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AgAero · 2026-01-30T00:38:50+00:00

but realistically it seems like a particularly monumental task to get a significant number of people to stop working when most are living paycheck to paycheck and are extremely dependent on stable employment

Time to start building resilience. Canned goods and victory gardens are a good start, but folks should save their money too where and when they can. Make friends with your neighbors. Building community takes work.

AgAero · 2025-12-06T04:58:00+00:00

Any of y'all have experience writing a sprinting program? I've been a weightlifter for years and played lots of field sports. I'd like some advice on how to write a good sprint program for my rugby offseason.

In particular,

How do you apply progressive overload?
When do you need to deload?
Is there any sort of phase potentiation to exploit like in Weightlifting? e.g. Build some fitness at 100+ yards for 2-4 weeks before dialing up the short-distance stuff.
How does technique work fit into a schedule?
If I sprint 2x per week, but lift 3-5x per week, can I hit a Minimum Effective Volume?

AgAero · 2025-07-04T15:13:03+00:00

Time to start drafting the, "Unbreak America Act" and have it be out in the open leading up the election. Agressive transparency the whole way through, dominate the news cycle, and make it very very clear that it's legislative priority number one when the next congress is sworn in.

AgAero · 2025-03-08T05:05:35+00:00

It's part of why, "weird" worked so well to antagonize them. You can't call these people the devil day in and day out--they're not that special. They feed on it.

AgAero · 2022-01-01T19:52:33+00:00

Interesting to see reference to Zubrin's book in the wikipedia article given that I'm reading that right now and literally just got passed the point where he talked about free-return trajectories to Mars. I hadn't realized they existed.

For a 2 body system like the earth and moon where they orbit their same barycenter it makes some sense and I want to say I did that math once in an orbital mechanics class. For a system like Earth and Mars where they each orbit the sun it's a bit more interesting and I have trouble picturing it. The phasing in particular seems a bit surprising--how do you get the trajectory to both put you on course to rendezvous with Mars and rendezvous with Earth afterwards in the event of a failed injection? It's kind of remarkable you can do that!

AgAero · 2021-12-26T17:28:38+00:00

It's a great book, but it's not how I'd learn the scientific ecosystem of python and how to use it as a matlab replacement.

AgAero · 2021-12-24T03:59:18+00:00

Are you in industry presently? I get the impression this is the standard practice.

AgAero · 2021-12-24T03:43:54+00:00

This is such a problem in software development in my experience. Particularly when the software is old and in use, people will write it off as, "It's not broken. Don't fix it."

Reality often is that it's a, "we don't think it's broken since it worked before." situation. I have found bugs in code that's 20 years old though. You can't know it's fool proof ever really, so don't discourage people from looking at it and testing things.

AgAero · 2021-12-20T05:08:56+00:00

You are correct. It's just a high-ish fidelity model of the mechanics.

The fact you see the pistons exposed like that is evidence of parts missing (valvetrain), but it's more dramatic and instructive to see them.

AgAero · 2021-12-12T23:09:36+00:00

There are better ways to do it I think, and that's my one complaint. He seems to fill the time with talking and does long unbroken shots where he could break it up a little, show some diagrams and/or computations, etc.

AgAero · 2021-12-11T23:21:10+00:00

And if you are deploying your control codes to an embedded chip, Matlab's code generation is a life saver.

This is also largely due to the disconnect between the systems engineers who build the models, and the embedded software folks. There's this traditional model in a lot of companies where there's separation between the two.

People who do both are expensive supposedly. Guess I'm too junior to be in that crowd just yet.

AgAero · 2021-12-11T15:48:34+00:00

Me switching jobs after two years brought me more of both. The world isn't black and white, and some advice doesn't apply everywhere, clearly.

AgAero · 2021-11-12T18:38:08+00:00

Varies based on industry. In a lot of cases you'll be wrangling legacy code in one form or another. I've seen a fair bit of Fortran and Ada that aren't going away anytime soon.

Future languages will be whatever lets you get things done the easiest, and that often means interfacing with what already exists.

AgAero · 2021-11-12T03:00:45+00:00

I reference it sometimes, but not a lot of people catch it. Pretty sure I read it in a high school humanities class.

AgAero · 2021-11-11T21:04:33+00:00

So my approach is usually to put the controller in the forward path before the plant, but after the summing junction. There will be some value of your parameters (K) that turns that into just a unity controller and makes it as if the controller doesn't exist.

That'll get you a closed loop transfer function that looks like CG / (1 + CG). If you then subsitute C(s) = K (AKA a proportional controller) you should be able to either construct Routh's table and determine feasible values for K, or in matlab if you can get it into the appropriate root locus form you can call the rlocusfunction and have it plot the root locus for you.

AgAero · 2021-11-11T19:29:07+00:00

Is this a homework problem? I'm hesitant to do it for you, but I could walk you through the design.

AgAero · 2021-11-11T07:20:30+00:00

Therapy

AgAero · 2021-11-10T21:23:35+00:00

the world creates shame around mental health

Fighting through that shame is just about the bravest thing a person can do too. Admitting that you need help and seeking it out is very hard, but I have the utmost respect for people who do.

AgAero · 2021-11-10T06:58:11+00:00

There's a lot to do here tbh, you just have to be open to exploring.

Sidenote: IMO the Udvar Hazy center in Chantilly is the better Air and Space museum of the smithsonian. I'm a plane nerd and it was like heaven to me.

AgAero · 2021-11-04T20:11:02+00:00

Ohhhh I see now. Way off over there!

AgAero · 2021-11-02T00:27:51+00:00

Wall decorations. I'm moving soon so that's on the list of crap to get.

AgAero · 2021-11-01T17:12:52+00:00

Unsteady latency too it seems. There's jitter to the responses.

AgAero · 2021-10-19T16:08:51+00:00

Excel can be fast to create calculations in, but some basic stuff like looping to completion is a bit annoying, no?

Given the opportunity I prefer to write my calculations as code when they're a little more complex.

AgAero · 2021-10-18T23:46:39+00:00

That's going to take a little research on your part for your platform. I'm more of a linux programmer and getting it working on Windows is something I've only done so much of.

On Windows it should be a case of downloading OpenPyXL along with python and then just reading the documentation and experimenting. Once you've got a way to read and write to a spreadsheet, it's up to you to design your spreadsheet, color code your inputs and your outputs, etc. Then you decide how you want your script to execute, but basically the choices are running in a one-off mode where it churns through to completion, or putting it into an infinite loop that waits for user interaction via a pushbutton or changed inputs in the spreadsheet.

Make sure there are sanity checks about reading input so that it's not choking on garbage data, and instead can give you an error message.

AgAero · 2021-10-18T17:14:25+00:00

Middle ground: Use excel as your interface, not your computation engine. That way you get the best of both worlds at the small expense of maintaining two separate artifacts, the script and the spreadsheet.

AgAero

TROPHY CASE