PopePompus

31 ms·

271.
by PopePompus 8y ago
There were a number of things they could have tried. No one of the alternatives (except launching a rescue shuttle) could possibly have turned out worse than the course they chose. Instead of an Apollo-13 style "Failure is not an o
272.
by PopePompus 8y ago
Heavy turbulence might be exciting, though.
273.
by PopePompus 8y ago
So what you're saying is that when an organization is considering using a Google product, it needs to track down some Google employees and speak with them privately, to see if the company is really serious about supporting it?
274.
by PopePompus 8y ago
It may be that GCP isn't going anywhere, but when our organization was choosing a cloud service, we chose Amazon over Google specifically because of Google's flakiness. Google could drop cloud services tomorrow, and it would not
275.
by PopePompus 8y ago
Not everything is possible. There are things which are provably impossible. It is, for example, impossible to find an algebraic solution for general polynomials of degree five or higher. The things we know to be impossible tend to be
276.
by PopePompus 8y ago
> I'm not sure why the author is talking about gravity ripping you apart in a black hole. It Is Known [tm] that larger black holes have pretty gentle event horizons. But the article isn't about what happens at the event horizon
277.
by PopePompus 8y ago
This isn't quite right. If you take the mass of Sgr A* (the black hole in the center of the galaxy) and divide it by the volume of a sphere (let's ignore rotation for simplicity) with the radius of the event horizon, you do get
278.
by PopePompus 8y ago
OK, fine. But why is NASA still pretending to build the Orion Spacecraft?
279.
by PopePompus 8y ago
I disagree. Not only can we no longer build large things, we are barely able to maintain the things we have. I lived in Cambridge MA during the repair of the Anderson Memorial Bridge, described here: http://larrysummers.com&#
280.
by PopePompus 8y ago
Some commercial forecasters have a "wet bias" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_bias ). They intentionally overestimate the odds for precipitation on the theory that people are happier if it doesn't rain
281.
by PopePompus 8y ago
It makes sense to insure against events that can wipe you out financially. Don't insure your car against theft, if you can easily afford to replace it. But unless you have north of about $5,000,000 that you don't really need,
282.
by PopePompus 8y ago
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." I don't think the detection of GW falls into the category of an extraordinary claim. Gravitational waves are a clear prediction of general relativity, and general rel
283.
by PopePompus 8y ago
Sounds good, as long as the public isn't expected to cough up the funds for their research. Otherwise, don't blame the public for wondering if the LHC was worth the cost.
284.
by PopePompus 8y ago
Well, at least the wealthy end up in private rooms, which is a big help. If you are unfortunate enough to share a room with another patient, then either he will be sick enough that the staff keeps you awake half the night as they attend t
285.
by PopePompus 8y ago
This was the first IC I ever saw, when I was pulling apart busted electronics equipment in the early 1970s. I understood why transistors had three leads, but what the heck could possibly need eight leads?!?!?
286.
by PopePompus 8y ago
Actually, you can do substantially better than one pixel, because the point spread function is bigger than one pixel. Even a technique as simple as centroiding will get you sub-pixel accuracy.
287.
by PopePompus 8y ago
This article brings up a point I used to worry about - if people are just automatically pumping money into a list of stocks, how does the price remain connected to reality?. But apparently the answer is that mis-priced stocks present an a
288.
by PopePompus 8y ago
Does this mean that all-female boards are also forbidden?
289.
by PopePompus 8y ago
Learn the constellations. It doesn’t take very long, and it’s quite satisfying to walk our at night and immediately be oriented. How many things can you look at that are largely unchanged from when your ancestors looked at them thousand
290.
by PopePompus 8y ago
I used to work with an astronomical observatory which was located on a mountain (Mauna Kea). When things were running smoothly, the telescope could be controlled entirely remotely, and the observatory itself would be unoccupied. But oft
291.
by PopePompus 8y ago
> For example, consider a finite number of legos in a room. This works with legos, but not subatomic particles. No matter how smart you are, you can't distinguish between two states which differ only by having two electrons swappe
292.
by PopePompus 8y ago
You should not go into a PhD program in any field if you're in it for the money. This is because your department will have at least a few grad students who are in it for the love of the field, and they will work insane hours. They
293.
by PopePompus 8y ago
The research is fine, but the clickbait title of this article is BS. The Iron and Titanium are not in a metalic state, so - no metalic sky
294.
by PopePompus 8y ago
Even in Pie, "Adaptive Brightness" is terrible. The display often abruptly drops in brightness for seemingly no reason. I think I could do better with a photocell and an opamp.
295.
by PopePompus 8y ago
One of the things that amazes me is that it is still not possible to do an ab initio quantum mechanics calculation of the rotational spectrum of even a diatomic molecule with sufficient accuracy to allow identification from measured spectra
296.
by PopePompus 13y ago
What is presented here is actually a reductio ad absurdum proof that 1 - 1 + 1 -1 ... does not equal 1/2 (or any other number).