lutorm

First flights are basically never more than a basic functionality check of take-off and landing configurations. (Note that there were no pictures of it with the gear retracted, because that's also typically something you don't try on a first flight.)

In aerospace it definitely does happen. For example, NASA, as a customer, has the right to independently review flight software implemented by contractors.

Assuming you throw out dead batteries, what's the harm in shorting them? (If we're talking normal nonrechargable alkaline batteries. If throwing away a lithium battery I'll definitely verify that the cells are totally dead or protect the terminals.)

In Sweden, you can't open a bank account without showing your face and ID. I just had to do this for my Wise account, too, and it seems par for the course for the quite intrusive money laundering rules in the EU these days.

My tinnitus, both the one that's always present and the one I can provoke with my jaw muscles, is not a single-pitched tone but more like band-limited noise. I did a hearing test and we tried to match it to various frequencies. None of the models they had really fit, but the best one was a sort of moderately-wise noise.

I've always assumed the tinnitus arises from some sort of AGC, automatic gain control, in the auditory system, such that when something is damaged and the signal disappears, the brain will just turn up the gain until the noise is about the level it expects the signal to be.

At least my experience with AGC is that it's useless because times of silence ends up just being filled with noise... "audio system tinnitus..."

Yes, there are reports of trigger points in the jaw muscles being at least partially responsible for tinnitus (see e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Trigger-Point-Therapy-Workbook-Self-T... which, if you have any muscle related pains, will likely blow your mind.) I have exactly the same experience as you. I also get jaw induced headaches from biting my nails etc and my impression is that it is associated with an increase in my tinnitus.

Probably a related mechanism, but I can also sometimes hear my eye muscles working. It only happens if I'm sick or otherwise feeling under the weather, but moving my eyes rapidly is then associated with a swoosh-like auditory impression. I haven't heard anyone else experiencing this so far.

If you were talking about the battery in your EV, the cost of replacement would be a bit higher. There are more things with batteries than iphones.

Yes! Every time my phone's had a problem charging, the issue has been cleared by doing exactly this.

Yes, good point, the velocity was too low. Yet it looked like all the engines just shut down nominally.

Oh yes, having a car in Sweden is very expensive. And yes, the current government did remove the EV incentives. My point is just that that's not a positive or negative against Tesla compared to other brands.

Yeah, this is a good question. It could be from the engines, but nothing should change at that point that I can think of, since it's well before shutdown. It might also start to vent something, intentionally or not.

I hope they tell us.

I dunno, it looks like a nominal shutdown to me. The speed readout shows rapidly decreasing acceleration just as the engine displays go out instead of the telemetry suddenly going stale as you'd expect if it just blew up during the burn. Then, after the acceleration has gone to zero, the telemetry goes stale, so my guess would be on something going wrong during shutdown (ullage collapse when the propellant sloshes forward as the engines shut down maybe, this was a problem during the first landing test.)

AFTS seems unlikely this late in the burn, I think they said it was in terminal guidance and it's very hard to laterally change the impact point in any meaningful way with that much velocity. But I agree, it definitely looked like something's venting near the end, too.

Well, the old staging method tried in the last launch was to rotate the entire vehicle stack and "fling" the ship off. That obviously has a performance penalty in that you're not going to be pointing in the correct direction when you come off. I don't know if the 10% was compared to that or compared to a hypothetical "straight" staging with pushers, though.

They actually went well into space, given the conventional boundary of 100km.

Do you mean this was a launch failure or a test failure? It was obviously a launch failure, but even the most optimistic wouldn't have expected anything else. As for whether the test was a failure: since it successfully did a bunch of things that didn't work the last time, why would you say it's a failure?

A failure would have been scattering the pad all over again, and not getting to stage sep. Or worse.

Well the technical term is "suborbital", which literally means "below orbital". (It's the energy that's below orbital, not the height...)

You could equally flip your questions: If you only do things that your employees like, then why would you care if they have a union or not? In that case, the only thing a union would do is ensure that this state persists, which definitely is beneficial to employees.

Even a company that's great to work for today is just one leveraged buyout or restructuring away from worker's hell.

Does it tax Teslas more than other vehicles?

I sure seem to be seeing a lot of Teslas around...

What I wish I was reading is book 9 of Joel Shepherd's "Spiral Wars" series. Unfortunately it's not out yet. But he's one of my new favorite authors, both the Scifi Spiral Wars and the more fantasy-like "Sasha" series are excellent.

They gave up on Kwaj mostly from the terrible logistics and corrosive environment though. If it was hard getting an F1 there, I can't imagine the pain of assembling Starship...

This system probably isn't very comparable to the Starlink space lasers. Because of scale, Starlink is very heavily optimized for cost, while a bespoke deep space terminal probably doesn't even have cost as a factor.

It's one thing building (a pair of) working optical communications terminals. Designing it so you can build tens of thousands of them is a totally different game.

Since the TMT protests, access to the Mauna Kea summit is much more restricted. I would not count on going up past the visitor center or getting any kind of tour. The Subaru telescope has ended their public tour program.

The thing that a sim never can simulate (not even a full-motion sim) are the various ways the vestibular system can get confused by e.g. the coriolis force when you move your head while in a turn that makes your feel like you're turning around another axis.

Most sim pilots can fly on instruments without a problem, because it's precisely the conflicting information between the instruments and your vestibular system that makes it easy to get disoriented. Flying a sim, you'll never have your ear telling you that you're leaning on your side even though you're flying straight and level, or vice versa, so you'll never be tempted to side with your vestibular system.

In a real plane, just turning a tight turn and suddenly looking down on the floor because you dropped something can induce conflicting vestibular information that's quite disconcerting even in day VFR.

There are two-place similar aircraft that you can train in. They're just not classified as ultralights.

Indeed. We flew from Stockholm to Hawaii and the SAS flight was late out of Stockholm, which cascaded to us being a full 24h late (same flight next day) to our destination in Hawaii. We got reimbursed without a problem and since we were traveling with an infant it was actually kind of nice to get a free full nights sleep in a hotel near LAX...

I'm in a funny situation that at my desktop I've been using a Kinesis dvorak keyboard for over 20 years, but on laptops or other random computers I use qwerty. My brain is totally bought in on the different layouts, I don't even have to think about it. It's too much of a hassle to manage to reconfigure all of them to dvorak, and then no one else in the family would be able to use them either. An extra complication is that I also sometimes use a Swedish keyboard to type åäö and on a dvorak I have no idea where they would end up.

Perhaps it would pay off to standardize... But like someone else said, the letters aren't the problem, it's all the symbols that you almost never use that become impossible if they aren't labeled.

And here I was thinking someone was commuting in their own plane...

20 years ago I was mostly writing C++ for work. I still am.

Me neither and, because UPS/Fedex is stupid expensive to HI, I always send it USPS. Never had a problem.