HCIdivision17

In many ways, it's really just a matter of measurement power. An illuminating illustration of this is posed by how far away do you need to be from another person to see them disappear over the horizon [0]. Turns out it's like 6 miles. I have terrible eyesight, so without telescopic optics, I'd never have been able to measure this.

Rather, I'd have to rely on local measurements. And that'd nail me too: the Earth only curves about 12cm / km. So if I could only resolve a local rise-over-run of 1/1000, I wouldn't be able to fail the null hypothesis that the Earth is flat. (But if I could manage an order of magnitude better, I could!) And given that hills and such are all kinds of lumpy, and large bodies of water are rarely still, getting even that level of resolution without advanced optics would be difficult. (Though if you can be sure you've got a straight enough stick...)

So I think it really comes down to how well you can prove or measure anything. Once we had telescopes, there really wasn't too much confusion about the spherical nature of the planet. (And people had suspected for a very long time the earth was - at least in some way - round. Eclipses give that away a bit.) But the details really give us the resolving power to be sure. That and it helps to get away from local measurements - get up really high, and it becomes easier to tell (and IIRC some early experiments measuring the size of the Earth took advantage of really large height differences).

After all, Newton was right, too. But add a few extra zeroes to the solutions, and we start seeing some deviation from our relative measurements...

[0] http://mathcentral.uregina.ca/QQ/database/QQ.09.02/shirley3....

Foolishly, I don't really. I made the connection in some other thread on HN, and it's stuck with me. My advice is perhaps terrible: find yourself an old engineer and just do whatever it takes to be their friend and follow 'em like a puppy. It's sorta weird how effective it is to just be around people like that (and I think some PE licenses actually require apprenticeships for that reason).

But I do have two formative things: Feynman's lecture on Cargo Cult Science is excellent, with this gem:

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that... I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen." - Feynman [0]

I can't tell you how many times this has saved me in the field. Replace the word 'scientist' with '<YOUR DISCIPLINE HERE>' as needed. (And I think moreso for engineers than scientists, since safety absolutely requires this mentality.)

And I really like the ideas in The Pragmatic Programmer [1]. More than anything specific, the idea of not being married to any particular concept or solution, but rather to pragmatically chose what is correct then for that circumstance helps a lot. The book is opinionated, but reasonable, and copying that pleasant tone is a fast way to make allies when solving problems in a group. And it's a pretty good book to boot.

[0] http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html (and is an HN favorite, to be sure)

[1] https://pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer (another HN favorite, though not always brought up in terms of engineering)

It's not questionable, just good practice. And my experience tells me it's a Best Practice. `Bartweiss gives a good overview of it, but I'll share some advice I got from an engineering greybeard (which I most definitely am not).

He had a great story to go with this, but the TLDR is that the PoC is the safe choice when applied to engineering: give a true, best-faith effort to prove the opposing view correct. (And best-faith is important: you can not approach it with bias, lest you waste everyone's time.) If you're right, then you'll find an irrefutable flaw in the engineering, and if you're wrong you've learned something new.

If it sounds like a lot of effort, it is.

But this is also utterly win-win. It's a way of assuring that you've been careful. Avoiding the humiliation of hubris is great if a detail of the implementation was missed at first glance. But you also will inevitably more fully understand the problem when you've failed to implement the opposing view; it also puts you in the excellent position to graciously be on the same side as your opponent and now you can sway your now-ally-in-war in their reasoning. In either way, your goal must be to solve the problem, and not merely "win" political points.

Of course, there's crackpot theories and stupid ideas and foolish plans which should be dismissed with prejudice. But hopefully you're working in a professional environment where your coworkers really are trying their best to succeed. And even then, a serious engineer will still give the stupid ideas at least some (small) time of day, as you must have a reason for all decisions, even dismissals; as you become experienced, you'll be able to properly dismiss these faster and more precisely, but you'll still need to go through the process. That process is what separates the people who loudly proclaim they are smart and right from those who would testify in court they are right.

(Incidentally, this is part of the reason why I get immensely frustrated with "idea people", as it takes much more work to flesh out their half-assed ideas into full-assed ideas. Non-engineers don't get that there's a huge amount of effort to constantly take everything and everyone seriously.)

