen a handful of accounts to follow each day (most ones that I followed before, some entirely new to me) and it's made a big difference. On the flip side, about 100 people seem to have unfollowed me after I unfollowed everybody, and I hope they hadn't felt obligated just to reciprocate if I was following them before. (That might also just be how many people unfollow me in a given week, I dunno.)

One of the most immediate benefits is that, when something terrible happens in the news, I don't see an endless, repetitive stream of dozens of people reacting to it in succession. It turns out, I don't mind knowing about current events, but it hurts to see lots of people I care about going through anguish or pain when bad news happens. I want to optimize for being aware, but not emotionally overwhelmed.

To that point, I've also basically not refollowed any news accounts or "official" corporate accounts. Anything I need to know about major headlines gets surfaced through other channels, or even just other parts of Twitter, so I don't need to see social media updates from media companies whose entire economic model is predicated on causing me enough stress to click through to their sites.

Similarly, I've focused a lot more on artists and activists and people who write about the stuff I'm obsessed with in general — Prince or mangoes or urban transit or the like. That brings a lot more joy into my life, and people writing about these other topics offer alot more inspiration for the things I want to be focused on. Oddly, given that my job is being the CEO of a tech company, I follow far fewer people in tech, and almost no tech company accounts except for my own. Despite that, I've missed almost nothing significant in the industry since making this change.

The algorithm is learning

Most interesting to me is how the suggested content and accounts on Twitter have changed since I changed my network. Before, much of the suggested headlines or featured Tweets in my Twitter apps would be from categories like "Technology VC"; now they're much more likely to be about "Climate Change" or "Comedians" than about inside-baseball tech talk.

On the less positive side, Twitter still suggests that I follow accounts that are almost entirely men, and overwhelmingly white American men with verified Twitter accounts. This is bizarre to me as I'm now following nearly 100 accounts, and they're basically the same mix of races and genders and geographies that I've always been interested in hearing from. I would have expected Twitter's follow-suggestion algorithm to be at least as adaptive as its content-suggestion one, and hope that it'll get updated to feature accounts that don't fit the usual privileged patterns. (I do still follow a lot of verified accounts, but some of that is due to an oddity I've just realized, which is that a lot of my friends have verified accounts. Look, ma — I'm a big-city elite!)

What Follows

I don't have some grand takeaway about what all this means; obviously, I've been thinking about the design and impacts and best use of social networks on the web for basically as long as they've existed. I strongly believe we should be intentional in how we use our networks, and even spent years building tools to encourage that, though the corporate interest of the major social networks precludes building a business around encouraging healthier use of their platforms.

But I'm happy for making a conscious decision about managing my network, and I lament that it takes a pretty extreme level of technical knowledge to be able to do so. I first wrote about Twitter when it was only a few months old, talking about its promise and predicting that Twitter would adopt @messaging and adapt to other ways its community was inventing new behaviors. Some of that happened, but of course most of what power users (and vulnerable users) wanted was never created.

I've also written a good bit about the peculiarities of having a large network in social media, like Twitter's early practice of suggesting which accounts to follow (including mine!) and what it's like to have the social network of a famous person without actually being famous. I think a lot about why I "favorite" (or like) so many things on various networks. And I also hope people can think more broadly about the ways the design of social networks intersects with how we see ourselves, and how we see social status, as best exemplified by the huge social anxieties around what it's like being verified on Twitter.

And ultimately, I come back to what I wrote a few years ago when I first decided to stop retweeting men (a practice I've followed for about half a decade now):

If you’re inclined, try being mindful of whose voices you share, amplify, validate and promote to others.

It's still a really important point, and to this list I would only add: Also be mindful about who you follow. And don't be afraid sometimes to reset and start over.

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jordanbrock
2286 days ago
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Perth, Western Australia
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jmontano
2301 days ago
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Interesting idea. Unfollow everyone on Twitter
Colombia

Earth-Moon Fire Pole

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Earth-Moon Fire Pole

My son (5y) asked me today: If there were a kind of a fireman's pole from the Moon down to the Earth, how long would it take to slide all the way from the Moon to the Earth?

Ramon Schönborn, Germany

First, let's get a few things out of the way:

In real life, we can't put a metal pole between the Earth and the Moon.[1]For one, someone at NASA would probably yell at us. The end of the pole near the Moon would be pulled toward the Moon by the Moon's gravity, and the rest of it would be pulled back down to the Earth by the Earth's gravity. The pole would be torn in half.

