kloch

Angular resolution through the Atmosphere has been solved with adaptive optics and advanced mathematical techniques.

Unfortunately, nothing can remove the temperature of the atmosphere (which affects infrared imaging), or the absorption of many wavelength bands.

Only maybe in the dense core of a galaxy because incident radiation falls off with the square of distance.

The nearest star to us after the Sun is ~4ly away, or ~250k AU. The Sun would have to be ~63 billion times brighter to give the same incident radiation at 250k AU, and that is just a typical distance between stars in our neighborhood . The Sun is also brighter than the average star, especially the older stars that congregate near the galactic center.

Galaxies can easily have 1 trillion stars but they are usually so spread out as to make this impractical. This is also why the Milky Way, Triangulum, LMC, SMC, and Andromeda (nearest galaxies) are so faint to the naked eye.

Nobody who had to work with 6509's/7609's at an ISP is shedding a tear over this.

Someone (Richard Steenbergen?) once made a joke that we should take the last 6509/7609 and launch it into orbit to celebrate.

It's not that they weren't popular. At one point in the mid 2000's they appeared to make up about 1/3 of major internet routers (if you looked around a carrier hotel). This was due to their extremely low cost compared to actual high end routers. While they had serious limitations and were notoriously sensitive to "IOS roulette", somehow you could just make them work.

I remember Hale-Bopp in 1997. At it's peak it was so bright you could easily see it from inside a brightly lit restaurant, looking out a window 20 feet away.

> Never have more than 79 characters per line Never write lines longer than 79 characters.

I'm sorry, I just cannot do this. I start to feel somewhat guity after 300 characters but 80 feels like an Atari 800.

I bought a CD from CDNOW over Telnet in the early 90's!

I also remember telnet BBS's became popular for a few years when I was in college 91-93.

> n 1976, while Van Flandern was employed by the USNO, he began to promote the belief that major planets sometimes explode.[30] Van Flandern also speculated that the origin of the human species may well have been on the planet Mars, which he believed was once a moon of a now-exploded "Planet V".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Van_Flandern#Exploding_pla...

> Mistake it may well be, but the fact remains that this sense of the word is in widespread use today, and may be found often enough in well regarded and highly edited, publications.

I would say you are most likely to find this usage of that word in well regarded and highly edited, publications.

I just had an idea that may be my worst technology idea ever.

Assemble some unstable atoms (that decay into carbon) into the desired cubic structure. When they decay you have a diamond.

The problem with this is that if it can decay fast enough (even with outside neutrons) it will be too hot (pun intended), and if it decays slowly enough it will take too long. Depending on the source isotopes and process it could also result in a radioactive diamond! Also, the heat of the process would have to not change the crystal structure.

However, some day when we master quarks and the weak interaction we might be able to do this quickly and safely.

I did indeed mean a singe, byte-valued parameter indicating angle (similar to the single angle parameter of a mechanical polarizing filter)

Full polarization and phase info would be great to have also but probably not necessary for reflection suppression. And yes purely circular polarization would be undefined in this scenario but again not common (possible?) with reflections.

What we need is sensors that can scan polarization on a per-pixel basis (like 256 orientations per pixel per image. Then it would be much easier to detect and remove consistently polarized components of the image (as specular reflections from glass are).

This would just be a fully electronic/computational version of a mechanical polarizing filter.

> Physicists actually use spherical cows-- it's a useful simplification to make calculations tractable

https://x.com/kevinmloch/status/1770484487689798030

I have a personal theory about human intuition.

It feels like answers come "from outer space" or "from God" but it's really just a highly optimized and efficient part of the brain for a very specific function. For that narrow function your brain has an effective IQ of something like 2000. As our brains have a much lower average IQ, we don't have the context to understand how we found the answer so we experience it and describe it as intuition.

If our entire brain operated at an IQ of 2000, we wouldn't experience it as intuition or a flash of genius, we would just say "I figured it out".

What I have read about Ramanujan sounds like he had some form of high functioning savant syndrome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savant_syndrome

Thank you for the clarification. I have removed "Show HN:" from the title

In this case I wanted to make clear it was not my drone

> 10+ bits. Jpegli can be encoded with 10+ bits per component.

If you are making a new image/video codec in 2024 please don't just give us 2 measly extra bits of DR. Support up to 16 bit unsigned integer and floating point options. Sheesh.