To be sure, there are limits to one's sanity when over-applying this principle, but I also would apply it far past where many would stop. A simple explanation that doesn't quite fit needs yet more inquiry. Normally, the application pre-limits the number of things that may go wrong, and you can use that to save some effort. For example, I may not know if a pressure sensor's wiring diagram is correct enough to squelch Cthulhu's call, but since that has not bearing on if the vaccuum system's gases are pure, I also don't care. (That's the sort of thing HR and Operations to worry about.)

Usually this meant digging in deep, questioning really basic stuff like "Are we sure this model is normally open or closed? Did the manufacturer forget to tell us?", and normally there would be clues or evidence to hint at the next round of questions. Eventually you'll have enough information that the evidence fits the questions, and there's no clear line of inquiry left. Life experience and just volume of work teaches one the limits of inquiry (old engineers can be shockingly good at this, to the point of appearing sloppy :)

I once spent 6 hours overnight troubleshooting a confusing gas non-leak that ended up being the result of a default setting changing on a valve being replaced off-the-record by not-the-usual-guy. It gave me the confidence that this process does eventually get to the bottom of it, but it was a long, meandering path from miswired panels to out of date schematics in the wrong language to noting how clean the part was to know someone replaced it. All to dig out the missing tribal and undocumented information, proving the PLC was actually correct to interlock the whole machine out. (It's like knowing your program will halt - you can't prove it, but you can still be damn sure it will. At least until it doesn't ;)

This philosophy is one of the cornerstones of my engineering practice. IFF you can describe why something is there - without using shortcuts/crutches like 'their dumb' - then we may be able to consider changing it. Otherwise, it's dangerous and risky to fool with it. Too many times did I see something absurd and paint myself into a corner trying to 'fix' it, when there really was a bizarre edge case that this covered. (And in plants, you usually only find these edge cases after enormously expensive production loss events!)

And it's a fantastic principle in general, since it's like the technical equivalent of the Principle of Charity.

( http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html )

I've been wondering if maybe they just switched something in the backend and a whole bunch of shows got confused metadata. They're not at all what would be interpreted as "Recently Added". Charitably, my only guess is the system just doesn't detect that certain shows used to be in the line-up. Cynically, I imagine someone in their management is taking advantage of a bug and calling it a feature.

My 12th grade lit teacher would likely note that we was rather squeezing seamen, and then leap into another lecture on Melville's literary craftiness. Gotta admit, though, it's a legendary pun.

Good news! Irish pubs are pretty great (I guess many thematic pubs are?), and while not pop-culture mainstream, are at least common enough that you likely have one not-too-far away. At the very least, it gives your idea something to grab onto :)

What's the stance on using tabs to keep the stuff after keywords lined up? Whacking space a bunch of times to keep an OR lined in a WHERE clause is incredibly annoying. Why not just go WHERE\tcol1 = 3\n\t\tORcol2=6

    select	*
    from	asdf
    where	col1 = 5
    	or	col2 = 6

I'll concede that the river is less pretty, but it's substantially easier to type, and SQL keywords are remarkably conducive to being tabbed around.

EDIT: Perhaps hilariously, by preceding the code with two spaces, the stuff got out of alignment. I'm adding another two padding spaces to start. (I usually use a 4 space tab, but I can see how the river becomes a bit wide on 8.)

This is going to be my go-to factoid on nuclear plant nimby-ism.

My uncle had an interesting experience in this vein. It was well understood that high voltage power lines caused all manner of health issues, from cancer to various degenerative diseases. He understood that EM radiation from the lines really shouldn't be very dangerous, though, and didn't think much of the leg of a line tower in his back yard. Then one day the power company came through to clear out the underbrush growing around the base of the line's tower. In just two days after the spraying all vegitation was thoroughly dead. Turns out they spray an Agent Orange-like chemical to keep the towers maintained from plant overgrowth. You can bet he moved shortly after noticing that. (This was some years ago, and likely has been (hopefully) rectified.)

I'm bookmarking your comment. It is just the slice-of-life that I want to show newbie engineers. Like some people say you need to spend a year or two in the service industry to learn empathy, I feel engineers likewise need to spend time in QA to learn what their ethics really are. QA is hard, and the pressure to pass is difficult to withstand; eventually you take the "my boss told me to do it" attitude or you learn to make ... Well, not enemies, but certainly rock the boat.

