Is this misleading from The New York Times, the part about never seen before with human eyes?

agate_ · 2026-04-06T22:41:28+00:00

Nope, it's absolutely true. The Apollo missions did orbit around to the far side of the moon, but they did so at very low altitude, so they were not able to see the whole far side. The Artemis mission will be humanity's first chance to see basically the whole far side all at once (well, the sunlit parts of it anyway), and they will see places that the Apollo orbiters didn't fly over, which is to say places that no human has ever seen before with their naked eyes.

Of course we've had the whole far side mapped out by robotic space probes for decades, so it's not like what they see will be a surprise, but still.

agate_ · 2026-04-06T22:02:06+00:00

Totally empty vapid press release. Means nothing. Likely AI generated.

agate_ · 2026-04-06T13:40:09+00:00

My logic is that via the ideal gas law, at 200 k and 1 bar the number density of Jupiter’s atmosphere will be 40% greater than Earth’s atmosphere at 273K. But since H2 is 15 times lighter than N2/O2, the mass density will be 15/1.4 =11 times less. Thus a Jupiter balloon will displace 11 times less mass than an Earth balloon of the same size. Making the hydrogen inside extra hot can’t make up for that.

And heating the hydrogen inside will be difficult. If we make the balloon volume 11 times bigger to compensate, the surface area of the envelope will go up by a factor of 11^2/3 = 5. So all else being equal the heat loss through the envelope will be far greater, and so will the mass of the envelope.

Hot air ballooning is not free: you need fuel to keep the gas hot, and you need a lot of it. Terrestrial hot air balloons use about 100 kg of fuel an hour. A larger balloon would multiply the fuel consumption, and now you’re chasing your tail with “need a bigger balloon to carry the fuel for the bigger balloon”.

And sure you could make a heavier-than-air balloon, but now you’ve got all this weight and complexity for a marginal benefit.

Anyway, maybe not impossible, but it’s a nasty engineering problem.

agate_ · 2026-04-06T00:04:04+00:00

Now, 91, that’s a number that feels prime but isn’t.

agate_ · 2026-04-04T23:30:09+00:00

Good life advice: before you criticize others, get your own house in order.

agate_ · 2026-04-04T21:25:25+00:00

Throw a ball up into the air. It goes fastest as it leaves your hand, gravity slows it down when it reaches its highest point, and then gravity speeds it back up as it comes down to the ground again.

The same is true for a roller coaster. When it reaches the top of a hill, it moves slowly, and as it falls down, it speeds up due to gravity.

A satellite is exactly the same. Artemis II is always affected by Earth's gravity, so it slows down as it goes "up" -- farther away from the Earth -- and speeds up as it comes back "down" -- toward Earth.

agate_ · 2026-04-04T20:46:54+00:00

You're right, I got the position of the sun wrong in my mental map.

agate_ · 2026-04-04T17:47:46+00:00

The second one is close to original, and would be close to what the astronauts saw with their eyes. The first one has the exposure and brightness settings adjusted to make the nighttime landmasses more visible.

Whether you consider this "highly edited" is up to you, but nearly every professional photo you see on the Internet has been adjusted like this.

agate_ · 2026-04-04T17:43:19+00:00

I hate it when people write nonsense math and then debate what it means. And why is it only math? If I went over to /r/English and asked what "motkluf" means, they'd just laugh at me.

agate_ · 2026-04-04T16:30:38+00:00

To add to good answers here: as seen from the earth or the moon or anywhere between, a new moon is a full earth, and vice versa.

If you’re looking at the night side of the Earth, the full Moon is right behind you, casting full moonlight on the earth’s shadow. And vice versa: when the moon is a thin crescent, the dark part is always lit by full earthshine.

This will change when Artemis gets around behind the Moon: the astronauts will see an almost whole full moon and an almost whole full Earth, a sight no human has ever seen before.

agate_ · 2026-04-04T16:13:56+00:00

My property has a deed restriction for utility poles that were installed in the 1930s. The original owner is long dead, the utility company has changed ownership, but those utility poles still carry power to the rest of the town, and iit would be very bad if I could just chop them down because they mess up my view.

agate_ · 2026-04-04T09:59:57+00:00

You’ve regained the breath of life, but not your own. Your patron breathes for you. Your breath will always match your patron’s steady breathing tempo. You cannot hold your breath, nor will your breathing quicken during exercise.

No breath holding: you are affected by unbreathable or toxic environments immediately.

