Another frequent astronaut simile is a runaway freight train going down an old, poorly maintained track.
That's a simile I like better. No need to bring the "woman driver" stereotype into things!
Substitute "nervous driver", then. Hey, I don't make 'em up, I just quote 'em. Actually, I thought that particular stereotype was dead and buried - I think Danica pretty firmly hammered the last nail in the coffin Sunday.
Speaking of Aulis claims, I was poking around some of their links the other day (entertainment is where you find it, I guess) and found some documents from 2010 written by a Greg Alexander in which he questions the validity of the law of Conservation of Energy and the formula for kinetic energy, among other things.
What caught my attention was that he used an example for kinetic energy that sounded awfully familiar:
"Consider two identical space rockets in the vacuum of space well away from the effects of any gravitational field. Both, in parallel, burn their engines at full power on two separate occasions of exactly equal duration. However the second rocket, immediately after its first burn does an about turn such that its engine is pointing in exactly the opposite direction just in time for the second burn. In such a situation it is obvious that the first rocket will continue accelerating with the second burn while the first will start to decelerate, losing the velocity it had gained from the first burn. It is also apparent that by the end of the second burn the second rocket will have lost all the velocity it had gained from the first burn while the first rocket will have exactly doubled the velocity it had gained after the first burn.
... Each rocket can be considered as a closed system and both have had the same amount of energy supplied to it by its engine.... Even though the first had all its power from its engine transformed directly into kinetic energy, the second rocket is now stationary compared with the first, relatively speaking, and has zero kinetic energy... It would appear that as the two burns were directed precisely counter to one another, the kinetic energy from both has exactly cancelled out. Such a destruction of energy is completely counter to the laws of conservation."I wonder if this is where our maritime engineer friend got his ideas or if it's just a parallel case of someone else who didn't pay attention in high school physics and thinks you can just toss mass/energy out of a closed system and pretend it just disappeared.
Oh, if anyone wants a chuckle, this is the link:
http://www.webspawner.com/users/gjalex