Geek Flame

[selenite0]

I'm not very active on the Pyramid boards--I don't check them often enough to participate in the give and take. But when someone was being pedantically wrong about the orbital mechanics of a space elevator I had to post a correction. And then I could not resist letting him have it for this assertion:

> And there is no such thing as centrifugal
> force, it's a illusion based on inertia.

Bah. Centrifugal force is real. Inertial reference frames are an illusion. Nobody in human history has ever been in a non-rotating reference frame. They're a purely theoretical construct. Save it for the physicists. Anybody doing practical work uses centrifugal force when it's the most sensible way to describe the system.