Kudos to you!

Oh, I see. In that case then, that's a very good question.

To me, the goal is exposure to brutal constraints. There are very few environments as demanding as space, and as such it's a fantastic crucible of learning. Really, the bottom of the ocean is likely the only other environment that is comparable to it. And also a fantastic alternative. Perhaps ironically, I think deep ocean research is actually far harder and riskier than space, and so space may be the easier alternative. But I certainly am no expert on it, and I would love a few billion dollars in research thrown at the ocean that wasn't myopically limited commercial interests. We could find some truly unbelievable things down there, stuff we could never hope to find on the surface of a planet.

So I guess my response is who knows? We should try them both and find out! There's plenty of people, resources, and time enough to try!

It's certainly enormously expensive. But... most things are. Waste is an extremely relative thing, even when it seems obvious. Basic research discovers things that normal iterative research never does. And space tech discovers things through scale, overcoming myopic outlooks in the way an Access database doesn't illuminate how distributed multi-region databases scale.

For example, what do you do with all that captured coal dust and slag we get from power plants scrubbing their exhaust? We could throw it away, but it turns out there are industries that would love to pay to take that garbage away and use it as a filler their process. We could have stuck with the argument that scrubbing is too expensive to be worth the trouble, and that it would never be practical. Or we can just do the engineering and try it out, and maybe new markets open up. Or not; at least we got some cleaner air.

There's a lot of risk, like any venture. Possibly garbage is just garbage. Possibly there's no reasonable return on investment. Possibly entire industrial supply chains shift to a new technology for the marginal improvement. Possibly a new process for extracting carbon nanotubes is discovered. Or we simply find a cool new color of black for our sports cars.

Maybe the data collected from the moon tells us that it's really just some fairly boring rock not worth our time. Maybe we learn that crystals grown in space can have a perfect crystal structure useful in manufacturing stable q-bits. Maybe we find an asteroid made of platinum and all energy markets brace for a massive tech change, or parhaps it's made of iron and we move on. Or... not; at least we got some pictures for the philosophers and the next generation is inspired to try harder.

The wins from basic research come from the unknown unknowns, and as such can be disruptive like an outside-context-problem [0]. Or are trivial duds; you can't tell at the start, but you can hope. Transistors and lasers are pretty useful! They alone are likely worth all the money we've ever thrown (or ever will) at basic research. Likewise satellites also changed the world, allowing us to do things that likely make all the money we spend on space easily worth it.

<insert some comment about Y Combinator startups maybe becoming billion dollar enterprises... but many fail.>

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession#Outside_Context_Prob...

INTERCAL has made many contributions to the state-of-the-art for numerous modern languages. My personal favorite sides with the author with the implementation of COME FROM, which is indisputably a vast improvement over the much maligned GOTO. It's so handy that it's been ported to Python! [0]

[0] http://entrian.com/goto/

Oh jeez. Never mind my sibling comment - this sucker seems hellaciously sophisticated, far more so than I was imagining. An active fuse that carries 1.5kA that's the size of a finger? I've seen fuses wider than my wrist blam for less.

Without the performance characteristics for the fuse, I wouldn't imagine it would be cheap. Specialized electronic components are usually very expensive, especially if they're never mass produced and engineered to a specific task (component ICs for devices in space face the same issue). That engineering is pretty damn expensive, the tooling to make the small run of components is expensive, and quality control is expensive. Make a few hundred million and those costs vanish compared to the input materials, compared to a few thousand components where the overhead dominates.

That novel completely ruined squids and asteroid mining for me, because I immediately think about it. Whenever I come across a group studying cephalopod intelligence, I am waiting for someone to say they developed a computer interface that they glom to and have one operating a motorized tank.

I can echo quite a lot of your sentiment. In high school we learned C/C++ (on TurboC++!) and had a blast. We were quite happy to get anything done, and never aspired to much since it took so much effort to do even simple things. Ideas and algorithms had a lot of hoops to jump through to get the computer to understand them.

Fast forward a number of years, and I'm an engineer working in a plant. I need to get some analysis done, and Excel just ain't cutting it. Somehow I happen upon pandas and IPython, and it's magic. I remember building classes for calculating vectors and such in high school, full of pointer nonsense and terrifying piles of boilerplate. (You haven't lived until you're a newbie attempting to code a templated class that makes doing physics look like an ordinary equation - you'd think it's easy, and it is! Right until it ain't.)

