There's psychology, then there's psychology. The kind of neuropsychology I've seen done produces rather decent, reproducible results, not subject to a whole lot of interpretation...
I do know plenty of married couples that decided not to wear jewelry related to their marital status. They occasionally got dirty stares when they were young. They were cool enough not to give two shits about it, though.
Having had welded my first wedding ring to a bunch of initially charged capacitors in a UPS unit that sat offline, disconnected from batteries, for a week, I concur. I've had a nice round burn mark on my ring finger for months afterwards. It took 2 years for it to completely fade. I still wear the band #2, but I have a special ritual before I ever work on things that have more than a few tenths of a Joule stored in them, or have short circuit current ratings over 5A, or voltages over 48V.
P.S. The cap discharge resistor circuit had a hairline crack on a trace - apparently wide enough that the cap voltage wouldn't break down the gap. The design had redundant traces leading to an unpopulated location for a redundant cap discharge resistor. I replaced the failed one, and added the redundant buddy as was the original intent (presumably before the beancounters took over the engineering dept.).
Apart from pissing outside of restrooms being unsanitary, I do agree that we're a bit oversensitive about the so-called privates. It's a cultural thing, there's no rational reason for it, not even a moral one if one were to separate rationality and morality.
Lolwut? They play no role whatsoever in reproduction. They are only useful, optionally, to nourish the newborn - long after the reproduction is a done. The optional part is kinda important: you can feed a newborn quite well using nothing but plant-derived stuff, for example. If I were ever to hear a medical doctor call breasts "reproductive organs", I'd be looking for a different one, you know. Where you got that crazy idea I can't fathom.
It's real easy. It's not a big company that can't do it, because companies aren't living things and can't do anything, they are just ideas. It's their employees who don't care, but more often, simply aren't empowered to do the right thing. The marketing department can't will things to happen just so. If the people who have an influence on this process can't or won't make it happen, it doesn't happen. It's as simple as that. Corporate HR has lost the human touch long time ago.
At the moment, the Philae mission is a partial, or qualified, success. They'll be receiving the passive science data and imagery, but let's be realistic: they have no way of anchoring Philae to the comet, they can't drill, and any attempts at "bouncing" it are at the mercy of how much gyro range is available to keep it stable while it follows the ballistic arc - and whether it'll come down anywhere safe enough to keep itself upright. The gravity is so small that the lander could "impact" the comet upside down and it wouldn't damage it, it'd just make its orientation useless for the deployment of drilling instruments. Heck, it may be that the gyros have enough oomph to roll the Philae if it ends up upside-down, although it'd probably tumble for a while before setting in some other random orientation, possibly still a wrong one.
They have to weigh the battery life against science returns - and right now there's no battery recharging to speak of. That's the hard part of rocket science - it's not through any fault of mission design, it's simply a bad luck. So, I bet they'll keep Philae where it is up to say 48-50hr mark, and then they'll re-enable the gyros and attempt a bounce, and they'll get one shot at it due to the time the bounce will take, and the link availability constraints due to Rosetta's orbit. I really wonder if the harpoons didn't work due to insufficient contact forces and a sequencer step to shoot the harpoon not being triggered, or if it's due to a failure of the harpoon deployment mechanism itself. It wouldn't hurt to reattempt a harpoon firing once the bounce ends with a recontact.
I'm still wondering why they couldn't get the Rosetta spacecraft itself to be the lander. It's a much bigger platform, it has a proper RCS system and could easily land and take off to scout multiple locations on the comet. Not having a stand-alone lander would give enough available weight to put the instruments on Rosetta itself, and take the extra fuel to do repeated landings and take-offs. That's at least according to my back-of-the-envelope fuel budgeting, I may be way off, though...
Overall, the biggest lessons learned are about things didn't work. Any further low-gravity comet lander designs will need to use designs that include fixes for whatever didn't work this time. I really wish they did, for example, store a duplicate thruster fuel supply system on Earth, in cryogenic conditions, for the decade Rosetta was out there - I bet it'd fail on Earth just as it failed out there, and it'd be an easy thing to post-mortem. But that time has passed, so we may never know what went caused the failure of the puncture pin system...
