Viewing profile — generuso

They do not like to talk about it too much in public these days, but Rocket Lab had somewhat shady beginnings. Once they moved past the semi-amateur phase, their first real project…

It is uncontroversial among Dostoyevsky's scholars that his main focus is on Russian mysticism while the stories themselves are merely a setting for presenting author's theology. B…

Marc Raibert was a student of Ivan Sutherland. Sutherland had a lot of pull at DARPA. This facilitated the unique prototyping work done at Boston Dynamics to get noticed and suppor…

Maybe it was a bit too colloquial. I am not sure if this is very important. A formal term would have been "full propellant load." The phrase "fill level" is also used in NASA docum…

Correction: The first stage of New Glenn carries only about 260 tons of methane. The 1150 tons is the full propellent load, liquid oxygen and liquid methane combined. The heat from…

The problem is that there is no standard meaning for the "full duration" in this context. Some reports say that this means "running all seven BE-4 engines at full thrust for up to …

The TNT is relevant, because the atomic bomb energy output was defined in terms of TNT equivalent. Not the energy of the blast, but the total output. For Trinity this was 20 kt, or…

You are talking about the energy of the blast. In my comment I was talking about the heat output. From the followup comments it seems I have not made it sufficiently clear. The ene…

It is not clear what "full duration static fire" means, but if the stage was fully fueled, the fuel tank would have contained 1000 tons of methane. The heat of combustion of methan…

Both SpaceX and NASA use LabView. NASA has a relatively detailed description of the engine test stands at Stannis: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=NASA+Data+Acquisition+S... h…

Five years ago SpaceX reported that they had 30000 seconds of test firing time on the Raptor, over 567 engine starts. Since them the program accelerated dramatically. Well over one…

If we look at the venting from the propellant tank (around T+16:15) it looks thick white closer to the vent, becoming more transparent and blue as it expands. That's just sunlight …

The views from Ship's engine bay looked rather ominous -- with the red glow visible in multiple places, and something venting furiously from the broken engine. It was a pleasant su…

There is an excellent three part documentary from Sandia National Labs: "Always/Never: The Quest for Safety, Control, and Survivability." (part 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D…

Cleve Moler was one of the big names in numerical methods, and participated in creation of canonical FORTRAN libraries for solving linear equations, and matrix algorithms more gene…

They struggled with many things, often time the minutiae of accomplishing something conceptually rather simple. For example, making an explosive with a significantly slower detonat…

There are different versions of the story. In one of them, somebody asked the question whether the atmosphere could ignite, and that was very quickly answered in the negative, but …

Plutonium was compressed about two-fold by volume. There is a story about it. When they first brainstormed the ways to make the bomb, even before Los Alamos, in 1942, one of the se…

It is all true, but one needs to take into account that because of the different properties of the materials, the critical mass for uranium-235 is intrinsically much greater than t…

99% of all diamonds by mass are industrial diamonds. But they are so inexpensive that they only account for 3% or the revenue. The jewelry is the remaining 0.8% by mass, and it is …

I think one can extrapolate further. There will be two things intertwined together: 1. Thought will be liberated from the confines of mortal bodies. 2. Technology will be able to c…

The point is not that silicon is not suitable for extreme cold -- it is, with careful design. But the authors want to use a semiconductor which would operate at much higher tempera…

Exactly. In physics, when people measured things at 4K, there were many examples of active circuits built to measure or amplify things in situ at 4K, and only send the results out,…

It was unintentional, but it is actually kind of true in his case. The guy is a founder and the CTO of two semiconductor companies.

In the "real" DRAM chip, there is a large array of very tiny capacitors, with the switches which allow to connect one row of the array at a time to the readout column wires. The ca…