Viewing profile — hanche

NTSB is the relevant institution, not FAA.

There’s an old story about that. Possibly apocryphal, but here goes: IBM mainframes used to come with documentation in ring binders. Some pages might indeed be marked “This page in…

You can't know. However, it is a consequence of the axiom of choice (AC). You can't know if AC is true either; but mathematics without it is really really hard, so it usually assum…

Heh. To borrow an idea from xkcd (measuring gas consumption as area): The kWh measures energy, right? And energy is force times distance. So energy divided by distance is force! Le…

Even worse with just two digits for the year! 01/02/03 could be 1 Feb 2003, or 2 Jan 2003, or 3 Feb 2001. Let’s just be thankful no one ever uses any of remaining three permutation…

> Runbox.com is a one person operation. Small team yes, but one person? https://runbox.com/about/runbox-team/ indicates otherwise. (I am a happy customer.)

71. So far, the oldest to respond. Only a tiny minority of readers are likely to respond, though. And all you will learn from the responses is the age disribition of that tiny mino…

Good point about pluralization. I tend to be confused about that because we don't pluralize units in Norwegian (except the equivalent of degrees). But confusingly, in English, you …

If you’ll excuse a bit of trivia: SI units named after people are not capitalized. So we have newton, joule, weber, kelvin, named after Newton, Joule, Weber, and Kelvin. (But their…

I could have sworn it was Asimov, but now I’m not so sure. As I remember it, the problem was communication with astronauts in the outer reaches of the solar system.

That makes no sense, and is not consistent with video evidence. Max flaps (40 degrees or so) are typically used only for landing. That is very obvious when you see it! Usual flap s…

They have a RAT (ram air turbine) that deploys automatically under specific conditions. It’s basically a turbine providing electric and hydraulic power. It was almost certainly dep…

Rachel has posted a follow-up: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/03/26/atop/ > user1 does something... and gets user2 to blow up. If you can make that do something useful, then you…

With the Alt key, that adjusts the width of all columns.

Too late to edit further, but I should add that there could be many reasons for the apparent failure to flare. I did not intend to speculate that the pilot is to blame. That is for…

A properly scathing resignation letter catches media attention better than anything you say after being fired, which would be interpreted by many as whining.

Indeed. Likely a wing tip strike, the right wing was ripped off, then the left wing is of course still flying so its lifting force rolls the plane over until that wing hits the gro…

I guess if we all add our favourite papers, we’ll end up with a very long list indeed. My own additions: As we may think by Vannevar Bush, and then something on Project Xanadu. The…

They can, but they need to learn the proper techniques. In a country like Norway with a high proportion of electric cars, I think all fire departments know the drill by now – even …

Electric cars don't burn more often than gas cars. And most electric car fires don't involve the high voltage battery at all, but originate in the 12 volt wiring. That said, high v…

> sometimes the reviewer selection is an utter crap shoot Indeed, but when someone of Tao's caliber submits a paper, any editor would (should) make an extra effort to get the very …

Or cheese slicer publishing, as you are selling your cheese one slice at a time. The practice is usually frowned upon.

Normally, referees are unpaid. You're just supposed to do your share of referee work. And then the publisher sells the fruits of all that work (research and refereeing) back to uni…

It’s called the modified Julian day (MJD). And the offset is 2,400,000.5 days. In the Julian day way of counting, each day ended at noon, so that all astronomical observations done…