Hopefully they named the kittens Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Neutron. :)

--Ian

"Wi-Fi? For a garage door opener? Does each individual hair on your nutsack have a unique IPv6 address, or are you using NAT so that the whole scrotum functions as a single entity with one or more subnets beneath it?"

- actual thing I posted in a different forum.

I don't understand the whole "I must maximize the IoT trend such that every single thing which can possibly be connected is connected!" concept.

Is this like the Beanie-Baby thing?


It's ok to live in a word in which you cannot remotely monitor the level of water in the upper tank of the toilet.

For me, the tipping point is the refrigerator that allows you to access a camera showing the contents when you are at the store "to see what you need." Whatever happened to making a fucking list before you left the house?

I should add that the guy I was responding to is someone who I've considered a close friend since 1990.

At the time, he was a hard-core metalhead stoner and I was a serious nerd.

Now, he's an enterprise-scale software developer with a Brady-Bunch family and is also an usher at his church, and I'm a secular-humanist bozo who keeps a TV station and three cable / multicast networks on the air while experimenting with different combinations of naturally-occurring organic compounds.

But... yeah. Jon does have an IoT problem.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1606

--Ian

I sometimes wouldn't mind having a phone alert at 9pm to warn me: "Hey, dummy, it's 9pm, and you forgot to close the garage door for the night!" - and then provide me with an icon to touch in order to close said garage door - live interior garage camera feed optional.

Sometimes a guy just can't remember to close the garage door in the evening when you're halfway through a two-liter of stolichnaya and mountain dew while binge watching honey boo-boo reruns.

It turns out that Chamberlain, the manufacturer of my existing garage door openers, produces this product. Complete with camera.

I learned this while searching for the instruction manual for my aft opener (mfg 2006), to learn how to adjust the "down" setpoint after I had to re-install the chain which it threw and didn't get it back in exactly the right spot. I also now know how to adjust the chain tension.

When this one eventually dies, I believe that I'll most likely replace it with a belt-driven unit.

On the plus side, I also got the forward opener adjusted such that it no longer thinks "Ooh, an obstacle, I'd better retract" when it hits that one rough spot in the track on the way down.


Really?

My process for remembering to close the garage door:

"Am I finished with the garage door being open? If yes, then close the door and verify that it stays closed."

Typically, I am sober enough to perform this complex procedure any time I've had reason for the garage door to be open.

I recently installed a WiFi enable opener from Genie, it is great. I get notifications of door events, know if it is open or closed, and can open it remotely from my phone when my daughter forgets her keys.

You guys have garage door openers? Are you even real men?

You clearly do not have a female living in your residence full-time.

Or a teenager.

--Ian

^ I do not.

But, if anyone here needs to incinerate a horse, it turns out that my alma mater, the University of Florida, has an animal crematorium for sale.

https://m.publicsurplus.com/sms/auct...ew?auc=2937675

You'll need to dismantle it and haul it away yourself, but it's still sitting at zero bids, with four days left on a $200 starting bid.

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...8b2ee19f2c.png


Funny thing: I remember sneaking through that site on an "urban exploration" tour late one night during my freshman or sophomore year in the mid 90s. There was a small but respectable marijuana crop not far away from it. Obviously someone was tending it, and given the location, I lean towards faculty rather than students.

Who's the equipment dealer around here. Is it @sixshooter ?
I Can't remember sorry if it isn't you.

I got a line on a very cheap JCB. Like $10k less than any other brand for it's year and hours.

Is JCB any good? Can you get parts? Can you service it? Seems like a massive red flag for this equipment to be this cheap, from a very reputable dealer.

JCB is a British manufacturer that uses a lot of British components (such as Lucas electrical parts). They are incredibly unreliable and have a lousy reputation. They have significantly lower value as a percentage of their new price than others. I wouldn't touch it.

JCB = Junk Comes from Britain

P.S. I just sold a new Hitachi wheel loader to a fellow who has a JCB wheel loader that is very new and still under warranty. The JCB is down with engine emissions system problems and has been down for a month. A warranty is only useful if the local dealer has competent technicians and the needed parts available.

Well that's a relief to hear you say that.

I emailed the dealer back and asked the typical "why are you selling a '21 model with 20 hours cheaper than clapped out '14 models from other manufactures with 500 hours? Are parts easy to get? Who services these machines? Then went on to say i typically don't buy foreign equipment except for a handful of things (yaskawa drives) and i'm not to sure a JCB is a proper fit.
He literally didn't answer a single question, or even acknowledge that i sad anything about the JCB. He just sent me a few more listings and prices on other machines. hahah

Thanks for your input.

