I am like that when someone pisses me off. The cost I refer to is the entire thing. Test stands, launch facilities, failed launches and successful ones, every fucking thing. How can one not be patronizing when people just have no clue about how much can be done for under $1B. I wonder if SpaceX could pull off JWST for $1B. I think they probably could, but our government would much rather give out pork.
Dave, honey, the would-be SLS service tower cost about as much as the entire Falcon 1 and most of Falcon 9 development program. $500M. The government is absolutely, completely over-the-top with their spending. You have no sense of scale whatsoever.
Oh, I have the right to know too. And they have every right to make me miserable along the way, it appears. Guess who wins in the end... And I pay the fucking school, too.
Look, reading comprehension -- critical, analytic reading -- takes effort. It can be fun, but it doesn't come for free. It is a process that takes about two decades to really master -- you should be "done" by the time you're 25 or so. Audiobooks are no hindrance here.
Now be very, very careful there. There is a reading disorder known to me as hyperlexia. It is when a child has perfected the phonological decoding of the text (letters into sounds), at the expense of completely blocking out the meaning. Those kids read beautifully but have no clue what they are reading. No clue as in not knowing anything about the text. Total I-don't-recall-even-half-of-the-last-sentence disconnect.
From an earliest age one must place equal emphasis on comprehension. Listening to audiobooks is a good way to exercise that in isolation, even though it does nothing to verify that comprehension won't be outgunned during reading of written text. I'd hope at age 8 the kid reads well enough that the book club doesn't have to play an important role in development of reading-off-the-page.
If I were born 15 years later, I'd have probably had one at home, courtesy of my mom:) It wasn't even that expensive in terms of money. I think transporting it cost as much as the acquisition. Bringing it back up to a working condition, up to spec, was what took a lot of time. It's a transmission microscope, though, so there are things it can't do. It has a decent accelerating voltage for an instrument so small, though (100kV).
1/3 the parent read the book to the child and edited it as they did it to cut out any parts they didn't want their kid to hear. 1/3 just played the book on tape for the kid,
The former is mind-bogglingly stupid. The latter: hey, I "read" most books these days by listening to them on CDs. The fact that you read the words off the page yourself is fairly insignificant IMHO. Reading takes way more than that.
Some time after I left my parents' home, my mom got her hands on a desk-sized transmission electron microscope being decommissioned. It's in one of the rooms at home. In winter it's nice when you put the heat exchangers for the vacuum pumps under the desk: your feet stay warm:)
A friend has built a scanning EFM from scratch as a high schooler, took him 2 years to get decent images. Another one had built a cyclotron in the basement, with fairly decent beam by the time he turned 19. He won some lottery money, just enough to buy a used mill and lathe (fairly large ones), plenty of tooling and a whole bunch of junk for raw materials (copper tubing for the electromagnets, vacuum junk etc). The neutron-activated walls are there to this day, and the house is abandoned:) He just barely graduated high school, it wasn't exactly a part time project for him.
If you can get an itemized bill at all. The experience I've had with a major university medical center in the U.S. would lead me to believe that those itemized bills must be printed in 50um gold on pure platinum 100um thick foil substrate... Sigh.
Or you could have used Pascal, like many did in Europe, and then you don't have to deal with the char* silliness. I loved Pascal strings. C++ string classes do the same, but they are usually reference counted, and thus royally suck balls in performance department when it comes to non-copying short strings. Many of those "solid" string classes never had their performance measured when the design decisions to implement reference counting were being made in all-or-nothing fashion...
I'd have dumped the girlfriend -- not for lying, but for closing the door to the winning spot to kids who actually do the work and perhaps actually deserve the prize. She is, it seems, a typical example of no-holds-barred "winner". What a loser, that is.
For modern high-voltage transmission, capacitive losses matter even at 50/60Hz. HV transmission is best done as DC. The thing Tesla was right about was that with technology available back then, AC distribution was the only feasible one. It has only been in the last few decades that we have the semiconductor technology that would allow completely solid state, DC-to-DC power conversion all the way to the consumer. That would be, ultimately, the way to go. DC-to-DC converters can be quite compact compared to 50/60Hz transformers, especially when running at high frequencies. I've seen resonant converters taking in 10kV 3 phase and outputting 1.5kV DC at about 50kVA. It had PFC as well. Two people could very easily lift one up, it was probably less than 200lbs, just bulky, and the magnetics (cores) could fit in a breadbox. Try lifting up a 50kVA oil immersed transformer with same ratings -- it's half a ton, give or take.
Alas, circuit breakers for DC are significantly more complex and expensive than ones for AC, since you have an arc that needs to be quenched. They need to have a chamber that utilizes spatial gradients in pressure or temperature (due to asymmetry of the plasma chamber) to move some air around to blow the arc out. AC arcs are usually self-extinguishing, except at extreme short-circuit currents and voltages (high voltage substations and the like).
