ghostberry

You took "reflective" too literally. I just meant more reflective to IR than dark green paint that most military stuff gets painted with. I never meant a mirror surface. Just the IR equivalent of white paint.

I can't help thinking that in the anti-mortar role, there are very simple countermeasures that would severely reduce the laser's effectiveness.

Reflective paint, ablative coatings, internal vacuum layer, heat insulation, thermally insensitive explosive and detonators, etc.

Have you got hardware acceleration switched on?

Out of interest, why do you think there are so many valid criminals and lawbreakers in the US?

A bad case of rose tinted spectacles.

As the smaller party in a coalition, they got blamed for every unpopular decision and got no credit for anything popular.

How do you give money to a poor homeless person?

I read this story a few months ago, it had a few more details then.

They tried giving them iron cookware, but they didn't like the weight. They then tried putting a random piece of iron in with their cooking, but not many kept up with doing it. That's where the idea to shape the iron like a lucky fish came from, and it seems to be working.

It's 7.5° high and 5.5° wide. If you don't consider that huge, then that's up to you. But for me, that counts as huge, especially since it's fairly near the middle of vision. That's over half the width of my hand at arms length.

That's just nature making the best it can of a historical accident.

If you were designing the eye from scratch, you'd have the nerves coming out the back like in squid. Then if you wanted something that concentrates the red and green wavelengths, you could put something else in front of the light sensing cells.

You'd end up exactly where you are now, except you'd not have a huge blind spot, and wouldn't have to spend as much brain power compensating for it.

It really, really isn't.

There are always people thinking "Uh oh..."

Sometimes they are right.

A super Earth is a planet that's larger than Earth, but not large enough to be a gas giant.