What type of machine are you considering?

I was looking at a scissor lift and a telehandler.

Equipment is really difficult to find right now. I don't mind financing for something new, but i don't want to wait 9 months to get it.

So, this is something I found interesting:

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...5cc9e7d56b.png

At a casual glance, I chuckled, assuming it was satire. Eg: pointing out how electric vehicles will remain a non-solution to carbon emissions in the US so long as our energy policy rejects the construction of more nuclear plants in favor of continuing to burn fossil fuels.

But then I noticed the name of the account which posted the image. So I clicked on it.

And it turns out that the image is intended to be completely serious.Their website: Friends of Coal West - Working for a Better Tomorrow Today



(I get targeted by some weird stuff by the FB algorithm. Lately, I've been seeing advertisements for ejection seats for military aircraft. Totally serious.)

But this "trainload of clean electric car fuel" thing.... I honestly cannot fathom who the target audience for that it.

One thing is for sure, I'd love to see the tax returns for "Friends of Coal West." But they provide absolutely no info on their website whatsoever as to the identities of their donors / supporters.

The ads Joe gets vs the ads i get.

haha

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...f4f3e5b24b.jpg

So is that one funded by Tesla?

--Ian

Apparently, when a former classmate (female) of yours, with whom you actually were casual friends with 30 years ago back in high school, is gushing all over Facebook about how she's lost 30 lbs and gotten all sorts of ripped and toned over the past year by following this One Specific Multi-Level-Marketing Program, and is posting a bunch of "before and after" photos, in which the "before" all look cute and cuddly and the "after" all look wrinkly and hard, commenting "Wow, you used to be really hot!" is not what they expect.

Well, this is tremendously exciting.

We're doing line-sweeps (fancy RF inspection with expensive tools) of my new hookups to the west (main) and east (aux) antenna combiners at Sears, which is the final box the needs to be checked before I can officially power up the new transmitter on the 100th floor and shut down the tired 22 year old rig on the 98th floor.

I say "we", despite the fact that the people doing the actual work are freezing their nuts off up at the tower, and I'm at home in my warm, fuzzy pajamas, occasionally looking over at monitor #2 on which I have the remote telemetry from the Hancock (backup) transmitter and environmental controls.

Right now, every single TV station on Sears is shut down. Some of them, like us, have off-site backups. The others are poor.

I also have an OTA tuner up in a little window at the bottom-right, with the volume at about 5%.

On the one hand, technology is fucking amazing. Like, I'm logged into three different sites remotely, and I have, as an overlay, a TV tuner up in my attic which is capturing a stream of "what's actually happening on the air right now, for real" and then re-transmitting it via the magic of wireless ethernet to a little VLC Media Player window. And this is all just happening while I sit here with glass number... I dunno... five, maybe? of bourbon in my hand. It's not like I'm pouring singles here.

On the other hand, is there literally one single human who is actively watching this hour-long infomercial for cosmetic dental surgery? Ok, there is one. I spoke with her about a half hour ago. But aside from the person keeping the chair warm in master control, is there a second human watching this?

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...9496ad45d1.png


I have one of those jobs which, if you tried to explain it to someone, they'd interrupt you with "hold on... you get paid how much for this?"

It's hard to explain.

Sleep well, pretty Diamond. I'll be hammering you with about 200kw of input power in a few hours.

I'm gonna keep barely watching / listening to this until about 5am, by which time I'll hopefully have gotten a call from the on-site engineer saying that they're done with the survey, everything is hunky-dory, and I'm clear to re-energize on the main antenna.

I thought I had to do weird and cool stuff between the hours of 2am and 4am...

Bravo Joe, I am jealous.

When we are speaking of concepts such as entropy, decay, thermodynamics, etc., we speak of open systems, closed systems, and isolated systems.

Is the universe itself a closed system? Is it isolated? If not, what is it not isolated from?

What happens after all of the hydrogen contained in all the stars in the universe is fully converted? Does the second law of thermodynamics still apply at this scale? What would actually happen if the universe did reach complete thermodynamic equilibrium- could matter continue to exist?

