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You forgot the most important one, the human computers at ground control. Who said women can't do math? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-...
> Who said women can't do math? Nobody
I'm a bit tired of all the sensationalist "look what landed on the moon vs. today's hardware" comparisons. The first airplanes didn't have any sort of computer on board, so computation power is not the single deciding factor on the performance and success of such an endeavor. The software (and hardware) of the Apollo missions was very well-engineered. We all know computation became ridiculously more powerful in the m…
Sure they had and often still have, it's called wetware.
>so computation power is not the single deciding factor on the performance and success of such an endeavor
The endeavor to charge a phone?
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> Who said women can't do math? Nobody
A quick search will show you many many examples that say otherwise. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-524390/The-women-ad... Granted, that same search will show you many examples of content accusing unnamed other people of having this attitude. https://www.science.org/content/article/both-genders-think-w... It’s an antiquated notion in my mind, but I don’t think it is a thing of the past.
Women being bad at advanced math would make sense as an antiquated notion, but those in charge of hiring decisions until about 50 years ago evidently thought women were great at basic math.
The study you linked showing that women lag behind men in math to a degree proportional to some gender disparity metric is also interesting, but doesn't really tell us how we got here.
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let me preface this with the disclaimer that i am far from an expert on the topic probably numerous eddies in natural turbulent fluid flows have been digital turing-complete computers, given what we know now about the complexity of turbulence and the potential simplicity of turing-complete behavior. but is there an objective, rather than subjective, way to define this? how complicated are our input-preparation and ou…
> is the game? Sure. One of the "Surprisingly Turing-Complete" examples is that "Magic: the Gathering: not just TC, but above arithmetic in the hierarchy ". See https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09828 for the preprint "Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete", https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/its-possible-to-buil... for an Ars Technica article, and https://hn.algolia.com/?q=magic+turing for the many HN submissions on…
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It can? How?
as i understand it, with infinite precision; the real numbers within some range, say -15 volts to +15 volts, have a bijection to infinite strings of bits (some infinitesimally small fraction of which are all zeroes after a finite count). with things like the logistic map you can amplify arbitrarily small differences into totally different system trajectories; usually when we plot bifurcation diagrams from the logisti…
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That sounds way too low. Modern fly-by-wire planes are said to have 12-way voting.
> Modern fly-by-wire planes are said to have 12-way voting Do you have a source for that? Everything I've ever read about Airbus says the various flight control systems are doubly redundant (three units). Twelve sounds like it would be far beyond diminishing returns...
I'm a bit tired of all the sensationalist "look what landed on the moon vs. today's hardware" comparisons. The first airplanes didn't have any sort of computer on board, so computation power is not the single deciding factor on the performance and success of such an endeavor. The software (and hardware) of the Apollo missions was very well-engineered. We all know computation became ridiculously more powerful in the m…
What I find more interesting is to compare how complicated the tech we don’t think about has become. It’s amazing that a cable, not a smart device or even 80s digital watch, but a literal cable, has as much technology packed into it as Apollo 11 and we don’t even notice.
Playing devils advocate for your comment, one of the (admittedly many) reasons going to the moon is harder than charging a USB device is because there are not off-the-shelf parts for space travel. If you had to build your USB charger from scratch (including defining the USB specification for the first time) each time you needed to charge your phone, I bet people would quickly talk about USB cables as a “hard problem” too.
That is the biggest takeaway we should get from articles like this. Not that Apollo 11 wasn’t a hugely impressive feat of engineering. But that there is an enormous amount of engineering in our every day lives that is mass produced and we don’t even notice.
I'm a bit tired of all the sensationalist "look what landed on the moon vs. today's hardware" comparisons. The first airplanes didn't have any sort of computer on board, so computation power is not the single deciding factor on the performance and success of such an endeavor. The software (and hardware) of the Apollo missions was very well-engineered. We all know computation became ridiculously more powerful in the m…
I think this is the whole point of articles like this. I don’t think it’s sensationalist at all to compare older tech with newer and discuss how engineers did more with less.