Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.
The “space race” has always been a propaganda stunt.
There is a reason you don’t hear about every experimental result from the ISS, those are actual scientific achievements and not propaganda, while a guitar on the ISS or how to drink water, end up on the news.
China […] without the politics and waste
Wrong. China’s politics and waste may look different, they’re still there in huge amounts. Institutionalized corruption and cultural corner cutting, whether for a capitalist goal, or a power control and egocentrism goal, are still corruption and corner cutting.
In part, yes. Mostly it goes to show that bacteria are highly adaptable, and highly dangerous. Between the quick generation rate, and their ability to pick up genes as adult individuals, they can evolve faster than we can test new treatments against them. It’s only thanks to a complex immune system, that we get to live at all.
LoRas are AI shrooms.
“Somehow I suspect that international politics doesn’t depend on our models for the origin of the moon,” he says.
Creationists entered the chat…
Would be quite a plot twist if it resulted that the whole “seizures cure” spiel from electroshock therapy, resulted in it being “electrical waves help the brain to clean itself”, and have nothing to do with brain-destroying seizures.
Everything we’ve put into that level of orbit is falling, it is just falling so slowly […] go from a spiral to a more dramatic arc […] Once within the atmosphere
This is not correct.
The reason for a “more dramatic arc”, is that as an objects looses orbital height, it keeps hitting ever denser atmosphere, until it ends up losing enough momentum to not be able to complete an orbit, which precipitates things (pun intended).
Adding to @MaggiWuerze@feddit.de’s answer, an interesting tidbit: solar wind, particularly during more solar activity, blows (some of) Earth’s atmosphere all the way past the orbit of the Moon… so at some points in time, the Moon not only falls with style, but also falls through Earth’s atmosphere!
Simple explanation: 21st century tech.
A palm sized quadcopter, has more sensors and processing power, than many 20th century rockets.
SpaceX can afford to build dozens of (relatively) cheap prototypes, fill them with all kinds of sensors, hook them up to StarLink, and gather massive amounts of real-world data instead of some make-believe simulations, even when the rocket turns into thin dust. No video or flight recorders required.
For this latest flight 4, keep in mind that the damage to the flap would have thrown any simulation-based and verified flight computer program into the ground… but whatever they used, managed to adapt, compensate, and essentially land a rocket that was falling apart… all the while streaming live video and telemetry.
In software, a problem once solved is gone forever
That is not correct, and why having tests to detect regressions is important.
Not sure how much “technical debt” SpaceX might be incurring, but my guess is that each of these flights is providing massive amounts of data to plug into simulations of future designs, which might be more valuable than having a single “meticulous design” that would fail spectacularly if something like a rubber seal were to get too cold the night before.
Occam’s Razor is not a proof, it’s a way to prioritize resources onto more likely hypotheses.
last 100 years of radio until we die as a race.
Based on our own experience, over the last 100 years, radio signals have gone from very scarce, to a cacophony of millions of high bandwidth compressed and encrypted emissions that look like random noise from anywhere outside our solar system.
If we consider an intelligence with an evolution similar to our own, “in the clear” transmissions that might’ve reached Earth 200 years ago, would’ve gone completely unnoticed, while now we could be getting the sum of their thousands of Tbps of encrypted memes, and be none the wiser.
Both:
dialog_error = Dialog_plain.create_modal(error_text)
Variable and class names go from more general to more particular, functions begin with a verb.
Global functions are either “main”, or start with one of “debug”, “todo”, or “shit”.
Redefining identity in terms of cell organization, would definitely solve some ethical issues like human cloning: different structures, different individuals.
Now, the remaining question would be, how to “read” the structure. We can sequence DNA from a tiny sample, but disassembling people wouldn’t be… practical.
Tuvix was made, Tuvok and Neelix were recovered. Such are the paths of the universe, choices are just choices, right and wrong lie in the eye of the beholder.
That’s what I said (minus a typo).
(to nitpick however… there is some effect on the timing depending on how the planets align… wonder how a Moon right on its path impacted it)
Fun fact: the Sun is 8.3 light-minutes away from Earth, so the eclipse will start with light that left the Sun 8 minutes earlier, and end with light that left it 4 minutes before the eclipse.
If someone were to stand on Earth and send a signal to the Sun saying “hey, the eclipse is starting!”… it wouldn’t reach the Sun until 4 minutes after it already ended.
(Edit: typo)
The difference between theoretical math vs. applied math, is that one gives you spherical cows in a vacuum, while the other needs to take into account valve intake shapes and positioning so they can relight the reentry engines while fuel is experimenting those centrifugal forces.
“Will and dedication”, is what SpaceX is doing right now: getting stuff explode until they manage to account for all the variables you need to plug into the formulas… and this is just for the easy rocket science.
Selectively breeding and cloning genetically modified humans, is kind of frowned upon…
recycle materials in space to build space parts/ships/stations
If you mean in orbit, that’s orders of magnitude harder than reaching the Moon, and possibly harder than colonizing Mars.
We don’t have some scifi “gravity plating”, with some force fields to keep air in, to build a space dock, or a factory on a space station. Microgravity is fun for the first half hour, after that moving stuff around is a whole challenge on itself, something like screwing in a screw, or a lightbulb, is a separate challenge. Most of the knowledge about processes and logistics we use down the gravity well, with an atmosphere made primarily of nitrogen, goes out the window in microgravity.
The nearest “practical” place to recycle any materials, would be the Moon.
As some sources have titled it: “AI fixes fusion!” /s
On a more serious note, I find it interesting that a 25ms control loop is enough, and that:
the tearing prediction model could forecast the instability 300 ms before the disruption
Good model.
I want an eye replacement with a few extra opsins, and some EM sense like what birds have. Eternal life could be nice too, would make a lot of people reconsider their long term plans.