Viewing profile — ddbeck

I think it's like most jobs: compensation isn't related to how tough the work is, but about the abundance of people who can fill those positions. Administrators earn more because t…

I'd like to note that the shuttle fleet received a "glass cockpit" upgrade (around 1997-1998), replacing many mechanical indicators with multi-function displays. Here's a link to a…

Sorry, I wasn't able to figure out where I first heard about the contamination concern with MSL. I think I may have heard it in a video interview, which makes it nigh unsearchable.…

The Viking program was resigned to regarding the surface soil as untrustworthy for at least some (if not all) of their experiments. To get around this, the landers' robotic arms du…

One of the reasons for the skycrane is that it minimizes the area of the Martian surface that will be disturbed by the landing rockets. The skycrane approach moves less surface soi…

I imagine there's also a small, but non-trivial number of people on GitHub who wouldn't be readily identified as programmers. For example, I'm acquainted with a civil engineer that…

While not actually called memoize, Python 3.2 ships with the lru_cache decorator in the standard library module functools. http://docs.python.org/dev/library/functools.html#functoo…

Volumes, sure, but those volumes need to specialize and, to a certain extent, stand alone. In other words, don't just put "to be continued" at the end of a chapter; find a logical …

I think it's unfair to say that the focus on word count is absurd. Like most things, writing well requires practice. The only meaningful metric educators have to determine whether …

"Also a little regret knowing they will never go back." Wow, I had never thought of that aspect of the Apollo program. It's a little sad that of the 22 people to orbit the moon, la…