Shape of the Whorl

Jeff Wilson · 24 Jan 2009, 05:32 · from 2009-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2009 23:32:19 -0600
Subject: (urth) Shape of the Whorl
In-Reply-To: <F6EA78D8EDFC4528AEE5685A096AAD5B@GATEWAY>
References: <624495.33501.qm at web180003.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
	<F6EA78D8EDFC4528AEE5685A096AAD5B@GATEWAY>
Message-ID: <497AA7E3.6030708 at io.com>

James Wynn wrote:
>> I think the Whorl has to be close to perfect cylinder.
>> If not, it would wobble as it spins.
> 
> Only if the asteroid were of uniform density on all sides which is 
> unlikely. The engineering permutations to cause an asteroid of undefined 
> dimensions and mass to spin uniformly are infinite.

Relativity dictates any asymmetry will eventually lead to tumbling, so 
it needs to be pretty close to avoid instability over ages of travel.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net