Pray tell, what has a firmware bug got to do with the meaning of a power cycle counter, otherwise that in this particular case you can't rely on a faulty counter? Let's not deflect attention to strawmen.
I'm calling it stupid because if you don't know anything about the time between the power cycles, you can at best assume that the power cycle count is a low-quality proxy for powered hours.
For any claim that the number of power cycles itself is a predictor of failure, you'd need to, you know, power cycle a bunch of drives at various rates until they die, and see if merely power cycling it more often makes it fail faster. Only in such conditions would the power cycle mean anything. Otherwise it's stupid and let's just stop with the stupidity, okay?
Are people seriously just that stupid? It's the count of how many times you powered it up. It has nowhere to go but up. It's not an indicator of any failure, except to the extent that power-cycling the drive can have an effect on its lifetime and/or reliability. The article also pretends like this was some sort of a "drive quality" indicator. I think people somehow can't parse what simple words mean anymore:( SIGH.
(I'd call the parent a troll if the article didn't perpetuate this same stupidity. Maybe the article was a troll too.)
Sure, but with changing viscosity the sound propagation in the liquid changes - especially that the quality of the resonance in the liquid scales with viscosity (viscous damping!). The speed of sound in the liquid changes too, but the change in the 0-60C range is about a factor of magnitude smaller than the change in viscosity.
Except when different pieces of news from the same freakin' lander are reported on different Twitter handles. That's when multiple accounts are counterproductive. I think that ESA's approach to PR is a bit broken.
Code reviews only work in practice on code of known quality level. I stress that by "known" I don't imply "perfect" or even "high" - I only mean that it must be known. The code review process must be tailored to the quality of people who do the work.
There's no way to properly implement code reviews of code that effectively comes from random sources. Most of the time you'll be either wasting the time on code that's very good, or you'll miss some serious issues.
LISP is different because there's much less leeway if you're doing it "purely". It's uncanny that way. That's also why one can be very productive in LISP - with some experience, you have a much smaller solution space to explore and you don't need to waste time making choices that are very much irrelevant to the functioning of the code.
Not only you're not alone, this is a rather common physics experiment (or should be), but it doesn't have much to do with density - it doesn't change fast enough with temperature. But there is something about water that changes rapidly as you go from cold to hot water: viscosity.
Water's viscosity decreases rather dramatically with temperature - about 25% per 10deg C or so. The Reynolds number, a key descriptor of the fluid flow in a given situation, is inversely proportional to viscosity, with factor 1. Thus, in the flow of water in the tap, as you go from "cold" (around 10C) to "hot" (around 60C), the Reynolds number increases by a factor of ~3.5. In the turbulent flow, such a change is easy to hear.
Most of us actually have this skill and use it, perhaps without realizing it. We go a step further, though: we are passive echolocators. We don't click, but we listen for the multiple echoes of sounds that are emitted by other things, including other people.
I do. The updates are so few that splitting them between the lander and the orbiter is nuts. Similarly, a split between @esa and @esascience is nuts as well.
There's no point doing something if someone else has already done it
Most programming is adapting the well-known data structures and algorithms to various less-or-more-boring real life problems. Even if you're working on a completely breakthrough project, like the ESA's Rosetta just-landed-on-the-comet mission, most of the implementation's code is like any other spacecraft code, done dozens if not hundreds of times before.
Yet, proficiency at all the low-level "drudgery" is what differentiates a professional from someone who just pretends and sneaks their way around. It's as if you were a pianist who can only play their own compositions but can't play any of the classical staples.
Slashdot Mirror
There's psychology, then there's psychology. The kind of neuropsychology I've seen done produces rather decent, reproducible results, not subject to a whole lot of interpretation...
One thing has to be said: Bennett is a cheapskate. $25 to pay the survey takers? Gimme a break.
I do know plenty of married couples that decided not to wear jewelry related to their marital status. They occasionally got dirty stares when they were young. They were cool enough not to give two shits about it, though.
