Viewing profile — ridgeguy

Sometime in the mid-90s, after I'd read M&C and the two following books, I heard Patrick O’Brian interviewed on the radio as I was driving to work in Sunnyvale. The interview inclu…

Gasoline doesn't do that. Perhaps you're thinking of the following? What it does do is slowly polymerize, becoming useless as an ICE fuel in time, typically in a year or two. This …

It'll be interesting to see what happens when an AI-piloted F-16 flies for real against a human-piloted one. IIRC, the F-16 maximum maneuvering G-load is 9.5G, LBA (limited by airf…

A modern instance of that old saw "you are what you eat".

SpaceX, Tesla, and X have entered the chat....

YMMV a lot with Aliexpress. I bought a $700 chiller that arrived without a small attachment fitting for the return inlet line. I complained, received another chiller (with the fitt…

eBay is very good for science-related goods, in my experience. Last week, I bought ~$12K of used gear for a project. All items work, would have cost ~2.5x that from the usual used …

YMMV. When we sold in 2021, our realtor connected us with an interest-free lender who put up $76K for repairs and staging. This, and other services, made the difference between our…

The lighter centers could have been diffraction around the object and reconvergence. Or some kind of signal processing effect at the retinal level. The retinal vessel network is a …

Reconsider the blood cell visualization thing. I've had bilateral PVD. Each was accompanied by an initial few minutes of seeing a few dozen small dark spots that had lighter grey c…

Maybe the taxpayers who pay for those expensive sports arenas + the tax breaks that frequently shelter their owners/operators?

"Rocket Manual for Amateurs" was my favorite book after I found it in 8th grade. In high school I had a chem teacher who would give me chemicals so I could experiment with what I'd…

Teflon.

I wonder if the results would have differed if LLM training data were biased to include a stronger correlation between use of nukes and subsequent collapse of technology that all L…

I suspect there are substantial numbers of us in our 70's+ who would volunteer. Why not go out having made an amazing contribution?

This is an issue for me and my company. I'm building a prototype chemical vapor deposition system in a space with strong Chinese interest and activity. I picked Prusa 3D machines o…

Unknown at present (nobody sells diamond sandpaper yet that I know of), but not likely. Diamond is as bioinert as gold, fluorocarbons, and similar materials in not provoking inflam…

One has to be trained to do it, the untrained tendency is to wait too long. There's a USAF film on Youtube titled "Ejection Decision" that discusses this and shows how little time …

De Beers built and has abandoned a very large CVD gem diamond synthesis in Oregon. This was their LightBox operation. They've transferred it to Element Six to rid the parent (De Be…

De Beers sells devices that can distinguish between naturals and CVD synthetics. They're not cheap, but less than ~$80K, IIRC. They do a pretty good job, I've heard >90% success in…

Diamond grit for polishing and grinding is now a cheap commodity. In 10,000 ct. lots, I pay from 5¢/ct. to 30¢/ct. depending on specific grit properties. I haven't searched for it,…

Perhaps this is an early indicator. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/13/utah-approve...

The helmet cam video gave me a sense of just how difficult such operations are. I'm grateful we have people who will accept such assignments.

We turn off the AI note taker for the legal liabilities discussed in the NYT article. But we've also found its accuracy bad enough to warrant kicking it out, independent of legal i…

Arthur C. Clarke beat them to it - the thought, at least. Watch This Space - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_to_the_Moon