emergentstate

Friends I’ve spoken to who live in Ukraine say the same thing, for what it’s worth. There seems to be a major disconnect between the recent alarm in the US/UK media and the actual residents of the place in question. Either these people are awfully naive or they recognize bluster when they see it.

Sure, but satellites do cluster in useful orbits — it’s not some uniform distribution over the space. That significantly increases the chance of direct collision, which has already managed to occur a few times, despite back-of-the-envelope low odds.

And the risk of a runaway effect is fairly unique to the orbital setting. If cars magically kept careening down the highway after a collision, constantly tumbling and shedding parts and disintegrating without losing any kinetic energy, we probably couldn’t tolerate the current density of vehicles on roads.

I have pretty mixed feelings about FreeCAD, having used it for 100+ hours across a few different projects.

It’s wonderful to have a open-source alternative to the expensive CAD software that muscled its way into a near monopoly in academia/industry, but it suffers from some really inexcusable design problems, on a fundamental level. As it is, I don’t think it’s really usable as a serious tool for creating complex assemblies.

I’d be curious if anyone here has managed to use it effectively for a large project (something real-world, not just showcasing FreeCAD).

But the anecdote you're relating doesn't really say anything about the ability of a normal distribution to describe a population. It's just a natural consequence of having a high-dimensional multivariate distribution without accounting for correlation or covariance, along with a low sample size. If you have 4,063 pilots and you take the middle 30% of ten (assumed independent) factors, you're looking at 0.3^10 * 4,063 = 0.02 people who actually fall into that bin, on average -- it's more a dimensions game than anything profound.

That's not to refute the anecdote's takeaway, but the same reasoning doesn't apply to a unidimensional unimodal distribution.