Oh Lantronix, with firmware so fragile it seems like they had to sprinkle fairy dust on the flash chips just to make it not crumble under its own weight. Agreed.
You are under a mistaken assumption that people who know their shit don't go apeshit. Reiser, anyone? So there you go. There's no security through obscurity in those systems. Nurses in the ward? Ha ha. If you look like you belong, you can do anything you please. Good old social engineering. Yeah, I know, nerds usually aren't born with it, but don't count on them never learning. Not if your kid's safety depends on it, yaknow.
Here's what Feynman told his sister Joan about reading an astronomy text: you read it from the beginning until you get stuck. Then you read again and again, until eventually you'll get to the end. It's uncanny how, eventually, our brain will make up some working definitions for formerly unknown words. They may not be quite correct, but they'll, as if by magic, fit to the text you are reading. That's how I've learned English. I was reading technical texts such as manuals and software UI. Eventually I was good enough to read children's books, then more advanced texts, and that was it. Looking things up in a dictionary is sometimes necessary, but I find it distracting. I love reading completely unknown languages, such as greek where I make up surely botched phonetic rules as I go. It's cool to figure out what's what. There's surprisingly little bootstrapping you may need before you get hang of it. Feynman and Leighton figured out Tuvan from a phrasebook and some correspondence. Japanese has a slightly higher barrier to entry because their phonetic alphabet has more symbols, and there are two phonetic alphabets to begin with. Not there yet, not there yet:)
Same here. I only even noticed the little "sponsored" in the right sidebar. Heck, I think that I couldn't even tell what was in that right sidebar anyway, I never seem to need it for anything. If I happen to browse from Firefox, I have a greasemonkey script that kills that sidebar entirely.
Spouses spying on spouses: that makes them perhaps legally married, but not really spouses. A spouse, to me as a guy, is someone I can tell about a girl that just walked by being hot. Heck, we should be able to discuss that in more detail if that's what we fell like. To her, I'm a guy she can tell that if it weren't for last night, she'd have slept with the cute neighbor. Or that she'd be in a mood for me if it weren't for me being stinky after work. What would one need spying for, in such a relationship, is beyond me. Conversely, why would anyone call a relationship that lacks such transparency "marriage" is beyond me too.
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So you say that the least fortunate don't deserve the strippers and the booze? How, how, how unthoughtful of you!
A suitable suite in those circumstances, then.
Hopefully it's a suite with a good view.
I am like that when someone pisses me off. The cost I refer to is the entire thing. Test stands, launch facilities, failed launches and successful ones, every fucking thing. How can one not be patronizing when people just have no clue about how much can be done for under $1B. I wonder if SpaceX could pull off JWST for $1B. I think they probably could, but our government would much rather give out pork.
About those engineers: what, you think SpaceX hires people off the street, whose only exposure to the space program was via the media??
Dave, honey, the would-be SLS service tower cost about as much as the entire Falcon 1 and most of Falcon 9 development program. $500M. The government is absolutely, completely over-the-top with their spending. You have no sense of scale whatsoever.
Oh, I have the right to know too. And they have every right to make me miserable along the way, it appears. Guess who wins in the end... And I pay the fucking school, too.
Look, reading comprehension -- critical, analytic reading -- takes effort. It can be fun, but it doesn't come for free. It is a process that takes about two decades to really master -- you should be "done" by the time you're 25 or so. Audiobooks are no hindrance here.
Now be very, very careful there. There is a reading disorder known to me as hyperlexia. It is when a child has perfected the phonological decoding of the text (letters into sounds), at the expense of completely blocking out the meaning. Those kids read beautifully but have no clue what they are reading. No clue as in not knowing anything about the text. Total I-don't-recall-even-half-of-the-last-sentence disconnect.
From an earliest age one must place equal emphasis on comprehension. Listening to audiobooks is a good way to exercise that in isolation, even though it does nothing to verify that comprehension won't be outgunned during reading of written text. I'd hope at age 8 the kid reads well enough that the book club doesn't have to play an important role in development of reading-off-the-page.
If I were born 15 years later, I'd have probably had one at home, courtesy of my mom :) It wasn't even that expensive in terms of money. I think transporting it cost as much as the acquisition. Bringing it back up to a working condition, up to spec, was what took a lot of time. It's a transmission microscope, though, so there are things it can't do. It has a decent accelerating voltage for an instrument so small, though (100kV).
1/3 the parent read the book to the child and edited it as they did it to cut out any parts they didn't want their kid to hear. 1/3 just played the book on tape for the kid,
The former is mind-bogglingly stupid. The latter: hey, I "read" most books these days by listening to them on CDs. The fact that you read the words off the page yourself is fairly insignificant IMHO. Reading takes way more than that.