Having had welded my first wedding ring to a bunch of initially charged capacitors in a UPS unit that sat offline, disconnected from batteries, for a week, I concur. I've had a nice round burn mark on my ring finger for months afterwards. It took 2 years for it to completely fade. I still wear the band #2, but I have a special ritual before I ever work on things that have more than a few tenths of a Joule stored in them, or have short circuit current ratings over 5A, or voltages over 48V.
P.S. The cap discharge resistor circuit had a hairline crack on a trace - apparently wide enough that the cap voltage wouldn't break down the gap. The design had redundant traces leading to an unpopulated location for a redundant cap discharge resistor. I replaced the failed one, and added the redundant buddy as was the original intent (presumably before the beancounters took over the engineering dept.).
Apart from pissing outside of restrooms being unsanitary, I do agree that we're a bit oversensitive about the so-called privates. It's a cultural thing, there's no rational reason for it, not even a moral one if one were to separate rationality and morality.
Breasts are fundamental to sexual reproduction.
Lolwut? They play no role whatsoever in reproduction. They are only useful, optionally, to nourish the newborn - long after the reproduction is a done. The optional part is kinda important: you can feed a newborn quite well using nothing but plant-derived stuff, for example. If I were ever to hear a medical doctor call breasts "reproductive organs", I'd be looking for a different one, you know. Where you got that crazy idea I can't fathom.
Breasts are most definitely not intrinsically sexual!
Sexual here is used to mean "to do with the sex or gender of the person in question". DUH that they are sexual as only the female sex has them.
There's nothing colorful on a comet. It's just shades of gray. Seriously. It's literally dirty ice.
It's real easy. It's not a big company that can't do it, because companies aren't living things and can't do anything, they are just ideas. It's their employees who don't care, but more often, simply aren't empowered to do the right thing. The marketing department can't will things to happen just so. If the people who have an influence on this process can't or won't make it happen, it doesn't happen. It's as simple as that. Corporate HR has lost the human touch long time ago.
At the moment, the Philae mission is a partial, or qualified, success. They'll be receiving the passive science data and imagery, but let's be realistic: they have no way of anchoring Philae to the comet, they can't drill, and any attempts at "bouncing" it are at the mercy of how much gyro range is available to keep it stable while it follows the ballistic arc - and whether it'll come down anywhere safe enough to keep itself upright. The gravity is so small that the lander could "impact" the comet upside down and it wouldn't damage it, it'd just make its orientation useless for the deployment of drilling instruments. Heck, it may be that the gyros have enough oomph to roll the Philae if it ends up upside-down, although it'd probably tumble for a while before setting in some other random orientation, possibly still a wrong one.
They have to weigh the battery life against science returns - and right now there's no battery recharging to speak of. That's the hard part of rocket science - it's not through any fault of mission design, it's simply a bad luck. So, I bet they'll keep Philae where it is up to say 48-50hr mark, and then they'll re-enable the gyros and attempt a bounce, and they'll get one shot at it due to the time the bounce will take, and the link availability constraints due to Rosetta's orbit. I really wonder if the harpoons didn't work due to insufficient contact forces and a sequencer step to shoot the harpoon not being triggered, or if it's due to a failure of the harpoon deployment mechanism itself. It wouldn't hurt to reattempt a harpoon firing once the bounce ends with a recontact.
I'm still wondering why they couldn't get the Rosetta spacecraft itself to be the lander. It's a much bigger platform, it has a proper RCS system and could easily land and take off to scout multiple locations on the comet. Not having a stand-alone lander would give enough available weight to put the instruments on Rosetta itself, and take the extra fuel to do repeated landings and take-offs. That's at least according to my back-of-the-envelope fuel budgeting, I may be way off, though...
Overall, the biggest lessons learned are about things didn't work. Any further low-gravity comet lander designs will need to use designs that include fixes for whatever didn't work this time. I really wish they did, for example, store a duplicate thruster fuel supply system on Earth, in cryogenic conditions, for the decade Rosetta was out there - I bet it'd fail on Earth just as it failed out there, and it'd be an easy thing to post-mortem. But that time has passed, so we may never know what went caused the failure of the puncture pin system...
