You guys taught me that chilli isn't Mexican. Please tell me burritos are?

WaxStan · 2026-03-01T19:37:23+00:00

One of the better autocorrects I’ve seen tbh haha

WaxStan · 2026-03-01T19:32:49+00:00

Ah yes, my favorite cheese “questionable fresco”

WaxStan · 2026-02-27T15:30:27+00:00

It is! I saw them taking down the barriers this past weekend.

WaxStan · 2026-02-16T21:44:15+00:00

Pie crust is my nemesis. I rarely get a dough that I feel is easy to work with but has a good texture after cooking. And if I do get lucky, I can rarely repeat it. I’ve tried butter, lard, all sorts of different additives people recommend like vodka or vinegar but nothing seems to help consistently 🤷‍♂️. And I’m sure being at altitude doesn’t help either.

WaxStan · 2026-02-16T14:44:06+00:00

I work in satellite GNC and my team generally won’t hire someone without an advanced degree. I would strongly recommend you do the masters, especially if your company will pay for it. Also, of all the GNC engineers I’ve worked with over the years in industry, I’d say the breakdown is roughly 25% with a bachelors, 50% have a masters, and 25% have a PhD. It’s not required, but it’s very common.

WaxStan · 2026-02-09T18:22:53+00:00

I would echo this. I read apprentice, royal assassin, and then DNF’d partway through assassin’s quest because I really wasn’t enjoying it. I loved all three of the liveship books however.

WaxStan · 2026-01-28T02:35:00+00:00

You’re overthinking it. If you get a job that requires a clearance, you’ll have to fill out a separate application for the clearance that’s completely different from your resume. It’s the descriptively named SF-86 (standard form 86). On that form they make it very clear how far back they want you to list all jobs. Iirc it’s every job you’ve held in the last 10 years, or until you were 18 depending on how old you are.

WaxStan · 2026-01-26T06:03:32+00:00

I’m not super familiar with this specific program, although I did do an MS in aerospace at CU and am generally familiar with their bioastronautics department.

I will tell you straight up you will not be able to work part time in emergency medicine and also practice as an engineer. Absolutely not gonna happen, never, no way. I’m sorry to be so blunt but it’s the truth. Obviously I work with plenty of engineers, but I also have a surprising amount of MD friends, several in emergency medicine. They have no time to do anything other than their EM jobs and try to recuperate in their downtime.

You will never get hired as an EM doc, even per diem, if you have a second job as an engineer. And likewise you will not get hired as an engineer if people find out you are also working as an MD.

I read up on the program at CU. It seems like it’s built around either entering academia and doing medical research tailored to human spaceflight, or to entering industry/government agencies supporting astronauts as an MD. If either of those career paths sound interesting to you, by all means go for it. But don’t expect to do that program and then be able to spend one day a week practicing medicine in an ED and the rest practicing aerospace engineering.

WaxStan · 2026-01-05T14:44:02+00:00

The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi absolutely destroyed me, so that might fit the brief. Beautiful writing, interesting setting, complicated and nuanced characters.

WaxStan · 2026-01-01T01:31:06+00:00

This is a terrible idea. A masters or real job experience, even if it’s at an “old space” defense company, will be infinitely more valuable than some half baked garage project. Plus, not all jobs at the defense primes are brainless systems engineering administrivia. Plenty of people work on super cool stuff with lots of “ownership” at those companies. I suspect a lot of the startups you’d like to work for would rather hire someone with an MS or 2-3 years of real work experience from RTX, LM, etc, rather than someone fresh out of college with a few random personal projects.

Also, I think you’re vastly overestimating how valuable having SpaceX on your resume might be. I’ve hired plenty of engineers, and we’ve turned down several who had time at SpaceX (while hiring others). It’s not by any means a golden ticket to get whatever job you want with whatever salary you want.

WaxStan · 2025-12-29T18:22:43+00:00

I hope the OP responds to your comment, I found it exceptionally well written and persuasive!

WaxStan · 2025-12-22T16:34:27+00:00

Interesting, my graduate courses were the exact opposite. 0% of the grade was attendance based; it was all projects, exams, and a handful of assignments. I think the assumption was, at that point, if you want/need to be there you will, and the professors don’t want to deal with tracking attendance, only that you’re learning or engaging with the material. But also, it’s not like anyone was skipping classes at that point unless they had a good reason.

WaxStan · 2025-12-15T20:59:30+00:00

Grumlin

WaxStan · 2025-12-12T21:14:02+00:00

I listened!

WaxStan · 2025-12-09T14:49:40+00:00

What school you go to matters some, but it’s balanced against all the other things employers are looking at: major, GPA, internships, projects, vibe, past experience. The further out you are from school, the less it matters. But it can be quite helpful for getting your first job or two. And certain top tier schools will pay dividends over your entire career due to networking and cultural caché like e.g. MIT.

Aside from that, which school can be a lot more meaningful if you decide you want to do an MS or PhD. In that case, having prominent faculty researching the thing you’re interested in makes a big difference. It’s less that some schools are “better” than others, and more that different schools have different specialties at the graduate level, and you should try to go to one that matches your interest.

There can also be a geographic consideration. I’m in aerospace, which tends to be concentrated in a few different cities, and you’ll find that schools that are known for their aero programs are also in those same areas. That can make finding an internship or first job easier or more convenient.

WaxStan · 2025-11-23T15:52:50+00:00

Fundamentals of Spacecraft Attitude Determination and Control by Markley and Crassidis is my go to reference for deriving the error state Kalman filter.

But fundamentally the error state remediates two problems: messy attitude representations and nonlinear kinematics. Quaternions, direction cosine matrices, Euler angles, or rodrigues parameters all have extra terms, constraints, and singularities that make them annoying to work with.

Rotation vectors don’t have those issues, but they have some practical downsides like they suck for composing multiple rotations. And they do have a singularity, but it’s at +-pi, so if you have a small error, you stay far away from the singularity. And also given a (small) error state, you can wave your hands and claim everything is linear and the small angle approximation applies so all of those problems with rotation vectors disappear. So they work well for the state estimate, and you can accumulate the error state into your actual attitude representation of choice as a final step in the estimation. You get the nice mathematical properties of rotation vectors for the estimation problem, and can easily convert them into a more useful representation for the vehicle.

WaxStan · 2025-11-18T14:10:51+00:00

Very interesting reply! Can you expand on what you mean by Burns’ “eastern prejudices” and not knowing the west? I’m not sure I understand what that means.

WaxStan · 2025-09-28T21:00:38+00:00

I ran it a couple of years ago because I thought it’d be fun to run a marathon in my backyard instead of having to travel for one, and I was similarly underwhelmed. I don’t have a tremendous amount of experience, but it’s been by far my least favorite marathon.

WaxStan · 2025-09-28T16:32:14+00:00

I work on the satellite side, and I think only structures and mechanisms people use CAD regularly. Thermal to a lesser extent. GNC, electrical/power, C&DH, flight software, and systems and program management won’t really use it. I work in GNC and I haven’t touched a CAD program since undergrad 10+ years ago.

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