Someone told me once that Beofang uses the open source DSD (digital speech decoder) package in their scanners/radios. Can anyone confirm this?

Scientific publishing is a total joke these days, especially for theoretical works (vs practical/experimental results).

We need a better way to sift through the mountains of make-work papers to find the stuff that actually works and is useful. Ironically, AI will probably help with that, at least until it outperforms humans at scientific discoveries itself.

I remember overclocking the 486DX2-66 in the early 90's. I got the idea after reading my brother's Intel data book and noticed that while the max clock speed was speced at 66 MHz, all of the timing diagrams implied it could run to 80. I borrowed a variable speed clock generator and sure enough it was stable at 80, and started to crash at around 82MHz.

When I started to help friends overclock theirs, I quickly realized the "silicon lottery" variance. Some would only run reliably at 78 or 76 MHz. I bought a bunch of fixed frequency clock generators (that were drop-in replacements for the original on the motherboard) in 2MHz increments due to the variance.

This was back before CPU's had heat sinks or fans, so we quickly figured out that adding those gave better margins. We even made some 10-LED bar temperature display that had a thermocouple glued to the CPU case and indicated 10 degree C increments (green=0-60c, yellow=70-80c, red=90-100c).

And for the more complicated stuff, the Lyx editor is fantastic. Only rarely do I have to insert raw LaTeX codes.

https://www.lyx.org/

The "But wait, there's more!" device predates infomercials. It goes at least as far back as the "Atlantic city boardwalk pitch" from the early 20th century:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-tel

> K-tel was founded by Philip Kives,[4] a demonstration salesman from Oungre, Saskatchewan.[5][6] Kives had worked at a number of jobs as a young man, including selling cookware door-to-door and in a department store, and as a pitch-man on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City.

> Discharge across your heart can stop it, no problem. It is not at all difficult for that energy to route through your chest. You were lucky.

As my dad used to say "It's volts that jolts, but mills that kills!"

(you can survive a jolt very large voltage, but only a few milliamps across the heart can kill you)

Is the source for the original 1995 version available? At a retro arcade it is the one game you can never play because there is always a line (harder to get a spot than Tron). I remember playing it on pc around 1997 also.

I find it amusing that you need a normal distribution of scalars to generate a uniform distribution of vectors on an n-sphere.

I didn't know Bob but I was fortunate enough to work with another legend of live sound: Tommy Linthicum.

The sound company he started with his highschool friend (National Sound) ended up doing the first 11 world tours for Rush. He pioneered "flying" PA speakers above the stage in the 1970's. Before that they were commonly just stacked on the front/sides of the stage. Later, National Sound merged with another company to form National Events, which did sound/light/staging for almost all of the major concerts and political rallies on the national mall in DC for several decades.

I made a tribute video after his death in 2007: https://kevinloch.com/tommy/tommytribute-highres.avi

I found this wonderful page while searching for pics of a SPARCstation SLC

Wiki page for the star system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_110067

> Zip ties have an annoying square head, and the tag end is often cut off not quite flush with the head, giving a great jagged edge to lacerate some poor mechanic's hand.

In decades past my hands were cut many times in data center racks because of this. Fortunately, zip ties have gone out of fashion and everyone uses Velcro now. The advantages of Velcro over zip ties in data center racks:

- Even pressure and no risk of over tightening

- Trivial to re-work when cables are added/removed

- No more cut hands!

The only downside is that sometimes the loops can be too loose and slide down to the next loop. This is especially common when very few cables are being bound and the Velcro structure does not want to conform to such a tight radius.

You don't need a garage.

You just need the ability to make things that work. And by "work" I mean actually work, and in a way that others want to use it (an intuitive interface that needs almost no training/explanation helps a lot here). It doesn't have to be polished, pretty, or anywhere near feature complete (see: Apple 1). It just has to pass the "will people actually use this beyond the novelty phase" test. I can't stress enough how important intuitive function is above form at this stage.

That's step 1.

Step 2 is to have a management team that can effectively monetize that thing and manage the risks (financial/legal/market) that all businesses have to deal with. Engineers are usually not good at these things.

I've succeeded at step 1 many times but I'm personally not good at Step 2.

> Luckily NetBSD still exists, I very much doubt they will depreciate 32 bit:

I love NetBSD and their focus ppears to be so you can run a modern supported/bugfixed OS on legacy hardware.

So FreeBSD and NetBSD are perfect compliments to each other.