Another problem with this plan. The Earth's surface spins faster than the Moon goes around, so the end that dangled down to the Earth would break off if you tried to connect it to the ground:

There's one more problem:[2]Ok, that's a lie—there are, like, hundreds more problems. The Moon doesn't always stay the same distance from Earth. Its orbit takes it closer and farther away. It's not a big difference,[3]You may occasionally see people get excited about the "supermoon," a full Moon that appears slightly larger because it happens at the time of the month when the Moon is closest to Earth. But really, the full Moon always looks surprisingly large and pretty when it's near the horizon, thanks to the Moon illusion. In my opinion, it's worth going outside and looking at the Moon whenever it's full, regardless of whether it's super or not. but it's enough that the bottom 50,000 km of your fire station pole would be squished against the Earth once a month.

But let's ignore those problems! What if we had a magical pole that dangled from the Moon down to just above the Earth's surface, expanding and contracting so it never quite touched the ground? How long would it take to slide down from the Moon?

If you stood next to the end of the pole on the Moon, a problem would become clear right away: You have to slide up the pole, and that's not how sliding works.

Instead of sliding, you'll have to climb.

People can climb poles pretty fast. World-record pole climbers[4]Of course there's a world record for pole climbing. can climb at over a meter per second in championship competition.[5]Of course there are championship competitions. On the Moon, gravity is much weaker, so it will probably be easier to climb. On the other hand, you'll have to wear a spacesuit, so that will probably slow you down a little.

If you climb up the pole far enough, Earth's gravity will take over and start pulling you down. When you're hanging onto the pole, there are three forces pulling on you: The Earth's gravity pulling you toward Earth, the Moon's gravity pulling you away from Earth, and centrifugal force[6]As usual, anyone arguing about "centrifugal" versus "centripetal" force will be put in a centrifuge. from the swinging pole pulling you away from Earth.[7]At the distance of the Moon's orbit and the speed it's traveling, centrifugal force pushing away is exactly balanced by the Earth's gravity—which is why the Moon orbits there. At first, the combination of the Moon's gravity and centrifugal force are stronger, pulling you toward the Moon, but as you get closer to the Earth, Earth's gravity takes over. The Earth is pretty big, so you reach this point—which is known as the L1 Lagrange point—while you're still pretty close to the Moon.

Unfortunately for you, space is big, so "pretty close" is still a long way. Even if you climb at better-than-world-record speed, it will still take you several years to get to the L1 crossover point.

As you approach the L1 point, you'll start to be able to switch from climbing to pushing-and-gliding: You can push once and then coast a long distance up the pole. You don't have to wait to stop, either—you can grab the pole again and give yourself a push to move even faster, like a skateboarder kicking several times to speed up.

Eventually, as you reach the vicinity of the L1 point and are no longer fighting gravity, the only limit on your speed will be how quickly you can grab the pole and "throw" it past you. The best baseball pitchers can move their hands at about 100 mph while flinging objects past them, so you probably can't expect to move much faster than that.

Note: While you're flinging yourself along, be careful not to drift out of reach of the pole. Hopefully you brought some kind of safety line so you can recover if that happens.

After another few weeks of gliding along the pole, you'll start to feel gravity take over, speeding you up faster than you can go by pushing yourself. When this happens, be careful—soon, you'll need to start worrying about going too fast.

As you approach the Earth and the pull of its gravity increases, you'll start to speed up quite a bit. If you don't stop yourself, you'll reach the top of the atmosphere at roughly escape velocity—11 km/s[8]This is why anything that falls into the Earth hits the atmosphere fast enough to burn up. Even if an object is moving slowly when it's drifting through space, when it gets close to the Earth it gets accelerated up to at least escape velocity by that final segment of the trip down into the Earth's gravity well.—and the impact with the air will produce so much heat that you risk burning up. Spacecraft deal with this problem by including heat shields, which are capable of absorbing and dissipating this heat without burning up the spacecraft behind it.[9]People often ask why we don't use rockets to slow down, to avoid the need for a heat shield. You can read this article for an explanation, but the bottom line is that changing your speed by 11 km/s takes either a tank of fuel the size of a building or a tiny heat shield, and the tiny heat shield is a lot easier to carry. Thanks to heat shields, slowing down is much easier than speeding up—which requires the aforementioned giant fuel tank. (For more on this, see this What If question).

Heat shields only work for slowing down; if there were a way to use the same heat shield mechanism to speed up, space travel would get a lot easier. Sadly, no one's figured out a practical way to build a "reverse heat shield" rocket. However, while the idea seems silly, in a sense it's sort of the principle behind both Project Orion and laser ablation propulsion.
Since you have this handy metal pole, you can control your descent by clamping onto it and controlling your rate of descent through friction.

Make sure to keep your speed low during the whole approach and descent—and, if necessary, pausing to let your hands or brakepads cool down—rather than waiting until the end to try to slow down. If you get up to escape velocity, then at the last minute remember that you need to slow down, you'll be in for an unpleasant surprise as you try to grab on to the pole. At best, you'll be flung away and plummet to your death. At worst, your hands and the surface of the pole will both be converted into exciting new forms of matter, and then you'll be flung away and plummet to your death.

