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

mcarmichael

2 anni fadiscuss

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 to a fully national phone system wasn't clearly possible, let alone sound business.

The scale of the challenge over time is described pretty well here:

https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...

AT&T thus had both a clear long-term goal, national phone service, and multiple long-term research challenges needed to make that goal possible (amplification) and economically feasible (switching).

For folks interested in delving further into Labs history, this recent paper has a wealth of relevant citations, while also clarifying some important corporate cultural framing that might otherwise be confusing:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365365963_BELL_LABS...

mcarmichael

2 anni fadiscuss

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 the collection of breakthroughs needed:

  https://youtu.be/EkpQAGQiv4Q?t=391

mcarmichael

2 anni fadiscuss

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" novels. The short story collection Knight's Gambit is also well worth a look.

mcarmichael

2 anni fadiscuss

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 motivating this work.

mcarmichael

3 anni fadiscuss

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...

mcarmichael

3 anni fadiscuss

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 casually hacked together, though. Ierusalimschy et. al. have thoroughly documented the language and its development rationale with admirable clarity.

In particular, the paper "C APIs in extension and extensible languages"[2] will be of special interest to prospective embeddable language developers. "Passing a Language through the Eye of a Needle: How the embeddability of Lua impacted its design" is also a good read, for those who can summon bits through the ACM hellm... er, portal.

1. http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/docs/sblp-2007.pdf

mcarmichael

3 anni fadiscuss

The really troublesome securities of the Global Financial Crisis were complex derivatives of private-label, almost universally sub-prime, asset-backed-securities:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateralized_debt_obligation

The standardized, so-called "agency" MBS on the SVB books really isn't anything like that CDO plague. In 2008, people were losing faith in the ability to even assign valuations to CDOs; SVB's problem with their MBS portfolio is that the current market valuation is obviously not what they needed it to be just now.

mcarmichael

3 anni fadiscuss

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 development targets have largely been met, and potential customers are much more comfortable with capability and reliability data.

Here's a great Australian-based analysis of the F-35's particular attractions for current foreign buyers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQgNwrtVoZ4

Scathing criticism of the early F-35 development process has always been entirely warranted, and the Pentagon continues to pay the price in rebuilding costs for early "production" airframes. Its also notable that the Navy is being quite, ah, deliberate about F-35C deployment; I think only one carrier is currently rated to operate them. The Marines are more gung-ho about their F-35Bs, but only the F-35A is an export success story so far.

mcarmichael

3 anni fadiscuss

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-off point here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Brant_(rocket)

Canada also has prior non-military liquid-fueled rocket engine development worthy of note:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Arrow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD0ChIZnPLY

That project also originated in a prize competition context; it's great to see Space Concordia persevering with their effort on its own merits.

Addendum: A much more reality-tethered description of the group's achievements as of a couple of years ago: https://www.pccomposites.com/space-concordia-fires-most-powe...

mcarmichael

4 anni fadiscuss

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://flak.tedunangst.com/post/doas-mastery

mcarmichael

4 anni fadiscuss

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

Paragraphs 2-5 of the article are worth reading in this regard, e.g.

> Our students will be largely taking this course online, half of our students are over the age of 25, many are veterans or military-affiliated, many are from rural communities, and we are a regional public Historically Black University focused on improving student access to a college education.

and

> I started teaching World History to 1600 in Spring 2019 as a provost-led intervention in the core curriculum and gateway classes that had high rates of students receiving final grades of D or F or withdrawing from the course.

The article is a case study in local curriculum engineering, not a doctrinal proclamation.

mcarmichael

4 anni fadiscuss

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, and suggest "History Curriculum: Ending World History Part One in…1763?".

mcarmichael

4 anni fadiscuss

The relevant conceptual distinction seems to be whether the aerodynamics of the blade(s) are conceptually independent, or interdependent. Better explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propeller_(aeronautics)#Aircra...

mcarmichael

4 anni fadiscuss

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 touched twice its end-of-2019 price; Tesla peaked at over 13 times its end-of-2019 price, and is still 5 times higher now! That seems like a far more striking and unlikely phenomenon than the recent slide.

mcarmichael

6 anni fadiscuss

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 fatality, erring on the side of caution seems quite understandable.

If I were living in the region served by Brazosport Water Authority, I'd be more interested in the criteria used to proclaim the safety of the rest of the service area, especially after perusing this:

  https://cen.acs.org/articles/93/web/2015/09/Brain-Eating-AmoebaScoffs-Chlorine-Water.html

mcarmichael

6 anni fadiscuss

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:

  "Among the other books were a primer, some child's readers, numerous picture books, and a great dictionary. All of these he examined, but the pictures caught his fancy most, though the strange little bugs which covered the pages where there were no pictures excited his wonder and deepest thought."

These are materials his parents has gathered to take to their Colonial posting for the express purpose of educating their infant son over the next several years; he just gets a rather late start on the program.

  "He did not accomplish it in a day, or in a week, or in a month, or in a year; but slowly, very slowly, he learned after he had grasped the possibilities which lay in those little bugs, so that by the time he was fifteen he knew the various combinations of letters which stood for every pictured figure in the little primer and in one or two of the picture books."

He takes several more years to piece together some of the mysteries of verbs and modifiers... I've always found it a fascinating thought experiment about language formation, given the era. In this context, I suppose the Hollywood presentation of Tarzan could be considered an application of the critical period hypothesis (had it existed at the time).

mcarmichael

6 anni fadiscuss

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 thing.

Just to clarify; the ChAdOx1 MERS prospect hasn't proceeded to a trial demonstrating efficacy in human subjects (as yet).

That's a particularly important distinction here, given the nature of the novel delivery mechanism[1] and prior observation of complications in SARS-CoV-1 vaccine development[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_vector#Adenoviruses

[2] https://www.hkmj.org/abstracts/v22n3%20Suppl%204/25.htm

mcarmichael

6 anni fadiscuss

This article is a good summary of the various factors:

https://www.kqed.org/news/11755264/why-is-gas-so-expensive-i...

mcarmichael

6 anni fadiscuss

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 over allocation of terminal resources at an airport is not a useful prerequisite to generalize from.

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