Viewing profile — mcarmichael

Add some trigonometry, and this superpower has historical military applications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscopic_rangefinder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbXyAzGtIX8

An important early impetus for research at AT&T was the immense labor component of contemporary switching technology. Hiring the number of qualified operators needed to scale out t…

Control was an almost completely unaddressed issue before the Wrights took it up, even though it is also crucial to useful glider development. This video has a nice delineation of …

Melville's Moby Dick. It can be about adventure, about whaling, about the fellowship of man, about mortality... Intruder in the Dust, the best of William Faulkner's "young adult" n…

As described, something more akin to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return-oriented_programming#Br... That page has a reasonable summary of the exploitation techniques and history m…

A nice companion piece, focused on a related probem: "An Efficient Data Structure For A Hex Editor" https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/tweak/btree.htm...

There are fundamental design choices in Lua that can certainly put some people off, such as prototype-based inheritance or the union of arrays and maps. It certainly wasn't casuall…

The really troublesome securities of the Global Financial Crisis were complex derivatives of private-label, almost universally sub-prime, asset-backed-securities: https://en.wikipe…

The project had a real mark-to-market agonizing reappraisal in 2010 or so, as reviewed here (from the standpoint of 2013): https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-13-690t >. Since then de…

Indeed. This marketing copy is spectacularly over-reaching. Canada has a proud history in sounding rockets; I wonder if comparisons to that military research work were the stepping…

The primary author, Ted Unangst, has a couple of blog posts describing the inception of doas, and its intended typical use patterns: https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/doas https://f…

Fayetteville State has some pretty unique regional and demographic considerations to take into account, and specific issues concerning student engagement with this course matter. P…

The source article title is quite appropriate in the context of the blog it appears in; presumably it's the HN-specific clickbait paraphrase that's being objected to... I concur, a…

The relevant conceptual distinction seems to be whether the aerodynamics of the blade(s) are conceptually independent, or interdependent. Better explained here: https://en.wikipedi…

For Tesla in particular, an explanation for the incredible rise in stock price post-2019 is needed, to inform any explanation for the recent slide. In the last 2 years, Meta touche…

At worst, the Lake Jackson authorities are being excessively cautious. When drinking, there's a slight chance of some liquid not being swallowed, after all. Given the recent fatali…

The treatment in the actual text of the book is rather different, and goes into some delightful detail concerning Tarzan's self-study program, which begins at the age of 10 or so: …

Derek Lowe is terrific in communicating complex ideas in the field to concerned lay observers like me; he's been a great resource for reliable information about the science of this…

This article is a good summary of the various factors: https://www.kqed.org/news/11755264/why-is-gas-so-expensive-i...

Porter Airlines appears to have started in an entirely unique regulatory regime, actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_Airlines In particular, airline monopoly control ove…

Forbes has a reasonably clear article on the subject, although they do themselves no credit by inserting gratuitous Twitter snark about their competitor into their article presenta…

I suppose it is literally true that the X-29 is "an impossible fighter jet", in that it was never put into production and fitted with weaponry. The phrase "inverted wing" is more t…

On the question of the decision-making process of the corporate officers, hope was springing until the end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cook_Group#Collapse As uncertain as…

The lunacy began in 2007, I think, with the MyTravel Group merger. The corporate finances became very transactional after that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cook_Group#Hist…

The US has used lots of approaches that didn't seem to work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion More restraint was exercised after Soviet support for the Castro gov…