dgoodell

The radiators don’t have to increase in size really. If it’s more efficient you don’t have to reject as much heat.

But definitely a large increase in complexity as Stirling engines are mechanical devices and thermoelectrics are solid-state. The Stirling engines can be over 25% efficient rather than like 6% for thermoelectrics.

NASA has operated a Stirling engine in a lab for 17 years so it’s feasible, at least.

I think you need to define free will before deciding whether or not it exists. People that argue about it are mostly just using different definitions for it. Actually, the whole thing seems to be just a semantic argument, there's no science or anything involved.

IMO, I think free will is just a lie we tell ourselves. The inner workings of our brains are mostly hidden from us. When asked why we did something we just make up some bullshit that's not unlike what ChatGPT does when it helpfully fabricates an answer for us.

Maybe there was just some over-hiring of white-collar positions and this is just the result of a correction?

Why is it so hard for people to understand that you can’t have productive discussions about things that you haven’t solidly defined?

It kinda seems like the NTSB doesn't really need Boeing's cooperation. Apparently they can just waltz into a factory where an accident occurred and talk to whoever they want and look at whatever records they want.

I wonder why they aren't doing that yet?

I think nuclear electric propulsion is probably a viable option as well.

I think you read Boeing engineer's post a bit too quickly, because that's definitely not quite what it said.

That said, I worked in commercial aircraft engine component repair for years and everything I read in this is 100% plausible to me.

One time we shipped a part back to the customer before it was even done being repaired. It had labels and stickers marking stuff that needed to be done still on it. When the customer got it they emailed us some photos of the markings and said "It doesn't look done to us...". We had to tell them to send it back so we could finish it. Whoops!

I work for NASA. Our budget is like $25B. We’re definitely inefficient and wasteful, but we still do a lot of new things. Just not nearly as much as we could.

Microsoft’s operating budget was like $123B last year. There are bugs in office products that have been there for years

What exactly are they doing with all that money?

They say there are fewer new cars available at $21k today than in 2017. Did they take into account inflation?

$21k in Jan 2017 is nearly $26k Jan 2023. There seems to be plenty of new cars that cost that amount.

Do you really think Spacex required no permission at all for this? It certainly required approval from the FCC & FAA to launch this so I think you could say that US government gave him the right to do this.

Then you could ask: "Why does the US government have the right to do this?" I think the answer to that is probably the Outer Space Treaty which is signed on by most countries including all major spacefaring nations.

This may have been stopped (and still can be) if there was major uproar among the US populace or by other countries. I don't recall hearing much about that.

In any case, I'm not sure there is a sufficient reason to stop it. The biggest issue that I have heard about is the potential for a negative impact on ground-based astronomy. That's obviously not good, but I'm not sure it's a sufficient reason to stop this.

You are mistaken. There might be a bit of hybridization with some wild boars that were brought over and escaped, but these are feral pigs.

No it’s not. Native Americans were just the first wave of an invasive species.

I just looked up a youtube video of the pronunciation in Hindi and g is pronounced basically the same way as I say it in northeast Ohio, which is generally pretty close to standard American english.

Then I looked up the ipa standard pronunciations for both from wiktionary:

enPR: gē, IPA(key): /ɡiː/ (South Asia) IPA(key): [ɡʱiː]

Perhaps it’s just you?

I don’t thinks this page is ugly at all.

What more important to me is that it loads quickly.

Its real use case is going to be for nuclear power, either fission reactors or radioisotope power systems. Not solar electric. It turns out solar concentrators and reflectors are pretty difficult and fragile.

If you have enough sunlight, solar will almost always be preferred.

Note, I work with these systems at NASA.

Yes, it was “Nightfall”.

I don’t think that’s a commercial product yet, still on the tech development phase. It may not pan out.

I asked for some samples a while ago so we could test them out in our magnet lab here at NASA GRC but I haven’t heard anything back yet.

