tullianus

Unfortunately this is not the case. The amplifiers on the transmit-side phased arrays are about 10% efficient (perhaps 12% on a good day), but the amps represent only ~half the power consumption of the transmit phased arrays. The beamformers and processors are 0% efficient. The receive-side phased arrays are of course 0% efficient as well.

The current slate of Russian GPS jamming is not being done by satellites.

The jammer under discussion is not a satellite. It is a ground-based system that jams satellites. Did you read the article? There's even a photo of the system right at the top.

God I keep coming back to them using photos of twins for the children. Imagine taking this study. You're shown a photo of a kid. Does he look more like a John, Paul, George, or Ringo*? You click John. Two photos later you're shown the same goddamn kid. Does he look more like a Matthew, Mark, Luke or John*? You figure the test is bugged or something, so you click John again. OOPS, actually those two photos were identical twins, so you're guaranteed to have gotten one wrong! Does this affect the results? Who knows?

     * (imagine Israeli equivalents)

The paper is here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2405334121

No way does this replicate.

* Calling p = 0.062 "marginally significant" (Study 1, child perceivers, adult targets) rings my alarm bells.

* The adult photos used (for studies 1/2/4B) are headshots from an Israeli casting agency. Are there any stage names in use? The child photos are all twins from a twin study the same lab was running. Those seem like, uh, different datasets, with no attempt to control for differences between them. What are the results if you use child actor headshots. What are the results if you use random adult twins. Come on now.

* Any control for real correlations between name and visible features like race or class? The false names in the multiple-choice question were taken at random from the set of names in the dataset. The mean accuracy (for photos of adults) was like 30% - was that more or less even across photos? Or is the average dragged up by a few photos? Imagine an American context: how much of this result is from people correctly identifying the black guy as Darius or Hakeem (or from correctly identifying that the white guy ISN'T Darius or Hakeem)? If you can eliminate one option from a 4-choice question, then your odds are 33%, not 25%.

* The way the results are interpreted (people change their appearance in adulthood in a way that makes them look more like their name) depends entirely on the "we aged up these photos of children using a GAN" experiment, which seems extremely shaky. Also be serious here: do they really think people named Ariel have more lion-y haircuts on average in a way that people subconsciously pick up on? That people named David are gonna look more kingly? Not to shit on their proposed mechanism too much, but get real.

* They preregistered that they were going to look at the differences between men and women, between children and adults, between people who went to religious schools and people who didn't, and between people who knew an example of most of the names used and people who didn't, AND between participants' scores using names they were familiar with vs names they weren't. Lotta comparisons there; I hope they did a Bonferroni correction on the reported p-values.

That would have helped a lot! Using a high-conductance device to transport heat away from the hot side before switching to lower-conductance devices for heat rejection. All I can say is that my thermal philosophy wasn't as robust back then, and I also had an irrational fear of heatpipes :)

Tried to use one of these in a space application once: cold side on the sensor, hot side attached directly to a radiator. Unfortunately the thermal conductance [W/°C] from the hot side back to the cold side was high enough (relative to my radiator's thermal conductance to space) that I needed to pump not only the sensor's heat load, but a small fraction of the Peltier's heat as well, which ballooned the electrical power required. Not worth spending that much power to buy an increase in SNR from a cooler sensor.

Yes, although in practice you will have issues sinking heat at 0K without using additional energy to do so, since that's below the radiation sink temperature of space (~2.73K).

Cerium is common in solar coverglass used in space, but I'm not sure I've heard of it being used for terrestrial applications.

It means "tornado," referencing the 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz." The Kansan protagonist is transported by a sudden tornado to a magical land called Oz.

"Affected" is a strong term. The line along which re-entry was predicted to occur is three times the circumference of the Earth (as you can see in the OP article), and a small fraction of that line passes through the borders of Germany.

Helmet-mounted rearview mirror. Looks like the little mirror they use at the dentist's office.

Only partly thanks to overall budget inaction in Congress. The bigger cause in my opinion is Congress proposing huge reductions in Mars Sample Return program funding or outright cancellation [1], which is currently supporting a lot of people at JPL. This coincides with a scathing review of the program [2]. I think the vitriol is justified, especially after the two-decade-long shitshow that was JWST.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/07/the-senate-just-lobbed... [2] https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/mars-sample-...

You're describing a Control Moment Gyroscope (CMG), famously used on the ISS. They have very high torque output per unit power and mass/volume. They and reaction wheels (fixed axis of rotation) are convenient for spacecraft applications because they don't require an external medium to push against. Aircraft are surrounded by air, so they can use control surfaces instead.

Starlink is not a separate company from SpaceX

The people the DOJ claims are discriminated against (asylees and refugees) can't vote. The issue is SpaceX claiming they can only hire citizens (who can vote) and permanent residents (who can't vote).

A few, yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placentalia

SpaceX (at least in my experience) requires design and manufacturing engineers to spend shifts on the production line to make sure there isn't low-hanging fruit in improving either the design or the manufacturing flow. If your manager hears complaints from the production team and you haven't spent some shifts on the floor getting to know the issue personally, you won't be long for the job.

Counterfeit nutmegs (made of wood) were at minimum widely feared at some points in history: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94734/why-early-america-...

New players and stretchable diplomacy period length :)

I think this might be a strength of Diplomacy for current AI models - making contradictory plans with two different players is a perfectly normal human move, as is saying one thing and doing another, as is cooperating on round N and defecting on round N+1.

Two features that make Diplomacy particularly bad:

1. Length. An in-person game can last easily 12 hours, and is mentally exhausting. Getting 10 hours in and THEN getting screwed by your friend feels worse than a game with less time investment.

2. Design. It's difficult to survive the opening few hours without alliances, but only one player can win, so everyone is incentivized to defect at exactly the moment they think they can make greater gains by defecting than by cooperating. Being betrayed, even if you survive, forces a total rethink of strategy and ruins the next hour or two of gameplay.

The effect of downward-pointing black coatings on LEO satellites is higher spacecraft temperatures, but the cost of those higher temperatures is on spacecraft design/use, not on IR astronomy. Starlink satellites run screamingly hot even without the dark coatings; if they're a problem for IR telescopes, then that should already be a problem. A few extra degrees shouldn't break the budget.

> However, the details of the Harvard interpretation do not stand up to scrutiny. There is no evidence that Kaczynski read most of the authors whom Chase and Corey cite as his influences, and there is some evidence that Kaczynski did not read some of them. In May 2001, Corey mailed a copy of his article to Kaczynski and asked for his comments. Kaczynski’s reply was unhelpful and dismissive, but his private notes on this article are revealing. He wrote that he had ‘never read anything by’ many of the authors whom Corey and Chase list as the Manifesto’s sources: Alfred Adler, Hannah Arendt,...and E. F. Schumacher. Kaczynski confirmed that he had read B. F. Skinner, as well as three books by Jacques Ellul... But of the authors he read, he denied that the Manifesto was influenced by several of them.

Has the author of this article mailed it to Kaczynski to see what he thinks?

Oh, there are plenty of US satellites with classified payloads/missions; I just mean that most classified US satellites DO have orbital elements listed in the Space Force catalog.

That capability was transferred to the Space Force recently. They make their data publicly available here: https://www.space-track.org/

Often you can figure out what spacecraft/rocket a piece of debris came from with a good catalogue of orbits and some math - these are labeled "Debris." Often you just can't - these are labeled "Unknown."

The US Space Force does a lot of the object cataloging, and they occasionally will pretend one of their classified satellites doesn't exist, but there's only a handful of these.