It has been posited that the universe is expanding. If the universe is the sum total of all space, then what space is it expanding into? For the universe to be said to expand, it must be bounded by a finite physical shape. What shape is the universe? How can the universe even have a shape if nothing exists beyond it? How can "nothing" even exist?

The universe would look like it was expanding from an observer on the interesting side of an event horizon.
"Where we're going we won't need eyes to see"

The third law of thermodynamics says that the universe is a closed system, yes.

It's a bit more complicated than "all of the hydrogen in all of the stars" (stars don't actually use all of the hydrogen and galaxies are creating new starts out of gas clouds over time), but this is called the Heat Death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_d...f_the_universe

The universe does not need to expand into anything, it is space itself that is expanding. The usual analogy is to think of raisins in a ball of dough that is rising.

There are a number of other proposed ends to the universe other than heat death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima...f_the_universe

When it comes to expansion (or presumably contraction) of space itself, energy is not conserved. Dark energy is theorized to be energy inherent to space itself, therefore as space expands it creates more dark energy. The expansion of space also stretches light rays/photons, thus lengthening their wavelength and reducing the energy in them.

--Ian

What if the universe isn't actually expanding, but perhaps it remains the same size while the speed of light is slowing. Perhaps the speed of light is determined by the density of dark matter, and as dark matter is being condensed into the black holes of the universe, the density in the open universe is slowly dropping.

What if a black hole is actually the big bang of a self-contained sub-universe within it? What if our universe actually exists only as the black hole of a superior universe; how many layers deep are we, and what does the top layer "universe" actually look like?

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...d4527f0731.jpg

Team 1511 (FIRST robotics) won the Chairman's award at the Pittsburg regional competition. This means they get a free ticket to the championships in Houston. Although I am no longer involved with the team, my son still is, and I am very proud.

That's excellent, Roger!

Awesome.

First tried to get my wife and I to come out to Houston to judge Championships. Unfortunately we did not have the time in our schedule to go.

Sometimes, brevity is its own reward.

Such as this email which I just sent to the developer:
‎‎‎‎

‎
... and cc:ed the CEO, four VPs, the GM, and the two corp tech gods who actually decide which contracts get awarded to who for IT stuff (all of whom I'm on a first name basis with), after a period of about six months of total non-communication on what is, in the grand scheme of things, a relatively minor promise.

I'm honestly keeping a very open mind as to how they respond. I have a $600k PO to them sitting on my desk awaiting the pen which rleete hand-crafted for me years ago to sign it.


It may or may not get signed.



I'm feeling particularly randy at the moment. I already told one company, with which we've done business for the past 22 years, to go fuck and fuck their own mother this morning. And, mind you, this was a company which proudly advertises itself as "woman-owned," and I happened to be taking a shit early in the morning at the time the president of the company called me back, (from a "We no longer require your services, based on the fact that you try to fuck me over at every chance on inspections of this fire alarm system which you installed 22 years ago, and yet act as though you have no records of when the various components of it require replacement or detailed inspection until after you've already performed the scheduled regular inspection, so that you can charge me for a second service call...") email the prior evening.



I'm in a weird mood right now. I kinda like it. Telling people who you know are on the mafia payroll to go and literally have sexual intercourse with their mothers is titillating.

How many more years until you retire? It should start getting real good the closer that gets.

That is the biggest thing I've learned over the past year.

I find myself in very similar situations, though with slight less money involved.
It doesn't seem to matter what the relationship or how much money has been spent. These companies don't give a SHIT. Just yesterday I bought a $10,000 motor as a spare / replacement for one that is going bad. The motor that is failing / already failed is also $10,000 AND purchased in 2019. They are giving me grief on a warranty repair. (I buy nice shit) these motors are built for nuclear submarines and I'm killing them within 3 years...

I am so glad that I don't have to deal with vendors or suppliers anymore. I just sit at my desk and draw the same things over and over, with only minor variations, and just let everyone else deal with the crap.

To be fair, nuclear submarines do not typically have boiling acid spraying everywhere. :giggle:

And unless they've got some new civilian nuclear submarines (have the drug smugglers gone that far yet?), "built for nuclear submarines" means they were built by the lowest bidder. :)

--Ian

:rofl:
HA! You're not wrong.
Just figured i would have gotten 25 years out of it like we did with the last one is all... Guess this is one of those cases where "they just don't make stuff like they used to".