Pray tell, what has a firmware bug got to do with the meaning of a power cycle counter, otherwise that in this particular case you can't rely on a faulty counter? Let's not deflect attention to strawmen.
Load Cycle Count and Power Cycle Count aren't the same thing.
I'm calling it stupid because if you don't know anything about the time between the power cycles, you can at best assume that the power cycle count is a low-quality proxy for powered hours.
For any claim that the number of power cycles itself is a predictor of failure, you'd need to, you know, power cycle a bunch of drives at various rates until they die, and see if merely power cycling it more often makes it fail faster. Only in such conditions would the power cycle mean anything. Otherwise it's stupid and let's just stop with the stupidity, okay?
12 Power Cycle Count
Are people seriously just that stupid? It's the count of how many times you powered it up. It has nowhere to go but up. It's not an indicator of any failure, except to the extent that power-cycling the drive can have an effect on its lifetime and/or reliability. The article also pretends like this was some sort of a "drive quality" indicator. I think people somehow can't parse what simple words mean anymore :( SIGH.
(I'd call the parent a troll if the article didn't perpetuate this same stupidity. Maybe the article was a troll too.)
Sure, but with changing viscosity the sound propagation in the liquid changes - especially that the quality of the resonance in the liquid scales with viscosity (viscous damping!). The speed of sound in the liquid changes too, but the change in the 0-60C range is about a factor of magnitude smaller than the change in viscosity.
I concur. There's one in a science museum I go to often, and it never fails to make me feel wobbly.
Except when different pieces of news from the same freakin' lander are reported on different Twitter handles. That's when multiple accounts are counterproductive. I think that ESA's approach to PR is a bit broken.
It's not as if you can't be logged into the same Twitter account from multiple locations...
Code reviews only work in practice on code of known quality level. I stress that by "known" I don't imply "perfect" or even "high" - I only mean that it must be known. The code review process must be tailored to the quality of people who do the work.
There's no way to properly implement code reviews of code that effectively comes from random sources. Most of the time you'll be either wasting the time on code that's very good, or you'll miss some serious issues.
I meant the repeated code.
LISP is different because there's much less leeway if you're doing it "purely". It's uncanny that way. That's also why one can be very productive in LISP - with some experience, you have a much smaller solution space to explore and you don't need to waste time making choices that are very much irrelevant to the functioning of the code.
Not only you're not alone, this is a rather common physics experiment (or should be), but it doesn't have much to do with density - it doesn't change fast enough with temperature. But there is something about water that changes rapidly as you go from cold to hot water: viscosity.
Water's viscosity decreases rather dramatically with temperature - about 25% per 10deg C or so. The Reynolds number, a key descriptor of the fluid flow in a given situation, is inversely proportional to viscosity, with factor 1. Thus, in the flow of water in the tap, as you go from "cold" (around 10C) to "hot" (around 60C), the Reynolds number increases by a factor of ~3.5. In the turbulent flow, such a change is easy to hear.
Most of us actually have this skill and use it, perhaps without realizing it. We go a step further, though: we are passive echolocators. We don't click, but we listen for the multiple echoes of sounds that are emitted by other things, including other people.
I do. The updates are so few that splitting them between the lander and the orbiter is nuts. Similarly, a split between @esa and @esascience is nuts as well.
How many effing ways are there to do a merge-sort or to implement a minimum spanning tree?
Very, very many. The same as if you have asked 20 authors to write a chapter describing those algorithms, they'd never be word-for-word identical.
There's no point doing something if someone else has already done it
Most programming is adapting the well-known data structures and algorithms to various less-or-more-boring real life problems. Even if you're working on a completely breakthrough project, like the ESA's Rosetta just-landed-on-the-comet mission, most of the implementation's code is like any other spacecraft code, done dozens if not hundreds of times before.
Yet, proficiency at all the low-level "drudgery" is what differentiates a professional from someone who just pretends and sneaks their way around. It's as if you were a pianist who can only play their own compositions but can't play any of the classical staples.