Viewing profile — MalbertKerman

That only holds in the near field of the reflecting surface, which is roughly (it's a fuzzy boundary so who cares about a 2 pi here or there) where the ratio of distance to width o…

> Why does detection scale as the 4th root of the RCS? Because the power returned to the antenna scales as the -4th power of the distance to the target, and detection depends on th…

To me, all-lowercase text comes across one of two ways: (a) I felt speed was far more important than readability (reasonable for rapid-fire short messages or constrained typing abi…

I don't know whether to feel proudly clever or frighteningly jaded at having spotted this one by "industry standards." Nice.

> then wouldn't that require a razor's edge of criticality? Yup. From the device description in its decommissioning plan: The CFX was a sub-critical assembly of uranium-2-35 surrou…

And quality educational content like "Hokay, so, here's the Earth, chilling. 'Wow, that's a sweet Earth,' you might say. ROUND!"

The hard part isn't having a telescope, but analyzing the images for objects that have moved between successive observations. Digital astrophotography and analysis software have be…

> 100 days with zero emissions By my back of the envelope math, burning 600000 kcal should produce couple hundred kg of CO2. You could also make that crossing in less than a third …

> MCUs particularly from microchip had really good documentation Oh how the mighty have fallen. I've only worked on one major project with a Microchip MCU (PIC32MK), but their docu…

How fitting that it ends with September, whether that's September 30th, 2025 or September 11718th, 1993.

No (Betteridge, 2009).

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I did get a lot of that in the lower level math courses, where it kinda felt like the math faculty were grudgingly letting in the unwashed masses to learn some primitive skills to …

> and I was annoyed that nobody had just told me that because I would have gotten it instantly. Right?! In my path through the physics curriculum, this whole area was presented in …

It's quietly reversing the traditional "We approximate the cow to be a sphere" and showing how the spherical math can, in fact, be generalized to solutions on the cow.

The jump from spherical harmonics to eigenfunctions on a general mesh, and the specific example mesh chosen, might be the finest mathematical joke I've seen this decade.

The hard part is not realizing that one should stop caring. It's learning how to stop caring. For most of us, caring is an automatic, reflexive response, and changing it is not a t…

On my personal 2017-vintage i5-7200U, GIMP opens in under 5 seconds. On the computer I had for my last job, a 2023-ish i7, about 30 seconds. The problem was the shitheap of corpora…

> To be fair, the quality of software has dramatically dropped, apps now take 10 seconds to load, memory usage is maxed, games crash and people needed to reinstall their OS so freq…

Somebody just discovered E. E. Cummings and thought "I'm gonna be original just like that guy!"

Combustion cycles that run the turbopump exhaust into the main combustion chamber are called "staged combustion." The Soviets had staged combustion engines putting payloads in orbi…

The rocket folks call them "turbopumps" rather than "turbochargers," and most of them are powered by a separate combustion apparatus (with non-obvious terminology: if, after going …

There are 25 unique responses in that 1000-line file.

And aligned to a properly synchronized cardinal grammeter.

> Ye olde Rutherford experiment nicely illustrates the points of 'yes it is all empty space' No, it does not. It illustrates that the portion of an atom that strongly scatters alph…