GlenTheMachine

12 ms·

91.
by GlenTheMachine 2y ago
“Write down the problem” is hugely underrated as part of the algorithm. In my experience, at least when doing research, if you can precisely and rigorously define the problem you actually need to solve you’re probably halfway to a solutio
92.
by GlenTheMachine 2y ago
One minor quibble: on-orbit refueling has been demonstrated, during the DARPA Orbital Express mission in 2006. Otherwise, if NASA issued stock, you should consider shorting it.
93.
by GlenTheMachine 2y ago
I am too young to have ever used a slide rule in anger, but that doesn't mean I don't have one. My mother's, when she went to grad school.
94.
by GlenTheMachine 2y ago
And thus does the wheel of technology spin. I have a very slight problem in that I went to grad school when professionals still used calculators, and real professionals used HP calculators. And so I still own, and use, a variety of HP sci
95.
by GlenTheMachine 2y ago
You need to run your machine shop like a clean room. Laminar airflow, high grade air filters, glove boxes, etc. Anyone who has ever even walked through a machine shop will know how challenging that would be. You probably aren’t going to do
96.
by GlenTheMachine 2y ago
Is it possible that most terrorist groups understand the cost/benefit trade off? In other words, if you have folks capable of designing and/or assembling a nuclear device, those aren’t people you just throw away. I understand that
97.
by GlenTheMachine 2y ago
My understanding is that it isn’t enough to know how to build a nuclear weapon, or even to have the materials. Uranium and plutonium will kill you very quickly in a machine shop setting if you don’t also have the right protective equipment
98.
by GlenTheMachine 2y ago
Yes, and also the human owners are increasingly crazy. As in, they want the same kind of unlimited care a human would get, but don’t want to pay for it and take it out on the vet when presented with the bill. You never really been Karened u
99.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
Actually you don't. A well known attack against trucking is to suspend a cinder block from an overpass, just high enough for the cars to miss it but not the trucks. People put them up in the middle of the night and are miles away befor
100.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
Spoofing radar signals isn't exactly new, and the ability to do it on the ground (so to speak) shouldn't be surprising. The military has been doing it for decades. Also, it doesn't take nearly the sophistication of the system
101.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
As a controls engineer, I strongly discourage using hertz as a measure of events. It's an abuse of notation. In control theory and signal processing, we refer to the frequencies that make up a signal in hertz. The maximum frequency a c
102.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
Sure, there's some radiation, and it's shielded to some extent. But 10 mm of aluminum isn't that great at radiation shielding. The big difference is that deep space missions stay in space for decades. The rovers were in space
103.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
Primarily for machine vision applications, both for robotic satellite servicing and for e.g. processing earth imagery data onboard to reduce downlink requirements. Goddard does quite a lot of work on camera-based RPO (rendezvous and proximi
104.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
Note, also, that just being on a planetary surface significantly reduces your radiation exposure even if the planet doesn't have magnetic fields. The body of the planet shields you from the sun half the time. A thin atmosphere also ha
105.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
The question is whether you need to. Yeah, it would be cool. Yeah, you could probably go faster. But usually, none of that is worth it. The science can still get done without it.
106.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
"The cerebellum may also inspire artificial-intelligence approaches somewhat, especially approaches to robotics or other control, in that it may be be beneficial to include a fast feedforward-only predictive modeling step to control re
107.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
One issue here is that there are well built quality products on the market; the problem is distinguishing them from the crap. Also, they cost more. Total cost of ownership is typically a lot lower, though. Want a mechanical pencil that wi
108.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
Yes, given the size, power, and reliability constraints. There were, of course, far more powerful computers around… but not ones you could fit in a spacecraft the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. The Apollo program consumed something like half
109.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
They won’t be. We will use RAD750’s, the flight qualified variant of the PowerPC architecture. That’s the standard high end flight processor. https://www.petervis.com/Vintage%20Chips/PowerPC%20750/RAD75... The nex
110.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
TL/DR: I rearranged the address lines on an embedded controller with a razor knife to "fix" a bug on a bus translation chip. I was writing the motor controller code for a new submersible robot my PhD lab was building. We had
111.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
I did something similar on the C64 (6502). Programmatically user code could mask interrupts, but as long as it didn’t it worked fine. It saved all the registers and restored them prior to switching execution threads. The unified memory spac
112.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
There's nothing wrong with being a communicator to the public.
113.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
Why Tegmark?
114.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
I had the most amazing printer when I was in college. It was a NeXT laser printer that I got for a steal when NeXT dropped out of the hardware market; the university library had one as a sales model, and I was the NeXT sales rep, so they le
115.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
There is no doubt in my mind that the light we used could have set off the sprinklers from at least fifty feet. I don't know off the top of my head the amp rating, but I know we had to have the room electric supply upgraded (and this w
116.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
I am absolutely not surprised, this should be a completely expected outcome if you've ever worked with film lights. For reference our light was probably more like 40-50 feet away from our test article. We loaned it to some NASA colleag
117.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
My research group used to use a Hollywood spotlight to simulate the lighting in orbit. These lights take a long time to power cycle, so once they're on you kind of want to keep them on, otherwise it's 15-30 minutes once you turn t
118.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
For some reason, a certain part of humanity thinks that vets should be doing the work just out of kindness, eg free or nearly free. Minor surgery on your dog still requires anesthesia, x-rays, IV fluids, scalpels, etc etc, and those are usu
119.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
My wife is a vet. One big issue is that most people don’t have pet insurance. But they do have medical insurance. As a consequence they are completely surprised by the out-of-pocket costs of medical procedures. Hip surgery (to pick somethin
120.
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
I went to a small rural high school in the 1980s. Taught myself to code, started a business writing software, entered and won the regional science fair and placed second in the CS division of the International Science and Engineering Fair i

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