nether

Self-driving, plug-in Tacoma = dream car.

I don't even look at my feed for this reason. I think it kind of offends people though when I meet them and had no idea they went to Yosemite the past weekend. So now before I hang out with someone, I brush up on their feed real quick.

They don't outsource their formula development or testing, which is the difficult part. You could say they outsource the manufacturing, but that's common in every industry these days.

Are you a placard holder in California? Are you ok with people using their dead grandmother's placard to get a disabled spot, making you park at a non-disabled spot far away?

LA Times is writing about a California issue, where disabled spots are uniquely crowded. This is bad for people who are disabled. They truly need these spots but often can't find any available due to abuse. This has been documented extensively:

> Just inside the city limits, in Old Sacramento, Investigative Reporter Thom Jensen found nearly every disabled parking spot was taken. Dozens more metered spots also had cars and trucks in them - parked free of charge.

http://www.abc10.com/news/local/one-out-of-every-8-californi...

> At any given moment, on any given street, more than a third of the vehicles displaying the tags -- and parking without paying -- are doing so illegally, say officials with the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/22/local/la-me-disabled...

You see this pretty much everywhere. At the Mammoth Mountain Ski Area, it's not uncommon to see a family park at one of the coveted disabled spots right next to the slopes, take down four pairs of skis, and start hitting the pow. The UCLA football team was discovered a while back to be possessing placards.

I've been living in my pickup truck for about a year while rock climbing, skiing, hiking, and not working. A pickup is not a van, and definitely makes things like cooking or just hanging out less enjoyable. Regardless of the space constraints, the biggest thing is the loneliness of the vagabond lifestyle. I actually kind of miss my coworkers. Most connections are ephemeral, like climbing with someone for a day before they take off to LA or Oregon. There's also some stress with finding places to park at night. You're almost always staying somewhere where you shouldn't quite be. I've spent some entire days just surfing around on the internet, not motivated to really go out and adventure. I'd agree with this blogpost https://theinspiredclimber.com/2014/05/14/romancing-the-dirt..., "don’t expect going on the road alone to fill the void in your life."

Like the parent commenter, I too have spilled my pee bottle in my living compartment.

What type of rope coiling is that on Mr. Anderson's shoulder?

That's what I like about LA. Keeps out the superficial people, and draws those who can see past appearances.

Viewing it from a bike at night reveals more character: http://www.thepassageride.com/Photos

> When I signed up the sample they took was spit in a vial.

Yes, and? I don't see the significance of the testing medium here. DNA sequencing from hair or blood or saliva will yield identical results.

I wonder if there are instances where people signed the NDA and took the money, that we have not heard about.

You measure how much stress is applied to critical components, which uses up some of their finite lives. From experiment and theory, we know how much "damage" is done to a part subjected to a given stress. Similarly we know how much stress on components is generated in each launch. Therefore we can take the total life of each critical part (determined thru experiment and analysis), and divide it by the reduction in life (= damage) for each launch, to get the number of remaining launches. The part with the lowest remaining life determines the life of the system.

X-ray takes care of macro internal defects. It doesn't reveal defects at the grain (nanometer) scale, outside of research labs. I think it'd be time prohibitive to scan at that resolution for every component of large systems.

Yeah, we used X-ray inspections to get away with smaller safety margins at my last employer. Plastic deformations start at the grain level (nanometers) though, and I don't think there's any X-ray microscopy to do this en masse.

Semantics - it is anticipated and quantified, but with error bounds ;)

Yes, mitigated compared to a full-speed descent. It's not really possible to compare it to an entirely different system though like a fighter jet. Fatigue is analyzed at a part level, like a single strut or a patch of aluminum reinforcing a small area, and is dependent on the type of loading, materials, magnitude/dir of stress, temps in some cases, frequency of cycles, and so on. Fatigue life in aerospace is a tradeoff between designing heavier, beefier, longer lasting parts and skimpier, lighter parts that lead to a lighter vehicle overall.

Any part can undergo fatigue damage for a given loading if it is designed to be weak enough.

Not to be pedantic, but it's not possible to inspect an entire rocket for all defects because so many of them are microscopic and internal (not on the surface of a solid part). These can be analyzed and predicted with fatigue models in aggregate with varying levels of certainty. This comprises the fascinating field of fatigue analysis.

Welp

Seriously unless you're budget constrained, so much better. Cost twice as much as 2-week lenses, but you get to crack open a sterile pair each morning. Toss em at night.

Visions of a Flying Machine by Jakab. About the Wright brothers. Basically emphasizes how they were consummate engineers, not scientists. In a field where there were not yet any textbooks, they zeroed in on what was necessary to build a practical airplane. They figured out each aspect (aerodynamics, controls etc.) to a satisfactory level, then moved onto the next without getting bogged down. They didn't fully understand the physics (they were by no measure aerodynamicists), but they knew enough to predict how their craft would do on paper, which is all engineers need.

Then again at universities, isn't it generally the older profs and not the fresh postdocs doing the most novel work?

I think Vern Raburn was when he started Eclipse Aviation. Company still lost a billion.

Looking at their about page, these guys have a lot of aerospace experience: Lockheed, Boeing, Gulfstream, Scaled Composites (!), SpaceX, NASA, P&W, and more. I'm optimistic about this project. Hopefully they'll turn out more like SpaceX and less like Eclipse Aviation (also founded by a tech guy).

No kidding. I've still got 5 bring a friend tickets for Mammoth, if anyone on HN is interested.

This is unfair. It is also unfair that blacks receive harsher punishments, starting in preschool, and that this prejudice follows them their entire lives. Can you imagine that? Being told by society that you are bad and predisposed to being a criminal, probably every fucking day? In small and large ways. Learned helplessness is real. I may not see the injustice vividly, because I am not black nor do I have any close black friends (I have a college bud that I hardly talk to, that's it). But it's everywhere. Google knows the inequity exists and is taking a step to address it.

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/21/292456211/...

https://newsone.com/1859475/black-people-receive-60-longer-s...

> There are big racial differences in how school discipline is meted out: students of color are much more likely to be suspended or expelled that white students, even when the infractions are the same.

Well, I don't think there's much consideration of nuclear power in the first place by most countries. A nuclear-powered B-36D (large bomber) was explored in the '60s though. Complications included the weight of the lead shielding to protect occupants, and that doing some routine operations in the radioactive areas required a remote controlled robot. The reactor was never used to power the aircraft, and test flights just explored the effects of radiation on everything.

But they do have experience in aerospace, since they're made up of engineers from Boeing, Cessna, and NASA.

Anything wrong with buying a commercial clothes washer and dryer, like the ones at laundromats?

"Longer path" has no bearing on reality. A flat plate can generate plenty of lift even with both sides the same. It's also hard to define "path," as the air starts convecting well ahead of the wing in subsonic flow.