ballooney

Ludicrous, deeply confused, and wrong bro science.

Do you genuinely think that this is the worst economy ever?

Just to be clear incase the other replies haven’t made it so, you are definitely, definitely completely wrong about this and continuing to think this way will cause you to misunderstand the world you live in and make mistaken decisions. I have lived in several European countries and they all have a sect of loud delicate people pretending they are victims and persecuted for wanting to be patriots.

Exactly the sort of darling that that my college tutor would have said needed to be killed. “Yes, I know you’re very proud of it…”

You don’t have to imagine it, it happened in a series of Mars mission failures at the end of the 90s that were designed under the ‘faster better cheaper’ paradigm and lead to congressional reviews, the nasa administrator losing his job, and a return to slower and expensiver.

Nothing nonchalant about it. There was a stringent qualification process.

The time between boosters first being reused in Falcons and this mission is the same as the time between JFK's 'we choose to go to the moon' speech and the actual moon landings.

Apply jobs to what?

I remember an undergraduate homework question that was just asking you to calculate the fourier transform of a gaussian of mean 0 and variance a. You get out a gaussian of mean 0 and variance 1/a.

I missed the significance of this, until we went over the homework with the TA and pointed out the implications of this result, heisenberg, etc.

It was very enjoyable that something I had previously taken as a sort of spooky truth of the quantum universe (Heisenberg's uncertainty principle) was actually just a pretty mechanically apparent consequence of some basic algebra on an EE homework.

I shall choose to remember him in his prime.

The guys who did well at my uni (a very good one) in my experience really were consistent in putting the work in. It's not that they had to really struggle with the material and homework problems, but they consistently did a good shift every day, and seemed to quite enjoy doing past exam questions when exam season approached, and all the rest. There was of course the odd mathmo savant who could see the matrix, but they were the exception. This was a good university that you've heard of, it had the best of the best aswell as well as the people like me. There were correspondingly people who I thought were brilliant and had serious flare, and have gone on to have excellent careers, but they didn't really Do The Work and their exams results reflected that. Thankfully, it doesn't really matter in the long run provided you survive it all psychologically.

That’s why you don’t have to explicitly add it as a qualifier at every instance in which it’s implied in your work of non fiction for a general audience.

Just ask on their IRC channel. The bar is set very low.

I think you’ve accidentally remapped ‘.’ to ‘?’ On your keyboard.

I think the GP might have meant that Mach 3 at ground level is even more technically astonishing - a lot of the historial benchmarks for airspeed (mach 2 fighters and interceptors, the SR71's mach 3) were only valid at very high altitudes were the atmosphere is sufficiently thin to make the achivement teneable from a drag and heat-flux perspective. To cruise along at Mach 3 at sea level is a quite astonishing display of brute force.

A comment when an upvote would do - this is the kind of small act of generosity that I wish to acknowledge and praise in prose - thank you for taking the couple of minutes to do this. I've been feeling a little bleak about the internet lately as the SNR plummets in the tidal wave of AI seo search results, AI comments, etc. Thank you for taking the trouble. I went to EMFCamp in the UK a couple of weeks ago and had a similar resurgence in enthusiasm about simple things like asking a question of someone and getting an above-and-beyond, going-out-of-their-way response to share their enthusiasm and knowledge about something with you. We must defend these pockets of human interaction. [brought to you after a boozy work lunch but the sentiment is genuine].

[Reed-Solomon is the more conventional formulation if you do end up going looking]

Giving up Amazon Prime (which i used for shipping more than watching The Boys) has been surprisingly painless. Ebay seems pretty good for free P&P and finding obscure things. On this occassion, it genuinely wasn't that inconvenient to vote with my wallet.

Well, they absolutely _are_ addressed to impressionable, not always especially worldly, young [mostly] men. They are the workers he needs to send into his particular mine.

Agreed! For anyone else who, like me, didnt really pay attention to SD cards for a few years, it’s quite amazing how cheap they are for their capacity now. 256GB from reputable people like sandisk for low tens of dollars. Used one as a good travel backup drive on a recent work trip.

I know you're meant to just upvote here rather than say 'me too' but I am also a sucker.

Very neat - thank you for sharing.

Just out of interest would you mind sharing an example (eg a bit of screengrab) of the rendered result of the macro, and/or the macro itself? It sounds useful but I can’t quite visualise.

No one on this site should be contributing to a system that lets you buy a cooked chicken for $5! It’s destroying livelihoods and the environment.

He’s also on Knorr’s payroll for saying it.

He gets lots of interesting guests (and some BSers) on his podcast, so people listen.

I should have said explicitly, rather the subsuming it in all else being equal, that it’s _very_ different between ‘multicopter’ mode and flying under a wing. The later is, of course, much mor efficient, and the propulsion is correspondingly much quieter.

For a given amount of lift, all things being equal, a single larger diameter propellor will be quieter than several smaller ones at higher speeds, as most of the noise is from turbulence and a function of the difference in velocity between the air accelerated through the rotors and the ‘static’ air surrounding it.

Question for anyone still browsing this far back in the timeline - any recommendations for other good engineering war-story blogs? Ideally aerospace, robotics etc.

I mean lots of the lore is just residual 16 year old’s getting into reading stuff. You read l’Estranger (translated), decide you’re an intellectual, and so have a go at Ulysses cos it’s the hardest one and so suitable for you, an intellectual. The internet has been a good transmission vector for the sentiment.

If your ideas about cooking come from watching Masterchef (analogously), you might treat the idea of making a beurre blanc as a similar act of conquest, triumph in the face of splitting adversity whilst a thousand-voice choir crescendos in the background as you whisk. But a million french housewives happily made it for decades having never been told it’s impossible, and indeed knowing better that it isn’t.

It feels like we’re in a bit of a nadir, agriculturally, in terms of soil exhaustion and erosion, crop monocultures, and so on, largely because of technology letting you do the same thing to bigger areas more quickly and with fewer people, and we’re reaching the end of the epoch where the cost of this can be blithely externalised.

_However_, it seems like it could also be an inflection point, again because of technology. Imagine if tractors could tow behind them not a spraying trailer but a computer vision + laser system that could identify and zap individual weeds rather than napalming the whole ecosystem chemically, or that had arms that could pick only the correct, or ripe crop, or sub-varietal of crop, on a field planted with a variety of useful plants that balanced out the intensity with which they extracted nutrients from the soil. All of this at the cost/scale required to support the 8 billion (or so) people on the earth now with the agricultural land we have now, but perhaps too with the ability to open up more marginal bits of land to agriculture, and de-intensify the current wrung-to-death expanses of flat that we have to use now to accommodate the limitations of current farm machinery.