ixf

Earth's atmosphere is annoying, yes, but for huge swathes of observational science it's not a deal-breaker. Not having massive telescopes on the ground where you can fiddle with your instrumentation and take advantage of apertures and construction techniques simply not possible in space _is_ a deal-breaker.

The required precision for construction of telescopes is incredible, and doesn't translate to space well, especially once you start talking about apertures that even folded won't fit into even the largest Starship SpaceX is proposing.

Ground-based astronomy is here to stay and with good reason. SpaceX needs to avoid or minimise the harms to these users of the night sky.

There is another aspect of harm, too - the casual observer. The night sky is a precious resource and shared by all. Introducing huge constellations which in many parts of the world will be visible year-round (and in some quite heavily populated areas like northern Europe, even through the night at some times of year) is like building a huge mobile phone mast outside someone's window and expecting them not to complain, but on a much larger scale.

Light pollution is a huge issue, and satellites can pollute just as well (if not more effectively) than ground based sources - it needs to be an ecological consideration of any launch.

So, for sleeping I'd go for softer plugs like those made by Howard Leight for shooting (Laser Leights) or Moldex Spark Plugs.

Hearing protection always talks about attenuation in terms of dB(A) (A-weighting being a sensible thing to do when measuring perceived sound levels). 30dB(A) is a significant attenuation (logarithmic scale, don't forget). 35dB(A) is quite an improvement over 30dB(A).

For long-term use, ear plugs aren't great. But ear defenders can be had cheaply which will work well; I know of some people who use ear defenders atop in-ear active-noise-cancelling headphones as a double-whammy.

The correct answer is to work/sleep in quiet places, though, but I realise this is fast becoming a luxury.

This is the worst thing - they have a pretty good API and sensible terms to use it for personal use at least. Garmin by comparison is an omnishambles - no API unless you're a megacorp.

"unable to avoid existing satellites in orbit being entered into" is, in my book, worse than "we just cba"

You really can't do PTP over the internet, at least not meaningfully. Anyone who needs PTP is going to have their own grandmasters, reference sources, etc - and then a distribution network.

Most telecoms applications use an ePRTC source which tends to be implemented as a GPS/GLONASS/Galileo redundant frequency source, plus a local rubidium source or cesium reference. High-end telecoms applications use a hydrogen maser.

You can't stuff that over an unmanaged network and get the performance you need. Hardware needs to support it hop-to-hop.

There's a dedicated device, Kardia, which does this; it's fairly low-cost and claims to be able to reliably diagnose AFib. There's also another wearable heart monitor I can't remember the name of, but I had major issues with it because the electrodes weren't hypoallergenic and so caused an uncomfortable rash...

6 is useful for non-dense high-bandwidth environments where you might need to get 10G-BASET a little further than 5e will manage, but 6 doesn't address enhanced alien crosstalk. This means in dense environments it may struggle. 6A does, via shielding, and so will work better in dense environments (where you're likely to see 10G-BT anyway).

There are practical issues there. Liquid helium is relatively expensive and scarce, magnetic fields from the machine by definition need to be high to get good results, and to throw more fun into the mix you need to stop external radio interference from getting at the machine. Could you get the cost down to "specialised doctor's office" levels? Maaaaybe. Does AI have a role to play in that? Not one bit.

The frustrating thing with Neo4j is that they have two modes - a fairly neutered open source version, and a ~$35k/node enterprise version, with absolutely nothing inbetween. They're apparently doing a cloudy hosted enterprise version somewhere inbetween but that's some time out and not a self-hostable option.

This topic is also the theme of a rather good collection of essays on Singapore's politics by Cherian George - there's some available online here https://www.airconditionednation.com/

Not sure what IMUs you're using, but we've been using civilian MEMS and FOG IMUs for years now. You still can't make anything purely inertial good enough to keep position accurately enough to be a GPS replacement for more than a few hours.

Fascinating. A lot of the on-chip photonics stuff has the potential to make huge impacts on other research areas, too - but the potential for significant architectural changes in HPC and even hypervisor workloads with improvements to in-machine/cross-machine buses is huge.

Certainly a huge improvement over Slack in that it's federated. It's not quite there yet, but certainly usable today - it needs to mature a little yet.

Very old audio equipment is in a similar boat - I know archivists who are prioritizing stuff for digitization based on the number of tape head hours they think they've got left in older machines.

For some media, this is absolutely the case. Particularly films that are slightly damaged, or seriously damaged, it's well worth holding onto the material in order to wait for better techniques to become available.

Case in point, this recent restoration of Morecambe and Wise by BBC R&D: http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2017-12-morecambe-wise-video-fi...

They laser cut the film apart, then used X-ray microtomography to scan the film and some very clever software to unwarp layers from the 3D data produced by the X-ray microtomography process. Not exactly something we could've done 5 years ago.