alfiopuglisi

Wouldn't it be the smell of space suits and space stations, rather than space itself? I don't think astronauts have tried to breath the few particles in the vacuum.

Not true, but you still need a pretty big one. In order to resolve a 50cm object 238k miles away (average Moon distance) at visible light wavelengths you need a telescope with a diameter of 500 meters. In order to resolve some details on such object, say have 10 distinct pixels on it, you need 10 times as much. Since resolving power only depends on the distance between the two extreme viewpoints, you could get away with two separate telescopes separated by 5km. But optical interferometry is extremely hard and, to this day, not very successfull.

The ESO observatory in Paranal has its own electricity power plant, both natural gas and - recently - solar.

Computers: multiple TB of data per day will be generated and will need to be archived, backed up, and made easily accessible. Everything on the telescope and the instruments mounted on it is computer-controlled, with countless computer and electronics racks to power and maintain.

Staff: not only salaries and food, they have to run a whole hotel-like facility for people who live on the site for weeks at a time, plus travel costs both from the rest of Chile and from the main HQ in Germany. It's in the middle of the most forbidding desert on Earth, so water and everything else has to be trucked in. Facilities are spread out, so there are dozens of trucks and cheap Fiat cars to go around, with a gas station to fill them up. Cooks, cleaners, engineers, technicians come and go nearly every day.

It all adds up quickly.

The segments themselves are 100% modular and you could tile an US state with them. The main problem is engineering: the whole thing needs to behave like a single object, turning 360 degrees and moving between horizon and zenith (horizontal and vertical), with a minimum of mechanical flexure. And also resisting wind load. In essence, it's a lightweight building that has to move freely, and this one won't get bigger.

More than temperature, the main problem is the atmosphere. Hubble can see a lot of infrared, and also ultraviolet, because it is in space. Ground-based IR telescopes are somewhat limited, and UV is non-existent.

Mostly size. Ordinary shooting stars are grain-of-sand sized, and what you see is actually the superheated air that they displace coming in at 10+ km/s. Something slightly bigger, like a rock a few cm wide, can cause a blinding fireball.

Speed also counts. It can range from 8 km/s (a "stationary" object, relative to us, falling into Earth's gravity well) to about 70 km/s (something in a retrograde orbit in the Earth's plane). That's a factor of almost 80 in energy to be dissipated

Probably a satellite in low-earth orbit. They only take a few minutes to go from one horizon to the other. Since it is very bright, I am guessing it is the ISS.

Update: Iceland is too far north (64°N) to see the ISS (max 51.6°N). Too bad.

Interesting. I am Italian and I had no idea. From the sound of it, these tourist-specialized trains will be a small niche.

To be fair, trains are already heavily used for domestic tourism, in addition to personal or business travel. Most biggish towns are well connected by local trains, and big cities in the north and center are easy to reach with the high-speed lines. For example, the popular Cinque Terre destination in Liguria is well-connected by a train route that touches all five towns with a frequent schedule, every 20 minutes or so. If you don't need to move too much at your destination, a train is often the most convenient way of reaching it.

Something I often use is the bicycle transport on local trains, allowed with a very low fee, like 3 euros: starting from home, follow any scenic route that ends in a town with a train station, and use the train to go back home. Bonus points if the route touches multiple towns, so if you are too tired after 4h on the bike, you can cut it short and go back anyway.

Photons travel at the speed of light, and at that speed, any "subjective" time is zero. In Einstein's theory of special relativity, the faster you go, the slower your proper time appears to an external observer. At the speed of light, this effect reaches infinity.

What about translation?

Short answer: no. Except maybe for picking up a word here and there. Reading Latin is somewhat easier, except for poetry, where the word order is completely hopeless. Source: I am Italian.

Edit: most Italians study Latin in high school, but the curriculum is focused on grammar and literary works, not casual conversation, and very little of writing down your own essays, or God forbid speaking it.

At the end of high school, you can almost - I mean almost - read Caesar's texts fluently, and then it quickly fades away due to lack of practice. The only remaining use is to read some historical plaques in city centers, and even that is quite difficult since they often contain strange abbreviations, made-up grammar from the middle ages, or missing pieces.