Did i post the picture of the kitty i caught at work the other day? Most days i'm really unsure what my job duties around here really are...
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...819f3e39de.jpg

Repeat after me: "I will not anodize the cat."

Had i left it in shipping & receiving long enough it would of ended up with a packing slip on it along with an email to order entry with "arrived on Paducah Kentucky truck with no PO" in the subject line.

Ha!

Of course, I'm sure that this will somehow find a way to screw with your systems. You now have material in inventory to which no PO or invoice can be attached.

Does your company do the whole traceability thing?

Worse, you've got material which I'm guessing doesn't appear on any bill of materials for any process which you guys do. So even though it had no cost, it's still gonna irk the finance people to see this thing sit in inventory forever.

My plan is to retire at age 55. That's 9 years out. If all goes well, I should be able to comfortably disappear into BLM land in a small class C motorhome.

In all reality, I may try to downshift into a chief engineer position in a smaller market around that time, and do another couple of years on company medical* while I outfit the retirement rig in the driveway of a rental home in some random suburb somewhere, as that's something which I cannot physically accommodate here at my city-house. My driveway is about 12" long. Yes, that's inches, not feet.

Working at a leisurely pace, I figure 18-24 months build time for the rig plus the water / power trailer.

* = this seems like a weird concept to me, as I have never visited a doctor except as a result of traumatic injury. Still, I realize that I am not immortal, and recognize that normal people sometimes require medical care as they get into their 50s / 60s.

The scenario that i described is a regular occurrence. We were just discussing the idea of pulling down and sending back customer product that has been here for YEARS. Typically there is no PO issued. Or if there is a PO it will have no delivery date.

Hilariously, we have a million dollar computer program that is supposed to be the end-all be-all in terms of tracing customer product. It's so complex and we're so low on manpower that its utilization is probably only around 15%.

Fade up. Outer space. A field of stars passes slowly from left to right. An old sea shanty, recorded in the style of an upbeat 1980s pop song, is thinly audible, as though played on a cheap, portable turntable.

As the opening credits cycle, an escape pod drifts into view. It comes closer and closer, and the camera passes through the small window to show the cramped and dimly-lit interior.

Numerous hibernation chambers line the walls. Only one is occupied. Slow push towards the chamber. Inside it, we see a young man dressed in pirate attire. He is asleep.

Voiceover: "Hi, I'm Guybrush Threepwood, and I'm a mighty pirate. Yup, that's me there behind the glass. Now, you're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation. Well, let me tell you a story."

A little early to be dropping acid, isn't it Joe?

*record scratch*





Also, I will have you know that it was cannabis and bourbon.

I’m impressed. I only rarely went into the hard liquor prior to 10 AM on a workday.

I live by the rule - No beers before noon, unless i'm working or on vacation.

I suspect Joe abides by a similar set of rules.

Really Bad Analogies:

Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the middle.

Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.

The knowledge that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.

The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30

Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

The hailstones leaped from the pavement, like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.

Even in his last years, Grandpappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.

Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck either, but a real duck that was actually lame; maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.

She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

She caught my eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again.

Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that if her life was a movie this guy would be buried in the credits as something like "Second Tall Man."

The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.

The lamp just sat there, like an inanimate object.

His whole argument was as pointless as caffeine-free diet soda.

John already had more problems than a math book and needed another one like Dolly Parton needs a Wonderbra.

His new truck was a beauty but it ate gas like a fat kid with a KFC bucket.

Me: I got bitten by a dog on my way into work this morning.

Her: Oh my god! Imagine if that had been a small child!

Me: I could have fought off a small child, Alice.

As I'm sure many of you know, I underwent an innovative new surgery to repair an aortic aneurism several years ago. Custom stents, all super high tech. One of the conditions of the study (FDA clinical trial) was that I agreed to constant monitoring for the rest of my life. So, roughly once a year I get a full CT scan, from pelvis to neck. Insurance pays for all of it, and it only takes 90 minutes or so. The best part is that I have an on-going series of pictures of my insides, and the doctors can keep track of any changes.

Well, I recently had the scan, and just got the results. No surprises, and one section of the aneurism has actually shrunk by .6mm, which is good news.

Congrats on not being dead!

Isn't that an awful lot of radiation exposure to be receiving over time? (!!) I can see getting a few over the course of many years, but getting one annually for the rest of your life seems like it introduces a decidedly not insignificant risk of cancer. What happened to the whole "First, do no harm" Hippocratic Oath bit? :dunno:

I have just been through a bunch of scans of various sorts over the last year or so. It is something that preys on my mind, but really it is all about the 'why'. I have been persuaded that it is better to run that risk (in my case), than to not have the information they can provide.

