Was it just me who decided not to open a random PDF from GitHub?
The Parachute Message
21–27 of 27 posts
Re: The Parachute Message
#22A PDF of slides, inside a git repo, and concluding with a picture from - and a non clickable link to - a tweet from another person, seems like an awfully peculiar way to share content.
If you think parsing that sentence is insane: exactly.
Re: The Parachute Message
#23Here's where the coordinates on the outer rim point to (For the lazy) https://goo.gl/maps/MCqYxngeQLJRMNeK7
Interestingly, their hands were somewhat tied when it came to coordinate system precision [1] because they had eight 7-bit words to encode with data. They couldn't say "34.20 N 118.17 W", which would indicate they're talking about the whole campus and industrial park it's in, because that's only 6 words. Instead, by defining it to a precision of one arcsecond, they imply that JPL is located within the 30-by-25-meter…
The coordinate square contains a lot of roadway, yes, but it also contains the front door to von Kármán Auditorium, which is where many of the public-facing lectures and press conferences are held. In other words, that square is basically the front door to the whole lab.
Re: The Parachute Message
#24I wonder how much more expensive was it to create the parachute with the code.
Never understood downvotes on questions or on economics. The cost of something affects how well it will scale. This is like downvoting a question about performance specs. Cost is a performance spec that determines scaling.
I personally saw it as a low-effort question, which could also indicate someone trolling, or trying (and failing) to make a joke. When you've spent billions of dollars on something, dyeing the fabric of your parachute in a particular pattern is obviously such a tiny tiny tiny tiny fraction of a percent of your budget that it's entirely irrelevant.
If you were planning on building these for something where the cost of the parachute would actually matter, and need to do so at scale, perhaps you'd switch to a single-color parachute (with simple orientation/tracking markings). This discussion isn't really interesting at all.
Re: The Parachute Message
#25Was it just me who decided not to open a random PDF from GitHub?
Just you.
Re: The Parachute Message
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Subtle play of the classic HN "but does it scale?" joke. As if someone is concerned about how well martian parachute assembly processes scale :D
Elon cares.
I don't think he plans to use parachutes, but I would not be too surprised if it would be more efficient to get some non-fragile supplies down on parachutes and airbags, but that would be a very long way out.
Re: The Parachute Message
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Never understood downvotes on questions or on economics. The cost of something affects how well it will scale. This is like downvoting a question about performance specs. Cost is a performance spec that determines scaling.
I personally saw it as a low-effort question, which could also indicate someone trolling, or trying (and failing) to make a joke. When you've spent billions of dollars on something, dyeing the fabric of your parachute in a particular pattern is obviously such a tiny tiny tiny tiny fraction of a percent of your budget that it's entirely irrelevant. If you were planning on building these for something where the cost of…
When you start adding tiny tiny tiny fractions to a multi-million dollar project because, come on it is a tiny tiny tiny fraction, and everybody in the team starts doing it in their module/subsystem because, it is a tiny tiny tiny fraction, it starts adding up... that is really what my rhetorical question was.