idlewords

All of them!

Alcohol in cocktails is like MSG in cooking. Sometimes you just have to sneak some in there to tie everything together.

It is very scary. Oddly that makes blogs kind of a good place to start, since almost no one will find them or read them. It's public writing, but a lot less nerve-wracking than putting yourself out there in other formats (like forum posts).

There was a fatality on a Southwest flight in 2018.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1380

The best writing advice I ever got was from a college professor—"everybody's got 100 bad essays in them. You just have to get them out."

I feel like this is what blogging is especially good for. You can clear out the awful stuff and then try to incrementally improve.

I would diametrically disagree with point #7—if you want to write well, you need to revise the hell out of it. I guess pick whose writing you like better, between me and the author, and take the corresponding advice.

Yeah, or create a CAPTCHA that is something like "what transmission components did this car need replaced before reaching Kinshasa" and hide your Tier 1 support reps behind it.

When people say stuff like this I like to test the claim by kicking them in the shin.

I'm too ignorant to answer that, but the technical paper here [https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.11871] goes into a wealth of detail, and includes an image of Earth as it would appear to such a telescope (before and after post-processing) from 30 parsecs away. The optical properties of the solar gravitational lens are pretty astonishing.

There's also that thread about the Belgian couple who drove across the Congo:

https://forum.expeditionportal.com/threads/democratic-republ...

I call these kinds of forum threads "afternoon destroyers". It would be fun to weaponize them into a whole organized link page.

A different stab at this is to ask what it would take to build a telescope that could image some of these Earth-like planets, a project that turns out to be easier (in a very loose sense of that word) than sending cameras there.

The idea is you send a camera very, very far out in the Solar System (hundreds of AU) and then use the Sun's gravity well as your lens. Neat stuff and, unlike the interstellar probes, potentially doable in our lifetime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens

In space culture this is widely considered a dick move.

That's been the status quo since Concorde. The problem is it's hard to make a supersonic jet that has decent subsonic performance, you kind of have to pick one flight regime or the other to optimize for. And the market for business jets that you can only really fly transoceanic is small.

It's not pessimism to correctly describe reality.

Remember that the biggest technical challenge to passenger supersonic flight is hacking Congress. People really don't like plutocrats in private jets cracking their windows and scaring their dog.

Baldly accusing someone of bad faith is serious business, and I believe against the rules of this forum. It is way worse than calling out what you believe are bad arguments, as it's a slur against someone's integrity and character. Rayiner doesn't deserve that.

Nominative determinism. There's also the pithy Latin phrase nomen omen.

A specific Mach number is what airliner airframes are designed to fly at; it's absolutely the correct unit to talk about in this context. If airplane A is designed to cruise at 0.94 mach, it is faster than airplane B that cruises at 0.89 mach.

I don't understand the need for all the smoke and din in this argument thread. Old passenger jets flew a little faster than modern ones and that's okay!

You're saying planes have a top speed faster than their cruise speed; I'm saying it doesn't matter which of the two metrics you compare on, older jets are faster on both.

You can't tell someone you respect them in the same paragraph where you're accusing them of bad faith.

If you want to go by top speeds, for the 787 (entered service 2011) it's Mach 0.9, for the A-350 (2015) it's 0.89, while for the 707-120 (1958) it's Mach 0.91. The 747 (1970) can go Mach 0.94.

Modern jets are built to fly slightly slower than early jetliners, both in normal operation and at top speed. The reason is fuel economy, but the difference is real.

The real product Boom hopes to offer is regulatory capture, so that restrictions on supersonic business jets can be lifted. Then the bizjet itself can sell as a luxury status symbol.

They are not; the 707 flew noticeably faster than modern airliners (525 knots cruise, compare to 485 knots for the Boeing 787).

The sky was also noticeably darker.

Here is a monster pilot forum thread on Concorde that ends up pulling in senior engineers, pilots, aerodynamicists and even a former flight attendant. They lovingly go over every detail of the plane's design and operation.

WARNING, serious temporal hazard. Do not click if you have work to do today or are supervising small children.

https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/423988-concorde-question.htm...

Calling his firm "Tools for Humanity" shows an unusual level of self-awareness for Altman.

Unfortunately this is a topic that attracts LARPers. Remember that if things get spicy, you are not going to settings nerd your way out of a bad interaction with the police.

Tech advice for legal and illegal protests is pretty much diametrically opposite, and advice for countries like the United States is much different than for somewhere like Egypt.

It's complicated!

In other sectors that's just called a "small business" and celebrated as the fullest expression of the American dream. I've always found it funny that tech treats the idea of a going concern with such distaste.

There was similar hype around "intelligent agents" taking over the web back in the early 2000's, that might serve as a good corrective. Does anyone know a good writeup about it?

Pardon the money!

It's a full pardon; there is no crime.