And now? I open up localhost:8888 and spin up a new Python kernel. Within seconds I am importing opencv and doing stuff I couldn't dream of in high school. And it's fast! I lost years from the discouragement of fighting linkers and arcane syntax errors. Intellectually gratifying sometimes, but ultimately not worth starting in. Accomplishing real work early counts for a lot.

Never mind that the curriculum attempted to switch to Java in our third year in high school. We all rebelled and won, and I feel like we dodged a bullet there.

The image of Io is especially gorgeous. I mean, does Io have an aurora going on there? So I pop "ralph jupiter io blue" into Google and got this:

https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_9...

Turns out it's from a volcano. Now, I get that we already knew about volcanoes there, and while I never really paid too much care about it, I can't help but be floored by that image. The plume is enormous, and it's blue. There's a lot of really, really cool things going on there (the color from the scattering alone is super neat), and suddenly I'm interested in extraterrestrial volcanoes.

I'm embarassed to say I continue to be shocked by how images from space can surprise and delight.

You know what? I think I damn near completely agree. And I'm a pretty big fan of Blender. I think there's still a lot of us excited by how far it has come and may not focus enough on how much more excellent it could be. Originally, Blender was almost completely unusable (save for the few who divined some of the interface philosophies). Today at least there's hope. Personally, I'm hoping for more projects like this extending Blender out and maybe bringing it a bit closer to parity with the more elegant and professional suites.

And I think way back when Blender was just getting its foothold as FOSS, there wasn't a lot of free modeling software, just very limited demos. Today, there's so much choice it's overwhelming. So thanks for the recommendations! (I just hope someone clever tries them out and works some their goodness into the Blender base :)

And it is fascinating to see how it has evolved to become this. When it was first created as an in-house tool at NaN, the interface was just about the opposite. After a hundred hours of use, the 'one hand on keyboard, one on mouse' philosophy started to make sense, but the shortcuts and keys still seemed arbitrary; you just sorta memorized the whole interface. Heck, just discovering how to add a cube was sort of a personal coup for early-high school me since I had never used any real 3d modeling anything before.

But it was functional, and had some really great ideas, and it was free (which I needed on my nonexistent allowance)! I just assumed that the real cost was just a brutal learning curve. Then the really cool open source movement started for it when NaN went under, and people spent the next decade working to make it better.

It's always been a program for enthusiasts and passionate people, and it really shows. After half a decade I went back to it and was dismayed to realize I had no idea how to use it any more. And then 15 minutes later I was right at home. The learning curve's still there, but there are guideposts everywhere in the application, and the documentation exists! That you can throw Hy on top of it and live code it is just one more spiffy example of it working as intended. I would go so far to say that it's a core idea, since the blending engine made so many cool things easy (and possible) way back when it had an inscrutable interface.

TL;DR: I agree wholeheartedly.

Oh gosh, having worked on a fairly large vacuum system, I can tell you that o-rings are monsters. Very minor errors in dimensions can mess up the seal, and temperature/humidity/wear/elasticity and all that can subtly mess with the dimensions in crazy nonlinear ways. You can simulate the ever loving garbage out of it and an imperceptible change in composition due to an undetectible mixing error when extruding the ring can cause a seal to slightly leak. Mayhem ensues. (And most likely any attempt to directly detect it will destroy the integrity of the o-ring or take so long to render the test useless, since there are usually hundreds of o-rings (or in the thousands - o-rings are all over the place).)

I'm not even talking about jackquesm's note about the failure mode, either. Just real insidious errors in manufacturing that can't be detected in any sort of reliable, sane way. Even the Challenger's o-ring wasn't guaranteed to fail, and indeed most didn't. In fact, most of that entire o-ring didn't fail.

I've seen some really freaky things amplify what are essentially chaotic edge cases. You can certainly figure them out, but you'd never get anything done for any level of affordability in time for any ship date if you didn't just calculate risk and go ahead.

TL;DR: risk is always there because the world's imperfect. At best you just tighten the statistical confidence, but that's super hard.