Having industrial design and a nice webpage complete before there is any hardware at all seems like a major red flag to me. Who is actually going to manufacture this?

I work at NASA GRC and I couldn’t even imagine that happening here. That’s crazy.

I work at NASA. We had a big review meeting for a space brayton (turbine engine) concept. One manager-level engineer absolutely thought that the spinning rotor would apply a constant torque to the spacecraft that would have to be constantly counteracted. I tried and failed to explain conservation of angular momentum to him.

I studied physics and it always surprises me how many good engineers really don’t have a very good intuitive understanding of basic physics principles like conservation laws.

I work as an engineer at NASA in Cleveland, Ohio. We went from 100% in person work to completely remote work for a year and half due to the pandemic, and now the work environment is mainly in-person but remote work is much more common. I often work in a lab with physical hardware which obviously requires me to be present. Additionally, we don't produce anything per se, we do tech development. I'm not cranking out widgets/code/whatever where my productivity is easy to objectively judge.

Here are some reasons I could imagine in-person work may be advantageous:

-I think there is probably an increase in camaraderie when people can interact with each other in-person.

-Spontaneous unstructured collaboration and innovation absolutely increases in-person. We rarely have informal asides after a Teams meeting, but it happens a lot after in-person meetings.

-Hiring new inexperienced people who are from out-of-town and having them start 100% remote is generally a bad experience and they pick things more slowly.

-People that working from home abuse it and multitask by running errands, watching their kids, etc. This is great for employees and I would guess that it is a large part of the reason that many employees are loathe to go back to work 100% of the time. Productivity can be difficult to track.

-The NASA network is very reliable and under our complete control. Remote work depends on each person's home internet connection/router/wifi and it's MUCH slower and less reliable. I often deal with large quantities of data and and the only way to work with it is locally on the same network it's produced on. Sure I can remote in, but then we're back to depending on public internet infrastructure. Sometimes things break so I guess I can't work on that today.

A related thought: -If large percentage of the workforce depends on the complex public internet infrastructure to perform work, that creates a possible weak point in their operations that could be affected by adversaries or maybe a natural disaster or something. I get that many people here do work that would cease to have any purpose if the internet disappeared so there's less disadvantage to remote work. But most industries use the internet for convenience, it isn't fundamental to their existence and everything they do could be done without it.

I think it started in Euclid Ohio and went to the Supreme Court.

I think the 80286 could support a max of 16mb of ram. I doubt many computers built from them had anywhere near that much ram.

Peak horsepower is not that relevant to the sorts of applications that horses were performing that they proposed to use engines for. In that case they wanted sustained power, and a horse can only produce about 1 horsepower sustained.

NASA is lagging because of personnel? If by “personnel” includes incredibly, weak leadership, then I agree.

NASA leadership seems to think NASA’s job is primarily to set requirements and distribute funds to contractors and to avoid managing, building, or operating anything if it can possibly be avoided. They just want to pay someone to do something and slap a NASA logo on it and pat themselves on the back for their “achievement”.

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that people with skills that would permit them to work in mines, work in mines.

What I don’t understand is WHY these more automated systems cost so much.

And it’s not like there isn’t competition, we have both Lyft and Uber overlapping in many places and people can chose between them.

I’d really like to see a chart or something shows where Lyft/Uber fees goes.

There has to be a lot of inefficiencies. My suspicion is there is a lot of white collar bloat.

What is the correct amount of freedom to build? Do we have too much or too little? How do you know if we have the right amount of freedom?

You’re proposing that we should be using nuclear propulsion to get mass from earth’s surface to earth orbit?

The only proposed method of doing this that I’m aware of is nuclear pulse propulsion like project Orion. I think there are a few pretty legitimate reasons that we’re not doing that.

Written info is useless without the right sort of culture where the necessary experimentation and problem solving can occur to work out those undocumented details. That is all that matters.

However, that is also true today and the effects are visible through the variations in technological progress of different populations currently on earth.