Thanks, Don. I took a class from Mark at UMCP but I can't remember which one just now. He was one of my favorite instructors and I was sad when he went to PARC, but much sadder still when he died at such a young age.
There is great interest in using both instruments to observe the same target simultaneously, for example, a new supernova. It would be a real loss not to have Hubble available for such observations after JWST launches later this year.
I'm at NASA and a while ago I wanted to experiment with using Pi's to monitor experimental setups, instead of using full-on PCs as we do now, which would save a ton of money. Trying to get permission to put one on the network, even for just a quick test, was so difficult I gave up. And that was a few years ago, now we have so much mandatory compliance monitoring software, I don't know if it would even be possible anymore. Some of those packages may not be available for the Pi, even if it were running a supported OS like Ubuntu instead of Raspios. I understand why incidents like this one have made NASA management extra sensitive to IT security matters, but it sure feels like a creativity straight-jacket at times. There is not much fun in being an SA at NASA these days, I'm sorry to say.
I had the same thought. It takes time for even a fast charger to "top up" an electric car, so taking a half hour or more for lunch seems natural. They might even serve tea...
This chart is awesome. I agree about understanding the theory. My best friend is Hungarian and I could not get the 'gy' sound in his name (Gyuri) right until I read up on just how it's articulated. I read up on Finnish before I visited there a few years ago and it seemed a lot easier, although I'm not sure I understand the 'o' vowel correctly.
My sister (age 67) was diagnosed with exactly this a year ago, except she's stage 4. She's on Alecensa (alectinib) and is doing well, all things considered. Her left lung doesn't work very well, but she's dealing with it. Her cancer isn't localized, so surgery isn't an option. She did have radiation therapy on one tumor.
Alecensa is freaking expensive. Even with Medicare, it's costing her about $10,000 a year in deductibles and copays.
I still have a verizon.net email address (managed by AOL) that I use exclusively for sites that are likely to spam me. The torrent of political email I got at that address before the last election was amazing to behold.
I've wanted to do something similar to your project of having a sensing unit in each room, or at least each level, of my townhouse. What do you use as the "presence" sensor? PIR?
I personally think there's a lot of room for improvements that would work in nearly all English dialects. The "ough" mess, for example, could stand some clean up. But in general, yes, there is too much variation in English around the world to "fix" it now.
Since William Gibson coined the term in Neuromancer, it has become a common, if ill-defined, word for some sort of portable computing device, especially in a cyberpunk context.
I'm a big fan of Adafruit and the Pi, and I recently bought one of these "CyberDeck" add ons, but I'm annoyed that Adafruit chose to appropriate a generic term, cyberdeck, as the product name. This happens all the time, such as when IBM named their personal computer "The IBM Personal Computer" and what had once been a generic term became a specific product reference. Microsoft did this with "Windows", Intel did it with "Core", and more recently Musk did it with "Starship". Doing this muddies up the use of the generic term and can require extra effort to disambiguate (more so when speaking than in writing). I tend to see these choices as a mix of arrogance and a lack of imagination.
I never had any of the classic 8-bit home computers. I built a CP/M system from an Ampro Little Board, connected to the Heathkit H19 terminal I put together. The downside of that was little commercial software, but I mostly used it for accessing the University VAX 11/780. I follow a bunch of retro-computing Youtubers now and I feel like I missed out on something. My best friend had an Apple II and was always suggesting I get one. He still has it.
I've downloaded the Geroch paper and will give it a look, although it's probably over my head. My college physics classes were a long time ago. I nevertheless remain dubious that unrestricted causality violations are possible, but I'm happy to listen to arguments to the contrary.
This is the problem I have with most discussions of a practical Alcubierre style warp drive. They generally don't address the causality violations that are inherent in ANY form of FTL travel. But if it could be useful as an efficient sub-luminal drive, that would be cool and worth pursuing.
The original series was a bit fuzzy on just what role the matter-antimatter engines (and dilithium crystals) played in making warp drive possible. From the Next Generation era onward, the idea was basically that a matter-antimatter engine was the only practical way to generate the enormous power required to generate the warp field needed to go FTL via warp drive.
Space qualified processors are very expensive to develop and produce. They are optimized for use in space and manufactured on an entirely different process than commercial chips. All of this is to ensure reliability in the harsh environment of space. Due to these development and fabrication costs, it's worth it to keep using the same processor as long as it is capable of doing the needed computations. The current RAD750[0] has been used since 2005 and will likely continue to be used for some time.
I think this is part of what's behind the surge of interest in retrocomputing. As you say, those old 8-bit systems could be understood in their entirety by a single person. I know it's part of what has drawn me into the world of Arduino and other microcontrollers. It's fun to play with a simple system and get instant feedback from a blinky light.
Having said that, 512x480 with non-square pixels is a blight on the Universe.
Scion was in Reston, Virginia, but Chuck was a professor at the University of Maryland as well. He eventually quit UMD to work at Scion full time. He's the reason I got the job, he was one of my UMD profs. The MicroAngelo was easy to program but expensive because it was basically a full computer. It had an onboard Z80 and 32K (later 64K) of RAM. I worked there from 1981 to 1983-ish, when they fell on hard times and had to lay a bunch of people off.
My first job out of college was at Scion Corporation, who made the MicroAngelo S-100 graphics boards. I did Z80 programming for the firmware. They were nice boards but very expensive so I never got one for myself. The company nearly died when their follow on board for the IBM-PC was a failure, but that's a longer story.
More than CAD work. I'm a little out of the loop these days, but as of a few years ago, Nvidia cards were greatly preferred for all 3D work, including animation packages such as Maya. The Nouveau drivers just don't cut it for that sort of work.