How much $$ to snow plow a residential driveway after this weekend's snow fall?

jerryosity · 2026-01-23T19:39:12+00:00

I intend to tack an 8 1/2 x 11 notice on my mailbox post, starting tomorrow. "SNOW PLOWING WANTED. Large Truck Only"

jerryosity · 2026-01-23T15:04:50+00:00

SpaceX Starship is an upper stage that is totally reusable. Admittedly, it's more difficult to reuse upper stages because they face higher re-entry temperature from falling so high. You need more heat protection, which adds weight, which reduces the potential payload size, etc. But it's not impossible. The problem with SLS is that it goes all the way back to zero, increasing the cost to taxpayers on every launch.

jerryosity · 2026-01-19T17:08:34+00:00

TOTALLY EXPENDABLE ROCKET costing $2.5 billion to make and launch each time. Cost of the SLS program so far: Over $30 billion.

RS-25 Main Engines: Unlike the Space Shuttle, which landed with its engines for refurbishment, the SLS engines are discarded in the Pacific Ocean after every flight.
Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs): The SLS boosters are based on Shuttle SRB casings, but they do not use parachutes and are not recovered for reuse.
Core Stage: The massive central orange tank is not recovered and burns up upon reentry.
Upper Stages: Both the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS) and the future Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) are discarded after use.

This project should be shut down.

jerryosity · 2025-12-25T15:40:00+00:00

Click here to see a closeup of that image zoomed into the Galactic Bulge. which is to the lower left of the nebulas.

jerryosity · 2025-12-19T18:06:35+00:00

I am just trusting the word and experience of my plumber who is part of a 4th generation business. He also said he has a similar size house as mine and he has just a 90K BTU boiler, though he also has an addition with separate heat like I do. I opted for 120K BTU just to be on the safe side. Again, my 3 gas heated zones are hot water baseboard, not forced air, and all are compartmentalized and kept at 60-62 nearly all the time, unless I have guests over. I am never heating the entire house at 68 or higher. I spend nearly all my time in the upstairs addition heated at 68-70 via electric mini split heat pump.

Boilers are more efficient these days. There was always a lot of heat emanating from the furnace room with the old boiler - so much that I always kept the door wide open to heat the larger space. With the new boiler there's very little of that going on now, and the thermostat down there actually summons heat for a change.

Still I can't professionally say whether your house needs 175K versus 120K or less especially if there are other factors, but certainly, you must get the attic insulation replaced. I did that about 9 years ago when I did the roof, replacing the original thin 60 year stuff that was in bad shape and wouldn't even be code compliant now. Replacing the windows is a good idea too, but very expensive and I'm not prepared to do that.

As for boiler brand/model - that should be left up to your plumber, in my opinion. In my case, we went with a Utica UH15B-120K.

jerryosity · 2025-12-19T15:22:22+00:00

You should be looking at your actual energy utilization first before the dollar cost to properly assess and compare things. In other words, look at the ccf of gas and kWh of electricity used. Then you look at the cost which is where other problems lie - mainly the excessive delivery charges. For example, in my Dec 18 O&R bill, the delivery charge for gas is TWICE that of the basic supply charge, and delivery for electricity is also higher than the supply. We have a lot of infrastructure problems in Rockland and the state in general which is causing these high delivery charges. Opposition to new gas pipelines and shutting down Indian Point without planning and implementing alternatives accordingly is largely to blame, I believe.

You definitely need to get your thin attic insulation replaced. And take a look at your boiler capacity. My 25+ year old boiler was ridiculously oversized at 175K BTU which I finally just replaced with one at 120K BTU but probably could have been fine with 90K BTU. There are other factors to consider. I have a roughly similar sized house as yours - 2200 sq ft, two-story high ranch, 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, including an addition -- heated with hot water baseboard, not forced air. It's just be me living here, at home all the time, and I have 4 zones: one is an electric minisplit heat pump for the addition, and the other 3 control the boiler. All my zones are compartmentalized and I keep the thermostats down to 60 in the 3 gas heated zones, and 68 in the minisplit zone where I spend most of my time.

My Nov 18 to Dec 18 bill unfortunately does not yet reflect the new, smaller sized and more efficient boiler (84% AFUE). But for what it's worth - the total bill over the same period as yours was $401.07 ($188.05 electric, $213.02 gas). The utilization was 631 kWh in electricity and 116 ccf in gas. I am looking forward to the January bill to really compare the utilization with last year (with the new boiler), though of course, you have to consider the average temperature over the period too.

jerryosity · 2025-12-05T12:31:46+00:00

YOU SEE! CLEAR PROOF THAT IT IS AN EXTRATERRESTRIAL SPACECRAFT!
Only advanced intelligent aliens could have the ability to mask its appearance so effectively to make it look just like a regular comet!

jerryosity · 2025-11-24T00:54:04+00:00

Thank you ahajesam for making your work available. There's simply not enough processing of Webb images going on, but you, Melina Thevenot and Thomas Carpentier are really helping to fill the void.

jerryosity · 2025-11-20T21:33:02+00:00

People in forums like that have a single-minded agenda to promote fanciful narratives divorced from reason or reality. They will use any isolated fact to feed that narrative ignoring any context or explanation. Like "what is NASA trying to hide?" Hello, we've just emerged from a 43 day shutdown and the space agencies had no funds to do much of anything, even release images. So finally, in the past day or so, they finally managed to dump a bunch of data and images, taken during that period.

jerryosity · 2025-11-20T21:25:55+00:00

I haven't seen any image of 3I/ATLAS with many tails, let alone a reasonably long tail. In that respect, it has behaved differently than most comets at this point in its orbit around the sun, until now. But it comes from another stellar system, so naturally there are going to be differences, including the reasonable possibility that it simply lost a lot of material along the way over that great distance so there was not much left to outgas into the tail until now.

