221 karma · joined July 19, 2013
Sooo, did that debt get paid off, and they got XAi stock. If so, buying that Tesla debt might not have been the complete bloodbath it should have been.
The levels of .. self-fertilizing transactions here boggles the mind. I guess that's the idea.
Why?
To start with "we" - he and his students - made the mirrors out of old portlights (the glass in portholes), so it was "assumed" they would flex (since they were thinner than store-bought mirror blanks) and would be subject to thermal issues.
Then of course was the fact the telescope tube was made out of a heavy cardboard concrete form called a "Sonotube", which you'd waterproof and paint - paint color and pattern choice being one of the most creative parts of the project. The "diagonal" - the mirror which directed the light path 90-degrees out to the eyepiece - was mounted on a 1"-2" dowel with 3 slots cut into it and held in place by wood shingles.
The mirror mount itself was a 3/4" piece of plywood with 3 bolts in it, which you'd use to collimate the mirror once it was mounted in the tube.
And then the mount. Not only was it "alt-azimuth", it was made of plywood. You built a box around the tube, and two circles on the box fit into 1/2 circles in the mount.
There are more details on the Stellafane page - https://stellafane.org/tm/dob/index.html - but those are even fancier than the ones we made!
But Dobson's ultimate heresy was his approach to figuring the mirror:
Instead of using a "Foucault Tester" to measure and figure the mirror, he'd mount the polished mirror in the telescope and point it at a point source of light - usually the sun's reflection off a ceramic power line insulator.
By moving the image in and out of focus and looking for bright rings in the image, you could tell the shape of the mirror and whether is had hills or valleys in the figure. The end result was a parabola accurate to 1/2 or 1/4 wave (he said he could get it to 1/10th wave, and I have no reason to doubt it).
To the folks used to using much fancier foucault or even more advanced testing methods on much more expensive mirror blanks this was impossible and widely derided and, frankly, made fun of. People weren't very nice.
But when they took the mirrors and tested them with their foucault and diffraction testers they got a big surprise - the curves _were_ accurate and of high quality. And, _big_ - people regularly made 16" telescopes this way, and the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers had a portable 24" for goodness sake.
(I think people kind of forgot he used to be a physicist, and probably knew a thing or two about light).
The other big beef was the alt-azimuth mount. Not only did it not have setting circles to find things in the sky by RA and Dec, it wouldn't automatically track, so it could never be used to take pictures (you can get Dobsonians which will do that today natch now that we have computer controlled stepping motors).
But the point was _none of that mattered_: He wanted to make telescopes for people to look through, not take pictures with. So if he could build a telescope he could wheel out into Golden Gate park, set up in 15 minutes, and have 100 people see stars, planets and nebulae, that was The Win.
And teaching regular people - including kids - of both genders - how to make their own telescope, well that was almost as good. A big part of that was it was _affordable_, which meant many, many more people could make telescopes than otherwise. In Dot-Com vernacular, he grew the TAM (Total Addressable - or would that be Astronomical - Market), well, astronomically.
(Bada-Bing, I'm here all week folks).
But seriously, I can tell you from experience, no astrophotograph you take will ever, ever, compare to seeing Saturn, or M31, or any one of many other things with your own eye, and in a telescope you built.
Sorry for the long screed - got started and stirred up some memories there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dobson_(amateur_astronome...
I later went on to make a 16" and then "fell off the wagon" and bought refractors, equatorial mounts and cameras. But I never could have gotten started without him.
* Richard Greenberg suggests "a few" kilometers. * Robert Pappalardo suggests ~20 kilometers.
You know who else said this (in spirit)? Bill Watterson, author of Calvin and Hobbes.
There are few other people I'd be proud to be in the company of :-).
And this are only the debts which have been talked about _publically_.
I really get the impression lots of the sentences and paragraphs are stilted translations which don't succeed, either because of the translator of the inability of english to express the nuance of what the artist meant. To be clear, I think the latter limitation goes both ways, indeed any time you are translating between languages.
So it may just be another event which will drive Twitter's price down even further and make it a _worse_ deal for him.
From Bloomberg "The buyers could only back out of the agreement in the case of a material adverse effect, a high bar that excludes issues like market volatility or industry challenges." (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-07-13/elon-m...).
I suppose one could argue that the Whistleblower's report is "material adverse affect", something I'm sure will come out in the trial.
"So, tell me, do you go home to your Mom and say "Hey, I robbed 6 people today! Aren't you proud?"
It usually doesn't go well.
Seriously, they should use this mechanism to call out legislators that refuse to act on client, or, even worse, block client action.
They should also include international figures - "Heat Wave Bolsonaro" has a nice ring to it.
It's in "Alpha" and works pretty well.
Enjoy!
. Religious Cults. If you look at the religiously inspired insanity in US Laws and Politics recently, coupled with what's going on in, say, Afganistan, I'd say "check".
. Doomsday preppers. Check.
. All sorts of irrational behaviors. Well, if you include enabling destructive climate change in the face of overwhelming evidence, I'd say Check.
It's almost like we read all those stories and said "Hold my Beer".
So, for the James Webb, I'm sure they will be able to do the same thing to help improve and bring out details in it's images - it's just that the scale will be shifted to the red a bit.
Article: https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/blueshift/index.php/2016/09/13/hub...
Maybe you meant to say "formerly paid to be a quantum physicist"? :-)
My first reaction was "So, where does you family fit into all this?"
This sounds like someone who read the history of WeWork, but skipped the part at the end.
Wolves use a highly coordinated attack, where lead dogs harry the prey and are replaced as they tire.
Also, you need more than a simple strategy to take down an animal that can hurt you by kicking you with sharp hooves, poking you with antlers, or calling on 300 of it's close friends to trample you and your little pack to death.
https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/deploymentExplo...
This is the unfortunate reality of space: The images we see from the Hubble, et al, are exposed for minutes if not hours, and processed to bring out colors invisible to the human eye. An astronaut flying to see the Webb, or one of many other "well known" astronomical landmarks would see either nothing or a faint smudge without a telescope or other enhancements.
The aforementioned NASA blog post goes into the many other reasons this wasn't practical.
Even though they didn't sell their stock at a loss, they were forced to sell a big part of their holdings to meet their tax bill.
But, worst of all, the stock rebounded the next year.
---------------------------
I had other friends that exercised their stock, knowing full well they'd have to sell some at tax time to pay their taxes. What they didn't count on was getting promoted to the C-Suite and ending up LOCKED OUT of selling stock.
They told me the story of this huge tax bill (which they could have comfortably paid if they could sell), and a huge penalty for paying them late. I'm not a tax person by any means but I suggested they _donate_ stock to charity.
Turns out it was a good idea. With their tax accountant's guidance they were able to donate stock at the current value, realize the deduction and offset their gain. Problem solved.
(Again, I'm _NOT_ an accountant. Don't try this on your own at home. Only attempt in the presence of a qualified tax accountant.)
This was to prevent others from also getting the data and publishing before the requesting scientist.
Assuming this continues to be true, they probably wouldn't want to handle the data by publishing it to a FTP server immediately on receipt.
The body is ~$5750 which is not peanuts, but it's not $50K either.
"NOTE: Drobo Thunderbolt had been working properly up to RC2 posted on Nov. 11. If your Drobo has a USB port, use this. In the interim we are looking into the issue. "
My experience is a combination of kernel panics on startup, volumes not mounted, and not showing a filesystem in the Disk Utility. I was worried I'd lost all my data until I ran across this and was able to plug one device in via USB. Unfortunately, my Drobo 8D doesn't have a USB port, so I'll have to wait for a software solution.