Some time after I left my parents' home, my mom got her hands on a desk-sized transmission electron microscope being decommissioned. It's in one of the rooms at home. In winter it's nice when you put the heat exchangers for the vacuum pumps under the desk: your feet stay warm :)
A friend has built a scanning EFM from scratch as a high schooler, took him 2 years to get decent images. Another one had built a cyclotron in the basement, with fairly decent beam by the time he turned 19. He won some lottery money, just enough to buy a used mill and lathe (fairly large ones), plenty of tooling and a whole bunch of junk for raw materials (copper tubing for the electromagnets, vacuum junk etc). The neutron-activated walls are there to this day, and the house is abandoned :) He just barely graduated high school, it wasn't exactly a part time project for him.
If you can get an itemized bill at all. The experience I've had with a major university medical center in the U.S. would lead me to believe that those itemized bills must be printed in 50um gold on pure platinum 100um thick foil substrate... Sigh.
Or you could have used Pascal, like many did in Europe, and then you don't have to deal with the char* silliness. I loved Pascal strings. C++ string classes do the same, but they are usually reference counted, and thus royally suck balls in performance department when it comes to non-copying short strings. Many of those "solid" string classes never had their performance measured when the design decisions to implement reference counting were being made in all-or-nothing fashion...
They can very clearly lie, too.
I'd have dumped the girlfriend -- not for lying, but for closing the door to the winning spot to kids who actually do the work and perhaps actually deserve the prize. She is, it seems, a typical example of no-holds-barred "winner". What a loser, that is.
For modern high-voltage transmission, capacitive losses matter even at 50/60Hz. HV transmission is best done as DC. The thing Tesla was right about was that with technology available back then, AC distribution was the only feasible one. It has only been in the last few decades that we have the semiconductor technology that would allow completely solid state, DC-to-DC power conversion all the way to the consumer. That would be, ultimately, the way to go. DC-to-DC converters can be quite compact compared to 50/60Hz transformers, especially when running at high frequencies. I've seen resonant converters taking in 10kV 3 phase and outputting 1.5kV DC at about 50kVA. It had PFC as well. Two people could very easily lift one up, it was probably less than 200lbs, just bulky, and the magnetics (cores) could fit in a breadbox. Try lifting up a 50kVA oil immersed transformer with same ratings -- it's half a ton, give or take.
Alas, circuit breakers for DC are significantly more complex and expensive than ones for AC, since you have an arc that needs to be quenched. They need to have a chamber that utilizes spatial gradients in pressure or temperature (due to asymmetry of the plasma chamber) to move some air around to blow the arc out. AC arcs are usually self-extinguishing, except at extreme short-circuit currents and voltages (high voltage substations and the like).
Oh Lantronix, with firmware so fragile it seems like they had to sprinkle fairy dust on the flash chips just to make it not crumble under its own weight. Agreed.
You are under a mistaken assumption that people who know their shit don't go apeshit. Reiser, anyone? So there you go. There's no security through obscurity in those systems. Nurses in the ward? Ha ha. If you look like you belong, you can do anything you please. Good old social engineering. Yeah, I know, nerds usually aren't born with it, but don't count on them never learning. Not if your kid's safety depends on it, yaknow.
If you believe in God, that'd be impossible. You know, the whole omnipresence thing?
Here's what Feynman told his sister Joan about reading an astronomy text: you read it from the beginning until you get stuck. Then you read again and again, until eventually you'll get to the end. It's uncanny how, eventually, our brain will make up some working definitions for formerly unknown words. They may not be quite correct, but they'll, as if by magic, fit to the text you are reading. That's how I've learned English. I was reading technical texts such as manuals and software UI. Eventually I was good enough to read children's books, then more advanced texts, and that was it. Looking things up in a dictionary is sometimes necessary, but I find it distracting. I love reading completely unknown languages, such as greek where I make up surely botched phonetic rules as I go. It's cool to figure out what's what. There's surprisingly little bootstrapping you may need before you get hang of it. Feynman and Leighton figured out Tuvan from a phrasebook and some correspondence. Japanese has a slightly higher barrier to entry because their phonetic alphabet has more symbols, and there are two phonetic alphabets to begin with. Not there yet, not there yet :)
Same here. I only even noticed the little "sponsored" in the right sidebar. Heck, I think that I couldn't even tell what was in that right sidebar anyway, I never seem to need it for anything. If I happen to browse from Firefox, I have a greasemonkey script that kills that sidebar entirely.
Spouses spying on spouses: that makes them perhaps legally married, but not really spouses. A spouse, to me as a guy, is someone I can tell about a girl that just walked by being hot. Heck, we should be able to discuss that in more detail if that's what we fell like. To her, I'm a guy she can tell that if it weren't for last night, she'd have slept with the cute neighbor. Or that she'd be in a mood for me if it weren't for me being stinky after work. What would one need spying for, in such a relationship, is beyond me. Conversely, why would anyone call a relationship that lacks such transparency "marriage" is beyond me too.
It doesn't say that at all, sorry, do the multiplications and figure it out for yourself if you don't believe me.