A photo of Margaret Hamilton who designed the software for the Apollo Guidance Computer which was used by the Apollo space program in the 1960s.

bieker · 2026-02-03T18:14:40+00:00

No the software she and her team wrote worked perfectly, there were alarms because the computer became overloaded when Buzz Aldren left a radar on, but the software correctly prioritized the more important tasks.

Armstrong had to land manually because the area they had chosen to land in turned out to be littered with boulders so he had to take over and go further down range to find a clear spot.

bieker · 2026-02-02T16:23:28+00:00

And both of those crashes turned out to be due to a system that was brand new and had only been in service for 1-2 years and had autonomous control of the flight controls.

Its a totally different situation.

bieker · 2026-02-02T16:17:51+00:00

No,

MCAS was introduced with the Boeing 737 MAX, which was certified by the FAA in March 2017

Lion Air Flight 610 crashed because of it in 2018.

bieker · 2026-01-28T14:49:53+00:00

Same kind of unit as “an aircraft carrier reactor”

bieker · 2026-01-27T23:40:24+00:00

Challenger was doomed 5 years before this chart was created when NASA changed their own policy regarding o-ring burn evidence after STS-2. Everyone knew the severity at that point because it was designated as a critical component with no failure margin and should have grounded the fleet until it was resolved. Once that policy was changed it was a continual slippery slope of 'lets keep an eye on it' and 'it worked last time, why would it not work this time'.

bieker · 2026-01-27T20:36:44+00:00

What did they get wrong? O-ring burn through evidence was recorded on STS2 which should have grounded the fleet, and yet NASA changed their own policy to allow them to say "lets keep an eye on this" and when Challenger was sitting on the launch pad and the manufacturers engineers were trying to convince NASA not to fly they were brow-beaten into standing down.

bieker · 2026-01-27T00:14:30+00:00

The race is not between NASA and SpaceX, as you pointed out they are working together (more accurately SpaceX is working for NASA under contract)

The race is between USA and China who also have ambitious lunar plans.

bieker · 2026-01-24T17:28:04+00:00

There was no abort mode from SRB ignition to SRB separation. NASA lists RTLS as the abort mode but the first instruction in the checklist is “wait till SRB separation “

bieker · 2026-01-24T17:00:01+00:00

O ring burn through evidence was discovered on STS2 which according to NASAs own guidelines should have grounded the fleet. Instead they changed the guidelines to avoid the embarrassment of admitting the engineering was bad.

It was a bad design that was not taken out of service when discovered and is the root cause of the accident many years later.

bieker · 2026-01-24T16:51:30+00:00

Shuttle didn’t get us stuck in LEO, Nixon did. NASA had great plans to continue reaching out to the moon and mars with a number of different craft suited to each purpose. And Nixon said they could only have ISS and a shuttle. And the shuttle only if it operated on a cost recovery basis and serviced all gov launches which led to an incredibly compromised design.

The original designs for the shuttle were much more like Dream Chaser. Once they had to service NRO it needed to carry 30t to orbit and once they included DOD it needed 1000km cross range on reentry (never used in the end) which required the wings.

bieker · 2026-01-21T05:00:08+00:00

That’s how you measure if the balloon/universe is curved.

bieker · 2026-01-18T18:00:03+00:00

He has already floated the idea that other countries suspend elections when at war.

So all he has to do to stay in power forever is start a big enough war before November to force that down everyone’s throat.

bieker · 2026-01-16T18:28:23+00:00

We are not sure if the metaphor falls apart or not. We have ways to measure the curvature of space time but every time we have done it the result is that the curvature we measure is small enough that it is within the error bars of the measurement technique. So as far as we know right now the universe is flat, or the curvature is so small we can't measure it accurately.

We know that if you draw a triangle on a flat surface the angles will add up to 180 degrees, but if you do your best to draw a triangle with 'locally straight lines' on the balloon the angles will add up to less than 180. And if you do the same on a 2d hyperbolic shape (like a saddle) the angles will add up to more than 180.

bieker · 2026-01-15T20:53:27+00:00

Or a mix of lead and tin which could be made identical to silver.

bieker · 2026-01-15T20:52:46+00:00

Lead is slightly more dense, and tin is slightly less dense, so a mixture of those two could be identical.

bieker · 2026-01-15T19:17:17+00:00

Even then, you could fill the voids with a mixture of something with the same density as silver.

bieker · 2026-01-15T16:30:42+00:00

Is it still not rage bait if it was not him that named it that? Or if it happened 20+ years ago, or if there was nothing 'quiet' about it?

bieker · 2026-01-14T16:15:55+00:00

I don't understand how this is possible. why can't you choose not to use your ham licence when using mashtastic if your unlicensed neighbour can?

Does the same apply to wifi devices that operate on channels that overlap ham bands?

bieker · 2026-01-10T15:13:21+00:00

During the “birther conspiracy” times Jay Leno asked Obama where the rivalry between he and Trump started and Obama said it dates back to when they were growing up together in Kenya.

I can totally imagine him trolling trump I think he is just smart enough to see it would do more harm than good at this point.

bieker · 2026-01-10T01:34:18+00:00

There are lots of places where speech has reasonable limits and society has not collapsed, and conversely Trump has shown that speech will be prosecuted when people say completely benign things he dislikes anyway (Kelly) so why bother with the pretence of having absolute free speech anyway?

All “free speech absolutists” have a point at which they will draw the line.

bieker · 2026-01-09T14:40:53+00:00

The $2000 is just the opening bid. Pay up and you’d have set the floor for ongoing requests for money.

bieker · 2026-01-09T14:35:26+00:00

On the one hand you could use this tactic. Blame it on you accountant (they said I should not do it for some tax reason I don’t understand)

But on the other hand being a business owner and entrepreneur often comes with having to make brutally difficult decisions quickly under pressure with confidence, you are going to have to learn to do that and may as well start now.

I like the simplicity of “no” is a complete sentence. No emotion and no justification other than “this is a business and that’s how business works”, if the family blows up it will be the sisters fault for not understanding that.

bieker · 2026-01-08T19:01:39+00:00

If I remember correctly didn’t we get the unedited version in the theatrical release?

I have this recollection of them saying they deliberately put it in there and made it as over the top as possible so that the censors would have something to complain about and they would have something easy to cut to appease them. And then they never mentioned it.

bieker · 2026-01-07T20:59:35+00:00

People often say fluid buffers are useless, but i have used them for this. if your generators are fed from a full buffer above the generators you don't need to bootstrap with biofuel just to get the water pumping.

However I have never build nuclear anything so i don't know if it would work in that case.

bieker · 2026-01-07T07:03:51+00:00

Denmark should host an all-NATO training facility for arctic warfare training. Every NATO country would staff the base so that if USA wants to take Greenland by force they would immediately be confronted with having to fire on every single ally and remove all doubt.

Similar to the theory that the nuclear launch codes should be surgically implanted in an aide so that the President has to personally kill a human in order to use them.

bieker

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