HAPPY BIRTHDAY! :D

When they write "GitHub", I guess they mean "Microsoft"? Maybe this is the hero we deserve, but it's not the hero we need.

There's a war for digital ID.

The most costly part of Identification is the last mile. Paying the employee/cop/etc who asks for your ID and check it.

With digital IDs, there's several players fighting to consume that cost as profit.

Microsoft is a huge player. It is the sole reason windows11 requires a TPM device, so that your windows11 device can be used for identity attestation like an iphone can. (I mean, I don't buy that device bound keys are a valid solution, but i'm not the one being fooled in governments around the world to buy this up)

So, no, microsoft will definitely not by the hero of anything here.

Right, GitHub of old is long gone.

That's not how you would typically train a working dog.

I imagine it depends on the work?

I am not an expert here, but am a bit familiar with how rescue dogs are trained and this is a method in use.

Nice job!

It's interesting to see how little effect the orbit and rotation had on the straight line. A proposal is to align the numbers for the different movement categories so that it's easier to see the magnitudes of them.

It took me a couple of seconds to understand the concept, from the title I though it was going to be a planner to show gravity assists etc.

Yeah the scale difference is crazy. Once you add the Galaxy/CMB velocity, the earth's rotation basically becomes a rounding error.

Good call on the number alignment. I'm using a variable-width font which makes comparing them messy. I'll switch to monospace or tabular-nums in the next push so the magnitudes scan better.

And fair point on the title-'calculator' implies mission planning. Maybe 'travel visualizer' would have been safer!

> two splashes with light colours

Blood. That's blood.

Does Earth orbit Mercury?

By the astronomical definition of the word "orbit", no. Earth does circle Mercury though (and Mercury circles Earth).

In terms of this post - I suppose technically Earth does NOT circle the Moon, because we never see its back!

Now I had to imagine Mercury's motion in Earth's reference system, and that was painful.

The reason why we don't see satellite-targeting missiles is not because the problem is hard. All relevant actors are capable of that.

All relevant actors are also capable of destroying ground-based data centres, but somehow that's not a huge problem for data centres.

You can take out a data center in space with an accidental collision of a small runaway satellite. Taking out a data center in the middle of Oregon would be significantly harder and will invite massive retaliation.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it disputed, with heavy border tensions and all? I'm not claiming India doesn't control it, and as a Swede I don't know much. But that's about the one thing I thought I knew about Kashmir.

Yes, heavily disputed, to the point that there are widespread campaigns on the internet to normalize the various sovereignty claims under the guise of day-to-day conversation about those locales (e.g. conspicuously referring to them as being "in India" or "in Pakistan" or "in China"). For example, see the Google maps reviews for any landmarks in the area.