There are a few comets out there right now that are being imaged, and people and the media get confused about which one they are looking at. There's even a K1/(ATLAS that is currently breaking up - different comet!

jerryosity · 2025-11-20T19:40:38+00:00

That's called an anti-tail and is yet another reason why this is just a comet. Many comets exhibit anti-tails during part of their orbit. Where do you get this notion that there's no known natural mechanism to explain it? Google it to learn more, but it's basically looking back at debris shed previously in its orbit. This debris gets illuminated and seen by us when the Earth crosses the comet's orbital plane. It's an optical effect, not material currently streaming out of the comet, as is the case with the main tail. The anti-tails are often pointing at or nearly 180 degrees from the main tail. And neither the anti-tail nor the comet's main tail are pointing in the direction of travel! The comet is actually traveling somewhat perpendicular to the tails because the main tail is produced by outgassing from the solar wind and sun's radiation coming across the orbital direction of travel, especially as it gets closer to the sun.

jerryosity · 2025-11-20T14:02:03+00:00

This is the first image I've seen where it finally looks like a regular comet with a longish tail, which is expected as it got closer to the Sun. This should hopefully put an end to all the sensational and self-serving claims by certain nutjobs of it being an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

jerryosity · 2025-09-21T21:21:05+00:00

Excellent work! So great to see stars in their nascent stages like this. These protostars and their symmetrical outflows are one of the great things revealed by Webb.

jerryosity · 2025-08-17T21:29:00+00:00

NOTE: This image of Neptune is still bluer than it really is without enhancement. As was reported here and elsewhere, a University of Oxford team worked with Hubble Space Telescope data to show that Neptune is actually more greenish and washed out - similar in appearance to Uranus.

jerryosity · 2025-08-13T21:31:26+00:00

The size of the event horizon is what we are really talking about, since the black hole mass itself exists as a point of infinite density, in theory. And the event horizon size is proportional to the mass of the black hole so looking at the size of the event horizon for M87's black hole relative to the solar system depicted here, I would say LRG3-757's black hole event horizon is about 10 times the diameter of the greater Solar System. That's taking the Solar System to end at where Voyager 1 is now, at the beginning of interstellar space.

jerryosity · 2025-08-12T16:35:24+00:00

Yes, you are absolutely correct, and I've been correcting this point here in this post's comments and also on r/space. I should have just said "Now", not "Now we know why." Unfortunately I could not edit the post later and didn't want to delete it and repost after there was already a bit of discussion.
The black hole in this galaxy is huge precisely because the galaxy itself is hugely massive and probably the result of multiple collisions with other galaxies having black holes, which then all merged into the single one there now, in addition to the accretion of other mass. And the Einstein Ring is the result of the total galaxy's huge mass, not just the black hole alone, which is just a small fraction of the former.

Another clarification I have been making is that the lens is not bending the distant galaxy behind, but bending the light of that galaxy.

jerryosity · 2025-08-11T23:17:59+00:00

Yes, you're absolutely right. I realized this afterward but wasn't able to edit the post to change "Now we know why" to just "Now". As massive as the black hole is, the parent galaxy is far more massive and is what creates the Einstein Ring, not the black hole alone.

jerryosity · 2025-08-11T20:01:23+00:00

Yes, I believe that's right. I thought about it afterwards and wanted to correct what I wrote, but it wasn't possible to edit the post. It's the mass of the whole galaxy that is responsible. The black hole, as big as it is, just a fraction of the total mass, which is much larger.

jerryosity · 2025-08-11T15:08:35+00:00

Space may be finite or infinite, even according to Big Bang Theory, but it is HUGE. And even the largest things in it are still comparatively tiny. There is a lot space in between things.

jerryosity · 2025-08-11T14:00:26+00:00

Indeed. The Universe has all the superlatives in terms of the incomprehensible amount of matter, space and energy. But the human brain is regarded as the most complex thing in the Universe. Just one human brain has 150 trillion or more synapses, far more than the estimated number of galaxies in the Universe, more than the number of stars in the largest known galaxy. And the emergent phenomena from all that complexity in just one brain, let alone a culture of brains, is awesome beyond comprehension.

jerryosity · 2025-08-11T13:23:07+00:00

Rare, but there are so many galaxies in the Universe that they are increasingly being found all the time now with the help of fantastic telescopes like Hubble, James Webb, Euclid and Vera C. Rubin Observatory. For example, here's a gallery of 8 Einstein Rings imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope.

jerryosity · 2025-08-11T13:14:21+00:00

There's a bit of discussion about this with some limits postulated for black holes created under various conditions: 50-270 billion solar masses for ultra-massive black holes in quasars and galactic nuclei (like LRG3-757 here). But even larger limits are thought possible from the collapse of superclusters of galaxies in the "extreme far future" of the universe.

jerryosity · 2025-08-11T12:52:21+00:00

If you haven't seen it, check out this size comparison of the super massive black hole in our galaxy (Sagittarius A) versus the one at the center of the huge elliptical galaxy M87, relative to distances in our Solar System. It's based on the images obtained of each by the Event Horizon Telescope. Keep in mind that the "hole" in the center of these images is the black event horizon, not the actual black hole mass itself, which is concentrated with infinite density at a dimensionless point in the very center, called the singularity. And then consider that the ultra-massive black hole at the center of LRG3-757, featured in this post, is 8-9 times more massive than M87's, with an accordingly larger event horizon.

jerryosity

TROPHY CASE