Viewing profile — elihu

The way I look at it is that a manager can make decisions with wider scope, but the people under them exert greater control in day-to-day tasks over some narrower scope. In softwar…

It's the most common unit for describing the explosive yield of a nuclear weapon. So, it's a lot smaller than the bombs dropped on Japan in WWII, but a lot bigger than a Davy Crock…

The Super Turcano is a prop-driven aircraft that's often suggested for this role.

Or, alternatively, you switch to DC to get more current capacity over existing wires. (At a given voltage, a wire can generally carry more DC current because it doesn't have the sa…

I've been wondering for awhile about the economics of the AC vs DC grid thing. Historically, AC made a lot more sense because transformers are simple and relatively straightforward…

I really want the US to get on board with solar in general. Parking lot solar is a good thing generally, but I don't think it should be mandatory because it's an inefficient use of…

It can be either AC or DC. Aluminum TIG welding uses AC, whereas you'd use electrode-negative DC for steel or copper. As I understand it, with aluminum you need the electrode-negat…

It may be a boon to EV makers everywhere including in China, but I don't think it's a boon to China generally as they buy a lot of their oil from the Gulf states. Thus they're more…

That's true enough at the level of individual households. If the whole neighborhood switches to EVs, the power grid in general might not be built to handle it. (Personally I don't …

Sure, that's basically just intonation (JI). You pick what key you want to play in and a scale, and then you build an instrument around that scale. (Though something that happens i…

> the irony it comes from the same people who blame Israel for not letting supplies into Gaza during war. Israel did in fact do that. In fact there were several months of Israel no…

Whether or not one would accept deaths of civilians to get rid of Khamenei, I don't think anyone should accept a school full of children being blown up for no obvious reason. If th…

Also worth mentioning Baldassare Forestiere, who spent about 40 years digging an extensive network of tunnels in Fresno, CA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestiere_Underground_Ga…

Maybe Claude is just a fan of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann? (Or influenced by the fandom thereof.)

If the fundamental is 100hz, then the 1st harmonic is the fundamental (100hz), the 2nd harmonic is 200hz, the 3rd harmonic is 300hz, and so on. Sometimes the harmonics aren't exact…

A minor terminology quibble: the video refers to the Nth harmonic as if it's the fundamental frequency times N+1, but it's usually fairly standard to refer to the frequency that's …

The other side of this is that if you want your open source project to be useful to people, relevant, included by default in Linux distributions, highly regarded by the community, …

Didn't realize she played Lwaxana Troi. Knowing that now I wonder, am I going to hear the ship's computer as Lwaxana?

That could be one reason they want to do it. Maybe by using data from Palantir or harvested from Elon's work with DOGE, along with twitter user data and whatever else they can get,…

The main reason is that generating energy in space is very cheap and easy due to how ridiculously effective solar panels are. Someone mentioned in the comments on a similar article…

Huh, I didn't know that that was possible without burning fuel. Kind of wild that it only works because the Earth has an equatorial bulge and isn't an exact sphere.

Communication is a well-understood problem, and SpaceX already has Starlink. They might need pretty high bandwidth, but that's not necessarily much of a problem in space. Latency c…

That's not a new problem that no one has dealt with before. The ISS for instance has its External Active Thermal Control System (EACTS). It's not so much a matter of whether it's a…

Honestly, there's not a lot else I can think of if your goal is find some practical and profitable way to take advantage of relatively cheap access to near-Earth space. Communicati…

Do they need to be maintained? If one compute node breaks, you just turn it off and don't worry about it. You just assume you'll have some amount of unrecoverable errors and build …