Shameless plug for my own python GUI toolkit: guietta! http://guietta.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

It is built on top of PyQt5. But be very careful if you use conda, because conda decided to rename the PyQt5 packages, resulting in near-irrecoverable env crashes if conda and pip are mixed. In that case, make sure to use conda-forge to install.

For certain values of "food and resources". Incoming solar energy is 7000x humanity's energy consumption, while one trillion is merely 125x the current population, so it's physically possible. Probably the biosphere would have to be converted into a food-producing chemical factory, along with substitutes for oxygen generation, waste recycling, etc.

Was my C64 different from yours? When I was a kid, I was doing exactly what you describe: throwing together BASIC programs from the prompt, run them, saving and loading them from disk (actually the cassette). The manual even had a BASIC crash course. When later I found the OS assembly source, most of it was the BASIC interpreter.

Maybe avmich is thinking of the STS (the Space Shuttle)

Actually, LLMs are completely deterministic. Their output is a list of possible word, ordered by probability. If you always choose the highest-ranked word for the next iteration, they will always generate the same sequence for the same prompt. In all current implementations, a small amount of randomness (called "temperature") is added. In practice, the higher the temperature, the more probable is that a word down the list is selected, rather than the top one.

I don't know about the UK, but in Italy everyone is on WhatsApp, grandparents included, and without it the country would shut down in a couple of hours. In addition, Italians create WhatsApp group chats for everything. Heck, my sport club has three separate whatsapp groups: a general one, one for the senior's team, and a third one to broadcast official information.

I stumbled on this pipeline idea reading this page: https://mtomassoli.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/pipelining-in-py... but the implementation looked quite complicated.

The code in this github repo is both simpler and more powerful, since it can handle generator expressions seamlessly.

Yes, any QWidget instance can be used directly in the layout. If then you want to reference it, the best option is to use the tuple syntax to assign it a name: (widget, 'name'). Check the slider example out (slider.py), it does exactly this.

If you look in the tutorial, there is also a ___ (three underscores) magic widget for special layouts :) I can see the difference between one and three, but between two and three it becomes difficult :)

It has matplotlib support: https://guietta.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html#matpl...

or were you thinking of something else?

'result' and 'Enter numbers:' are exactly the same thing - two QT labels. The example code just changes the first one's text. If you run the code, you'll see it by yourself.

PyQt is not really difficult, just boring. And a bit of magic was indeed the intended effect :)

No, you have to manually update widgets assigning them their new value (strings, and for labels also lists and dicts). I will think about such a feature but I have no experience with such dynamic frameworks :)

Quit is a built-in class, because is very common. There are also Yes, No, Ok and Cancel builtins. You could do the same writing ['Quit'] and binding it a function that quits the program.

Binding is done using QT's signals/slots mechanism under the hood, and can be done in several ways:

- using the 'with' statement as in the example, but this is often limited

- using an events layer, that is, a replica of the GUI layout, with a callable for each widget that you want to bind.

- using the @gui.auto decorator on a function: it will try to guess.

All this is described in the tutorial: https://guietta.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html , chapter "GUI actions"

In no particular order:

radio buttons still basically unsupported - no way of grouping them.

Add optional astropy units for values, maybe extending the tuple syntax: ('__a__', u.km). More difficult than it seems, because one needs to parse input strings. But very useful in a scientific environment.

'with' syntax still very limited, in particular locals() and globals() refer to the Gui class scope so for example anything imported at the beginning of the script is not available inside the with block.

Unit tests almost completely missing, also I have no idea how to properly test GUI code.

Meta-level: add this list to github :)

Guietta author here. In fact I am Italian, but the name is just a diminutive of "GUI" - in Italian it sounds something like "small and cute GUI". I have a friend called Giulia and she initially thought that it was dedicated to her :)

I realized too late that _ is used for i18n. Well, 10 minutes late maybe, but I had already completed the first test GUI and it looked so nice that I could not turn back :) If you have ideas for an alternative syntax, I am all ears.

Thanks for the heads up. I confess that I did not look deeply into library licenses while setting up the project. I will add a note about PySide2 being LGPL in the readme.

Yes, I was inspired by PySimpleGUI (and say as much in the introduction: https://guietta.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.html ). But I felt that PySimpleGUI did not go far enough in making things simple. It also supports multiple backends, so that may be a reason to keep things more structured. Guietta is just a thin wrapper over QT.

If you get around to test it, I would love to hear the results :)