Assuming you descend slowly and enter the atmosphere in a controlled manner, you'll soon encounter your next problem: Your pole isn't moving at the same speed as the Earth. Not even close. The land and atmosphere below you are moving very fast relative to you. You're about to drop into some extremely strong winds.

The Moon orbits around the Earth at a speed of roughly one kilometer per second, making a wide circle[10]Yes, I know, orbits are conic sections which in the case of the Moon is technically not exactly a circle. It's actually a pentagon. every 29 days or so. That's how fast the top end of our hypothetical fire pole will be traveling. The bottom end of the pole makes a much smaller circle in the same amount of time, moving at an average speed of only about 35 mph relative to the center of the Moon's orbit:

35 miles per hour doesn't sound bad. Unfortunately for you, the Earth is also spinning,[11]I mean, unfortunately in this specific context. In general, the fact that the Earth spins is very fortunate for you, and for the planet's overall habitability. and its surface moves a lot faster than 35 mph; at the Equator, it can reach over 1,000 miles per hour.[12]It's common knowledge that Mt. Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth, measured from sea level. A somewhat more obscure piece of trivia is that the point on the Earth's surface farthest from its center is the summit of Mt. Chimborazo in Ecuador, due to the fact that the planet bulges out at the equator. Even more obscure is the question of which point on the Earth's surface moves the fastest as the Earth spins, which is the same as asking which point is farthest from the Earth's axis. The answer isn't Chimborazo or Everest. The fastest point turns out to be the peak of Mt. Cayambe, a volcano north of Chimborazo. And now you know.[13]Mt. Cayambe's southern slope also happens to be the highest point on Earth's surface directly on the Equator. I have a lot of mountain facts.

Even though the end of the pole is moving slowly relative to the Earth as a whole, it's moving very fast relative to the surface.

Asking how fast the pole is moving relative to the surface is effectively the same as asking what the "ground speed" of the Moon is. This is tricky to calculate, because the Moon's ground speed varies over time in a complicated way. Luckily for us, it doesn't vary that much—it's usually somewhere between 390 and 450 m/s, or a little over Mach 1—so figuring out the precise value isn't necessary.

Let's buy a little time by trying to figure it out anyway.

The Moon's ground speed varies pretty regularly, making a kind of sine wave. It peaks twice every month as it passes over the fast-moving equator, then reaches a minimum when it's over the slower-moving tropics. Its orbital speed also changes depending on whether it's at the close or far point in its orbit. This leads to a roughly sine-wave shaped ground speed:

Well, ready to jump?

Ok, fine. There's one other cycle we can take into account to really nail down the Moon's ground speed. The Moon's orbit is tilted by about 5° relative to the Earth-Sun plane, while the Earth's axis is tilted by 23.5°. This means that the Moon's latitude changes the way the Sun's does, moving from the northern tropics to the southern tropics twice a year.

However, the Moon's orbit is also tilted, and this tilt rotates on an 18.9-year cycle. When the Moon's tilt is in the same direction as the Earth's, it stays 5° closer to the Equator than the Sun, and when it's in the opposite direction, it reaches more extreme latitudes. When the Moon is over a point farther from the equator, it has a lower "ground speed," so the lower end of the sine wave goes lower. Here's the plot of the Moon's "ground speed" over the next few decades:

The Moon's top speed stays pretty constant, but the lowest speed rises and falls with an 18.9-year cycle. The lowest speed of the next cycle will be on May 1st, 2025, so if you want to wait until 2025 to slide down, you can hit the atmosphere when the pole is moving at only 390 m/s relative to the Earth's surface.

When you do finally enter the atmosphere, you'll be coming down near the edge of the tropics. Try to avoid the tropical jet stream, an upper-level air current which blows in the same direction the Earth rotates. If your pole happens to go through it, it could add another 50-100 m/s to the wind speed.

Regardless of where you come down, you'll need to contend with supersonic winds, so you should wear lots of protective gear.[15]For aerodynamic reasons, this gear should probably make it look like you're wearing a very fast airplane. Make sure you're tightly attached to the pole, since the wind and various shockwaves will be violently battering and jolting you around. People often say, "It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end." Unfortunately, in this case, it's probably going to be both.[17]If it helps, people have survived supersonic ejections before—and even a supersonic aircraft disintegration—so there's hope.

At some point, to reach the ground, you're going to have to let go of the pole. For obvious reasons, you don't want to jump directly onto the ground while moving at Mach 1. Instead, you should probably wait until you're somewhere near airline cruising altitude, where the air is still thin, so it's not pulling at you too hard—and let go of the pole. Then, as the air carries you away and you fall toward the Earth, you can open your parachute.

Then, at last, you can drift safely to the ground, having traveled from the Moon to the Earth completely under your own muscle power.

(When you're done, remember to remove the fire pole. That thing is definitely a safety hazard.)

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jordanbrock
2365 days ago
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