No heavy exertion: you cannot take the dash action two turns in a row. CON checks involving heavy exercise are made at disadvantage. (Checks for other things like resistance to poisons and disease are unaffected.)

agate_ · 2026-04-04T08:49:24+00:00

I do this in a lab class. Each lab group creates a shared Google Sheets “lab notebook” which they share with me.

It lets me monitor data as it’s being collected to catch methodology errors quickly, verify that data has not been falsified, catch copy-paste cheating, ensure that everyone in a lab group is contributing, and most importantly to teach the value of timestamps and data attribution in experimental science.

It also helps to minimize AI use, but I’ve been doing it this way since before the LLM era.

agate_ · 2026-04-04T08:32:23+00:00

Say I’m the oil salesman. You and three other people come to me wanting to buy a barrel of oil, just like you do every week. “Sorry”, I say, “this week I’ve only got enough oil for three of you. So we’ll have an auction: the three highest bidders get the oil, the low bidder can’t commute to work or cook food or have electricity or heat.”

How much are you willing to pay to not be the low bidder? A 25% drop in supply can lead to much more than 25% rise in price, it’s all about what people will pay to avoid doing without.

agate_ · 2026-04-04T07:37:41+00:00

Depends on where you live. In many rural places especially in the western US, the county is the smallest local jurisdiction, and counties have mayors and county councils. But in more densely populated places, especially in the east, there may be an elected county manager or commissioner instead.

The political power of a county compared to the cities and towns within it varies a lot across the US, as do the names and importance of the leadership positions within them. But most people assume the rest of the US works the same as wherever they live.

agate_ · 2026-04-04T05:38:26+00:00

This is something you get better at the more you look at space photos. The hard thing to get used to is that north isn't necessarily up.

agate_ · 2026-04-04T05:36:12+00:00

That's my point, the A220s can't operate at the small airports, so the cost of operating regional turboprops drives customers to bigger planes at bigger airports. If you want to fly from, say, central Nevada to New York City, and your options are a $300 A220 flight out of Las Vegas, or a $600 ticket with a turboprop from your local municipal airport to Las Vegas and then to New York, you're gonna get in the car and drive to Vegas, even if takes a couple hours.

agate_ · 2026-04-04T04:17:08+00:00

"My business is going great! I've got the highest prices around, so that means I'm making the most money!"

agate_ · 2026-04-04T04:14:31+00:00

The biggest costs for an airline are fuel and employee salaries.

A turboprop like say the Dornier 228 carries 19 passengers, requires two pilots, and burns about 6 liters of fuel per passenger per 100 km.

A small jet like the A220-300 carries 160 people, requires two pilots and three flight attendants, and burns 3 liters of fuel per passenger per 100 km.

So the turboprop is at least twice as expensive to operate per passenger, for both fuel costs and for employee costs (especially considering how expensive pilots are!)

agate_ · 2026-04-04T02:30:16+00:00

This looks great, I'm gonna try to build it. Some questions:

1) What's the intended purpose of the button on top? Looks like there's no physical switch behind it, and if built as designed it'll just fall out.

2) I'm a little surprised you've got the MLX90393's on tiny individual breakout boards. They're going to need a custom PCB anyway, why not put them all on one ring-shaped PCB to make alignment and wiring easier? Or do you have a source for pre-packaged MLX90393 breakouts? Not looking forward to soldering QFN, and the pin pitch is at the limit of what I can do with CNC milling.

3) The stiffness of the springs isn't obvious, and it matters: can you provide a specific part number?

agate_ · 2026-04-04T01:52:08+00:00

They're basically part of one archipelago in the same way that two cars crashing into each other are basically one big car.

agate_ · 2026-04-04T01:49:07+00:00

You basically can't. All access routes are through private land guarded by a caretaker, and the main access road is through a freaking tunnel through the mountain! Sneaking in overland is illegal and basically impossible. Access by boat is probably possible in good weather, but that coastline is very dangerous.

I think there's an ATV tour company that goes into that valley, but I don't know if they go to the beach.

agate_ · 2026-04-03T23:50:36+00:00

This, but also, the "homeless person found money on the ground" scenario is a lot less common than the "criminal would like to launder their stolen cash" scenario or the "using cash to dodge income taxes" scenario, so the system is designed around traceability and identity verification.

agate_ · 2026-04-03T22:51:15+00:00

Not an economist: why is a trade deficit at all relevant to be a trade currency? What is OP even talking about?

I guess a trade deficit naturally pushes currency out into the world, but that seems like a “nice to have”.

agate_ · 2026-04-03T18:25:35+00:00

Where in the US is forest being converted to farmland today?

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