thatcherc

14 ms·

91.
by thatcherc 5y ago
> On Earth, life preferentially uses 12C over the heavier 13C, bioaccumulating it, so we observe significantly more 12C than 13C in ancient rocks where life grew. If (like me) you're wondering why life prefers to use carbon-12 over
92.
by thatcherc 5y ago
Lots! It made $363 million off a $200 million budget [1]. That's probably lower than the studio expected for such a big movie, but still a solid profit and especially good in today's post(?)-covid box office. [1] - https:/&#
93.
by thatcherc 5y ago
(un?)fortunately quantum entanglement cannot be used to send information any faster than classical communications. Entanglement is a good way to share bits for encrypting secrets, but you still need to be send entangled photons over a <c
94.
by thatcherc 5y ago
Yup - JWST will be way high up in space, much farther away than the Moon and plenty far from the debris we talk about in low Earth orbit. The telescope actually orbits the Sun, not Earth, at a point called "Earth-Sun L2", which is
95.
by thatcherc 5y ago
There's lots of oxygen on the Moon, but it's locked up in aluminum and silicon oxides as rocks. In principle if you had a lot of electricity you could do electrolysis on melted moon rocks to recover pure oxygen and metals, both ve
96.
by thatcherc 5y ago
The relationship between 3D rotations, spin-1/2 particles, and unit quaternions appears on one of the best-named Wikipedia pages: Exceptional Isomorphisms! [0] [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exceptional_isomor
97.
by thatcherc 5y ago
My bet would be refraction of the sunlight through the atmosphere. At sunrise and sunset light that reaches you on the ground is taking just about the longest path through the atmosphere that it can, and gradient of the atmosphere's de
98.
by thatcherc 5y ago
_Angle of Attack_ by Mike Gray is a good one about Apollo, specifically about North American Aviation and how they built one of the Apollo stages (and a bunch of other neat flying things!). Lots of information but definitely a fun read.
99.
by thatcherc 5y ago
I have a Boox Note Pro (small one) and I also find it great for taking big PDFs around for reading outside or while traveling. I recently found out about Onyx's GPL violations, though, which kind of sours me on the company and product.
100.
by thatcherc 5y ago
I didn't grow up in Boston but spent a lot of time sailing (and accordingly, a decent amount swimming) in the Charles River Basin in the past several years (go Tech Sailing!). Only once ever had a bad experience - got terribly sick for
101.
by thatcherc 5y ago
Crazy roll pitch yaw angle plots from reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/space/comments/ou1w7e/emergency_pro... Tweet from the Flight Director also makes it sound like the ISS thrusters had a very hard tim
102.
by thatcherc 5y ago
In the show, Norway had also designed a thorium reactor and were going to share the plans for free. They announced that and that they were shutting down the oil wells at the same time. Russia's main goal was to stop Norway from sharing
103.
by thatcherc 5y ago
Super cool! I like the block diagram [0] they have on their crowdsupply page [1]. It's a really clear illustration of how the board is set up with just a handful of high-level components. SDR schematics are usually pretty hard to parse
104.
by thatcherc 5y ago
What are the other options here? Sounds like you've got some good perspective!
105.
by thatcherc 5y ago
I was wondering if something like could be done to upload sensor data without a data connection and it looks like that's exactly what the authors here had in mind!: > Potential use cases > While I was mostly just curious about wh
106.
by thatcherc 5y ago
I think the real trick with the thought experiment is: which law of physics is the Demon ignoring? The answer (spoilers) is that the demon is ignoring the entropy of the information it must learns about the particles that pass through the
107.
by thatcherc 6y ago
I get these same issues on a Pixel 3a! The most common ones (~daily) are: - volume stuck low or high (on headphones :/) - "fixed" with a quick bluetooth off/on cycle - volume okay but not responsive to changes in system
108.
by thatcherc 6y ago
I got to visit JILA one time and talk to researchers working on a blue or ultraviolet atomic clock (possibly the strontium mentioned in the article - can't quite remember) and they had a great story about how sensitive their clocks wer
109.
by thatcherc 6y ago
SatelliteToolbox.jl[0] (one of the packages developed by the post author) is one of my most-used Julia packages! It's great for (among many other things) working with TLE orbits and presents a really nice interface for converting betw
110.
by thatcherc 6y ago
Pretty cool! Looks like this has the same resolution 30 meter resolution as the global SRTM DEM, but with coverage of the whole globe. Looking forward to using this.
111.
by thatcherc 6y ago
A fun Wikipedia page about another time results were published on coherent nuclear excitations is "Hafnium Controversy"[0]. In that case, it was thought that hafnium nuclei could put into a stable state that, through stimulated em
112.
by thatcherc 6y ago
SRTM3! It's all available from the USGS. I'm in the (slow) process of upgrading to SRTM1, which offers 3x better linear resolution, so 9 'pixels' to each of the current 'pixels' I have now. The drawback for me,
113.
by thatcherc 6y ago
To be clear, despite the appearance of 'quantum' in the title, this is a development toward faster classical computers by using superconducting circuit elements (Josephson junctions). A computer using this type of logic would need
114.
by thatcherc 6y ago
I'm intrigued and want to read more about this, but that site is crazy. Takes >10 seconds on my phone to load the 'experience' which is a long-form scrolljacking narrative that starts with the history of the chicken. Their
115.
by thatcherc 6y ago
Terrain2STL - http://jthatch.com/Terrain2STL/ Creates 3D-printable elevation maps of Earth's surface. I originally made it because I couldn't find a tool to make a particular 3D model I wanted, and then decid
116.
by thatcherc 6y ago
Generally optical comms systems in space are not affected by Doppler shift because of their modulation scheme, not the directionality of the beams. They tend to use some type on-off keying (sometimes called OOK) where data is encoded in the
117.
Physicist proposes human-populated mega-satellite orbiting Ceres(phys.org)
1 points by thatcherc 6y ago|0 comments
118.
by thatcherc 6y ago
I'd also love to hear the answer to this, especially having moved to a new city after school where I didn't know anyone ahead of time. Grad school looks real tempting these days, at least once everything's back in person.
119.
by thatcherc 6y ago
The authors' power comparison is outlined in Section VI of their paper [0] (page 11-12). You might be able to figure out some intermediate scalings from that! [0] - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&a
120.
by thatcherc 6y ago
Subtitle from the link: > The 2.5 GHz prototype uses 80 times less energy than its semiconductor counterpart, even accounting for cooling (emphasis mine)

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