keenerd

15 ms·

61.
by keenerd 9y ago
> The figures for Scotland are even more striking. Nearly half the land is in the hands of 432 private individuals and companies. More than a quarter of all Scottish estates of more than 5,000 acres are held by a list of aristocratic fam
62.
by keenerd 9y ago
Your thoughts on the Lofstrom loop concept? It seems like the most practical non-rocket idea at the moment.
63.
by keenerd 9y ago
If you want reliability, don't get a Pi. Look at the selection of Odroids and use one of their emmc modules.
64.
by keenerd 9y ago
The battery life on my Chromebook jumped from 10 hours to 15 hours when I replaced ChromeOS with Linux. Trading all of that Javascript for C makes a huge difference on battery life.
65.
by keenerd 9y ago
At the very least they should have included an "America's Navy" simulation game.
66.
by keenerd 9y ago
Okay, I concede it is totally possible. After including Nasa's atmosphere model and some drag coefficients from super-sonic bullets, it looks like Red Dragon's aerobraking maneuver would take 1600 seconds, cover 4800km and leave
67.
by keenerd 9y ago
We can also look at delta-V charts. Earth to the Moon is like 16.4km/s, Earth to Mars is like 14.3km/s using every available aerobraking opportunity (6.4km/s saved) and assuming 500m/s for the final powered landing. (T
68.
by keenerd 9y ago
I still think you are overstating things. Stefan-Boltzmann is just a fancy way to say radiation. That is more or less a solved problem with nested shells. Each layer of shell cuts the losses in half. But let's ignore that for now
69.
by keenerd 9y ago
Why would the Moon be any less independent than Mars? It is only 20% less delta-V to ship something there. It is just as much in their interests to become self-sufficient.
70.
by keenerd 9y ago
> It's still enough that Mars Global Surveyor used it to make up a 1,250 m/s delta-v deficit. It took MGS 15 months (not counting delays) of aerobraking to do that. MGS only weighed 1000kg too. Maybe it could work for shipp
71.
by keenerd 9y ago
Mercury won't be under any serious consideration for habitation for a long time. It is down at the bottom of the biggest gravity well within a few light years. Too much delta-V to come or go. It is the least explored inner planet
72.
by keenerd 9y ago
I'm having trouble thinking of catastrophes that could take out both. Well, I can think of a few (bio-weapon, nearby supernova) but they would take out a Mars colony just as easily.
73.
by keenerd 9y ago
The Martian atmosphere is next to worthless for aerobraking human-scale infrastructure. One of the most significant points in the Moon's favor is the (relative) ease with which a space elevator could be built. It doesn't need uno
74.
by keenerd 9y ago
> I'm intrigued by the future we will be living in where everything will be delivered to us. Future? Welcome to the 1800's. Every little shop in town had delivery boys. The lady of the house could walk to a dozen shops, insp
75.
by keenerd 9y ago
> there literally isn't enough lithium on earth to support the electric car market and lithium ion batteries are soon going to become prohibitively expensive. Probably not true. Check out this thread: https://news.ycombi
76.
by keenerd 9y ago
Of course not. I've documented some of that: http://kmkeen.com/c100p-tweaks/
77.
by keenerd 9y ago
My Asus C100P was around $280 when it was released. It is now down to $230. The 4GB model specifically, because it is my daily driver and I do my dev work on it. I do "actual computing" on it too, since it is has way more ram an
78.
by keenerd 9y ago
> The question, then, would be "what isn't covered by Schumpeterian?" .. rent-seeking only? Normal businesses that are created for traditional reasons. For example, to partake in a gold rush (like phone apps a few years
79.
by keenerd 9y ago
> That's also why I don't care about all these fears about us not having enough lithium Who is afraid of that? Take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... Lithium
80.
by keenerd 9y ago
You can't draw any useful conclusions from that. It is only depicting vertical force. Pushing up, not pushing off. Pushing off refers to forwards, longitudinal force. Walking and running are commonly modeled by inverted pendulums, a
81.
by keenerd 9y ago
Conversion to dumb american: 16 teaspoons of sugar per day was considered high. (If you don't enjoy cooking from scratch, try a mass-based recipe instead of a traditional volume-based recipe. It is so much faster and more convenient.)
82.
by keenerd 9y ago
Print() is valid in Python2. It will print a tuple under some conditions, but that is still syntactically valid and a graceful degradation. (Print is for humans to read. As long as a human can understand it, good enough. Going for full
83.
by keenerd 9y ago
You can't make something truly polyglot across all of 2.X and all of 3.X. However much of py3 syntax is supported by py2. As far as I know, 2to3 doesn't produce py3-only syntax. I diff the original and the converted code, mergi
84.
by keenerd 9y ago
I've been doing this for ten years. Why wouldn't you use 2to3? In my experience, 2to3 is all you need 95% of the time. It is really that good. The only times it doesn't work is with python that is bad to an unusual degree.
85.
by keenerd 9y ago
On the other hand there is Color Forth, which replaces syntax with color. It produces extremely compact code.
86.
by keenerd 9y ago
> i have used python before, and it was slower to develop in and more error prone than labview for system development. Exact opposite in my experience. I've been there, tried that. Re-wrote it in python for a more than 50x produ
87.
by keenerd 9y ago
I'm arguing against the existence of things that can't be measured. How is "market efficiency" different from Carl Sagan's "Dragon in my Garage"? It sounds like you saying that private companies that don&
88.
by keenerd 9y ago
This is more specific and useful. But it is still fairly hand-wavy. How is this efficiency measured? Is "market efficiency" really nothing more than the average USD to conduct a trade? Or the number of microseconds? (In eithe
89.
by keenerd 9y ago
Too vague! Since 1990, US population has increased 30% while the (inflation corrected) GDP has increased 90%. So something improved. I'm going to (arbitrarily) say it was computer literacy, since home PC ownership went from 15% of ho
90.
by keenerd 9y ago
Right, but how does "market efficiency" trickle through the rest of society? I can't even find anything that quantifies market efficiency, let alone anyone who has tracked it over the years.

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