I think a critical part of his point is that what you build and what you model are neccessarily two different things. You can totally simulate it, and then when the rocket inevitably fails, you can go "aha! This bit deviated from the simulation!" But you can't feed that forward beforehand to prevent the failure, since you can't expect random acts of poor workmanship or crafting. You can only prepare and hope (and you can do that with shockingly high confidence - but rockets are more than equally shockingly complex.)

Part of what makes the idea of bringing the first stage back to the pad so important is that we so rarely get to use the same engines multiple times in the field (where all the really nasty reality checks are done). Being able to reuse stages allows us to far better model how they will perform in the future. Otherwise, we're using test beds to feed parameters into sims to inform our launches; it's good practice, but more physical evidence is always better.

Exactly. Having worked on vacuum systems for physical vapor deposition, I can assure you that there's an enormous amount of energy going into gently wafting the materials onto other materials. (The wide area glass coater I worked on had a 2MW substation running dozens of 150-200kW power supplies (not full tilt all at once, obviously).)

Really, I recommend anyone look into this stuff. Just to get silicon to the purity and precise structure to just start chip fabrication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_process Imagine the whole supply chain, from smelting metal for wires and cases to plastic molding to storage, economies of scale truly are vast.

One of the interesting notes in the article is that they apparently use a lot of oyster shells. I would assume the shells are typically a waste product in other (likely food) industry processes. That's pretty darn green. Besides, we have a lot of limestone, veritable rock-oceans of it.

That's part of why it's incredibly difficult to talk about waste on industrial scales. One plant's garbage is frequently another's input. Waste is expensive, so plants will always try to reduce it to the bare minimums, and if possible make money off it, in the case of certainl classes of recyclables.

I had to think about what that meant for a moment, as it's sort of part of the weirdness of the bottle. Really, putting a cork in it is probably closer to putting a lid on a bowl, no?

It's just sealing the local minimum. (Maximum? I don't really know what the sign should be for this. Probably maximum, for enclosed volume, since I'm not sure if it's reasonable to talk about the topology having a minimum in this context...)

And let us not forget The Fiddler.

You really haven't lived until you've died by a holy banana donkey armageddon nuke. (Actually, it made some balance fixes cool, like making certain guns more precise/accurate, or to make some more interesting/tactical.)

Because of The Fiddler, I never could understand why there wouldn't merely be oodles more weapons with each new game. Seemed like a no brainer. Oh well.

[0]http://worms2d.info/The_Fiddler

This is what I keep thinking. I'm excited about the tech that will be developed to make it work!

I live in Texas. I can't give a flying tube torpedo about whether CA gets a fancy speedy train thing. But I would love to have some very large-scale vacuum tube tech developed that can safely launch people. There's all kinds of great innovation that will come out of it.

I was never a part of a group that believed in hell (hope that doesn't give me away...), so I can't speak for that.

But, if you relax the rigor and you're willing to settle for what you personally qualify as overwhelming circumstantial evidence, it's not too hard to meet that level of confidence (the Anthropic Principle is very powerful). These people are often True Believers.

It's a whole different mindset, and worth spending the effort to wrap your head around. I'd bet it's a sufficiently different frame of mind that you'll have a hard time relating. It's easy to just gloss it over as a fool's thinking, but it really can be quite complex and deep (after all, without that moral vacuum, there's a lot of core axioms to keep straight). And that's not bad; just be warned that it can be a bit of a memetic virus, but it's certainly not too hard to quarantine. Usually at a very low level there's an assumption made about the way things are, and enough evidence is brought in to make that assumption feel reasonable; that's not science but rather more of a judicial argument. If it feels a bit boot-strappy, you're a bit on track. Typically once the mindset is settled, that rationalizes the initial bootstrap; I think often those who preach worry that many will not be exposed to the needed bootstrap, and feel a moral imperative to help others through that process. And that's how you get the evangelism. (Clearly there's a gross amount of glossing over here :)

And it'll help a lot in pleasantly/tactfully dealing with such individuals. People are just folk, and most are sincere. Just not always as... rigorous as folk like yourself.

Nicely put. This is exactly why there was (is?) quite a lot of effort in finding effective alternatives to the door-to-door method. There's still a lot of people who aren't modern (and the 'no person left behind' policy dictates that you'd continue to do door-to-door to sweep them up), but alternatives are needed.