Living is a health hazard, and in the long run we are all dead of something.

Modern CT machines use much less radiation than those from even 5 years ago. In fact, there's a sign on the wall of the dressing/waiting room that touts their new, improved machines, and how the dose is about 1/3 of the previous models. University of Rochester Medical Centers are big business around here (and affiliated with the medical school), so they keep things up to date. The facility is only a few years old, and very modern. Hell, even the IV contrast solution is better/safer than it was when I started getting scans.

Frankly, the scans are a small price to pay for the lack of pain and recovery time (up to a full year) that traditional aneurism repair would have cost me. Not to mention I get to talk to the hot nurses!

An old boss of mine had an aneurysm on his descending aorta, had it repaired the old-fashioned way(in 1987, after all). He showed me the scars - it looked liked they cut him in half, removed all his organs and then put him back together again. I understand that was close to what they did. Easily a year to recover, and he was never the same.
I think you made the right risk/benefit call.

My sister has been through that. Twice. Turns out that there's just no easy way to pull out a pair of lungs and put new ones in.

Definitely a brutal procedure, and long recovery. Not a year, but easily many months, featuring pretty serious physical therapy.

Sounds like Rleete made the right choice here.

Yeah, that's about it. When my vascular surgeon called me and told me it was time, the following appointment scared the crap outa me. I was still in shock when he told me about the FDA trial, as he and the guy who invented the process had become friends at some medical convention. The timing couldn't have been better. And my aneurism was discovered almost by accident when I had a kidney stone, and my regular doctor had a scan done to check when I was having lingering pain. That's when he sent me to the vascular surgeon, who put me on a regimen of ultrasounds every 6 months.

It's really something that couldn't be done 10 years ago, what with all the technology involved. First, they take a high-resolution MRI scan. Then, using specially made machines, weave custom stents based on my anatomy. For the operation, the operating table has some sort of scanner built in (fluoroscope?), so they can see the stents to position them. The operating room looked like something out of Star Trek. All told, I have nearly 2.5 feet of stent in me.

I came across a rather well-written paper describing in detail how to destroy the Earth. It's far too long to post here, but the full text is at: https://qntm.org/destroy

How to destroy the Earth

2003-04-03 by qntm

Preamble

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. I can in no way guarantee the complete extinction of the human race via any of these methods, real or imaginary. Humanity is wily and resourceful, and many of the methods outlined below will take many years to even become available, let alone implement, by which time mankind may well have spread to other planets; indeed, other star systems. If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.

This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.

Contents

• Preamble
• Mission statement
• Current Earth-Destruction Status
• Methods for destroying the Earth
• Fall-back methods
• Other, less scientifically probable ways that Earth could be destroyed
• Methods from fiction
• Things which will NOT destroy the Earth
• General geocide strategy
• Credits

Mission statement

For the purposes of what I hope to be a technically and scientifically accurate document, I will define our goal thus: by any means necessary, to change the Earth into something other than a planet or a dwarf planet.

The International Astronomical Union defines a planet as:
a celestial body that

1. is in orbit around the Sun
2. has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and
3. has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit

and a dwarf planet as:
a celestial body that

1. is in orbit around the Sun
2. has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape,
3. has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and
4. is not a satellite.

Since "celestial body" does not include the Earth, we shall assume for the sake of pedantry that the IAU meant to say "astronomical body".

These definitions instantly suggest some very simple ways of stripping the Earth of its planethood, such as hurling it into interstellar space, moving it into orbit around a gas giant, or moving it into a solar orbit whose neighbourhood is not cleared (the main asteroid belt being the most obvious choice). A slightly less obvious method would be redefining "planet" not to include the Earth. Naturally, these methods (the latter of which is by far the most feasible method listed in this document) will not be considered to count - redefining something doesn't make it go away.

We are left, therefore, with the challenge of significantly altering the Earth's physical structure, or else reducing its mass such that it can maintain a shape which is not round. For example: blowing it up, turning it into a dust cloud, merging it with a larger body, et cetera.

Current Earth-Destruction Status

• Number of times the Earth has been destroyed: 1

Information courtesy of the International Earth-Destruction Advisory Board