…most of the time. This is because it whizzes around the sun every 88 days, so it often gets itself closer to us than the Venus, which is supposed to be our nearest neighbour. Mercury does this more often than it doesn’t, if you know what I mean.
While this may be a bit mind-blowing….wait – there’s more. Mercury is also, on average, the closest planet to every other planet in the solar system. The attached article and video explains everything.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/solar-system/a26839314/closest-planet-to-earth-on-average/
Popular Mechanics also publish an article proving that the correct number of guitars to own is always n + 1, where n = the number you currently have.
Not only that, they have an entire issue devoted to the little known fact that, algorithymically, the optimum number of records to own is always (r x 3) – a – d, where r is the number of records you already have, a is the number of records you’ve forgotten you own due to hasty, hazy Amazon shopping and d is the number of Discogs orders you have that are yet to arrive in the post.
Forget yer Mojos and Uncuts – Popular Mechanics is the journal du jour for the Afterword community!
Californian country singer, Sam Outlaw, no doubt anticipating this shift in mood, titled his last album Popular Mechanics.
Here’s the title track.
I anticipate a new album from Depeche Mode called Concrete Today.
Freddie would have been happy to know that.
I want to break free (of my heliocentric orbit)
I find it amazing to think that there were still woolly mammoths on Earth at the time the pyramids were built – but by then, they were isolated on Wrangel Island in the Russian Arctic, far from the upshoots of civilisation.
What I find just as amazing is that the pyramids are still there, and they’re still making new discoveries.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/64833530
Fair point!
My favourite planet fact is, were it possible to manoeuvre it there, Saturn would float in my bath..
But would it, though?
Brilliant. Very thorough. Thanks for the slap. But now I really want to know how you embed the link into the text..
I was intrigued by the idea of Saturn floating – never heard it before you mentioned it. It’s a useful idea for conceptualizing what Saturn is – like me after a pint of pils, mostly gas.
But I enjoy even more the idea that it’s like an egg, the ‘yolk’ held in suspension by gravity. And that I only found out by googling ‘Saturn floats’. A result on the first page from Wired I couldn’t resist. So, I hope not a slap, but an unpacking of a fascinating thought experiment you initiated.
The link embedding?
I can’t post code in a comment – it just disappears. Instead, I’ll embed another link to somewhere where you can see it
Ta!
Best thing I’ve read in weeks – thanks.