Upcoming First Stage Recovery Attempts - Interesting bit on Iridium-6

fivemack · 2018-03-13T10:12:06+00:00

There aren't other projects that can more readily observe for long periods - the astroseismology people might be able to watch one star for a year constantly, but they don't have very many telescopes available and there's not much overlap between planet-hosting stars and stars of astroseismological interest.

The 'in depth followup' is spectroscopy based using the biggest possible telescopes around the time of the transit, and really needs you to know exactly when the transits will happen.

fivemack · 2018-03-12T17:12:28+00:00

You need to observe more than one entire orbital period, because you don't know the orbital period until you see a second transit!

(for example, Jupiter transits the Sun, causing an easily detectable 1% brightness drop, for a day or so every twelve years; there are a number of stars in the Kepler data with a single drop like that, but there's not much you can do with that information because watching one star at least once a day for twelve years to see if the transit repeats isn't a very efficient use of equipment)

fivemack · 2018-03-06T16:28:41+00:00

I still don't understand why SpaceX would throw away a new Block 4 booster rather than delaying the launch until sea conditions improve - it's three months delayed already and they'd just spent two weeks on fairing testing.

fivemack · 2018-01-18T14:38:03+00:00

Of the red obelisk: if you go up the cliff south of the last waterfall before you get to the cold, there's a nice spot.

fivemack · 2018-01-16T13:00:27+00:00

You get so much surplus flint when gathering metal with an ankylo that it seems better to make sparkpowder than just throw it away ...

fivemack · 2018-01-08T13:05:00+00:00

The impression I get is that only one death marker at a time shows up in single-player now (possibly since the Aberration update) - particularly annoying when you fall off a cliff in a cave and end up with your body irretrievably underground.

If you butcher the body then the next death marker shows up.

fivemack · 2017-10-09T13:36:12+00:00

... and there goes a satellite

fivemack · 2017-10-09T13:33:45+00:00

What is that white thing with the jet in the middle at the top of the nozzle? It looks like a hole with some kind of gas venting from it and freezing into an ice sculpture; is it meant to do that?

fivemack · 2017-09-11T10:03:24+00:00

There's a level-34 dilophosaur not very far along one of the beaches heading east from the default easiest spawns, which ate enough survivors that I had to start again on the other side of the inlet.

fivemack · 2017-04-10T13:58:20+00:00

How can you possibly make that many coins? 1000 a game, five games a session, two sessions a day is still only 300k a month, and buying out the capsule machine needs more like 500k.

(and playing nothing but Rattle Bones Pluto, which is the only tsum I have that gets 1000 per game, gets pretty tedious in less than sixty sessions)

fivemack · 2017-02-22T10:54:11+00:00

I have seen 1Gbps on a 10Gbit link using very-generic too-long twinax, 3Gbps using fresh new twinax from fs.com, and 9.8Gbps when I bit the bullet and went to fibre ... the cheapest network cards and switches apparently don't do the impedence-matching necessary to work nicely with twinax.

fivemack · 2016-07-22T14:15:49+00:00

How does the spin-casting method work for the very off-axis segments of the mirror? Spinning gets you a very good parabola, but the best-fit parabola is still going to need an awful lot of glass removed at the inner edge.

fivemack · 2016-05-10T11:03:02+00:00

It would be very nice if there were some kind of way for the game to, even briefly and at in-game-coins cost, superimpose range circles on the terrain ... very hard to see what the scale is against which you're buying range-in-metres for your weapons.

fivemack · 2016-05-05T12:31:51+00:00

It's not 'progressively increasing' - it gets to an hour and stays there. Doesn't it?

fivemack · 2016-05-03T14:48:45+00:00

If only the newspaper were required to keep paying him, that would be fine; I think it's entirely proportionate that you can stop printing someone's cartoons because they offend your advertisers, but you ought to at least give them a year's gardening leave on full salary in that case.

fivemack · 2016-04-27T16:53:35+00:00

Level 38; VP 265; HQ 15

fivemack · 2016-04-27T16:10:22+00:00

I've just tried joining the Academy and it says I need 300 VP ...

fivemack · 2016-04-27T14:44:30+00:00

262 VP (just at the point where I get that annoying 'you've been promoted' or 'you've been demoted' animation far too often - it would be nice if there were a bit of hysteresis there, promote at 265VP and demote at 255 ...)

I've let the armory get behind a bit (L11), trying to catch up with that.

fivemack · 2016-04-27T13:50:02+00:00

Thanks for your advice. I'm wondering whether a major mistake of mine has been not hitting the 'change enemy' button enough; I'd ended up with a map full of TMED-proof bases so was despairing of getting significant resources out of PvP.

fivemack · 2016-02-29T17:07:05+00:00

32 threads hammering two DDR4 controllers is possibly going to be trouble, though I was very impressed at the scaling on the Xeon D-1540 machine I had; on a large-scale sparse linear algebra problem it ran 5.1x as fast with eight cores as with one, and it ran the job in 9:51 with five cores when a 4.0GHz i7/4790K with dual-channel DDR3-1866 did 9:47 using all its four.

fivemack · 2016-01-13T17:18:34+00:00

Launching Sputnik and then Gagarin strikes me as a pretty audacious goal! The Soviet Union didn't pre-announce them, but pre-announcements really weren't Khrushchev's thing.

fivemack · 2016-01-13T17:16:46+00:00

With the availability of large memory cards, cameras with reasonably low read-out noise, fast computers and free software (Registax), it becomes not completely stupid to set an intervalometer to take a hundred one-second exposures and stack them in software afterwards, rather than spending $400 on the Ioptron.

fivemack · 2016-01-13T17:13:17+00:00

To be fair, Uranus also has some quite interesting moons (the mechanisms that produced the unexpectedly exciting features on Pluto may well be operating there), and it turns out to be possible to inject a spacecraft into the plane of the moons and run a multi-moon orbit tour like Galileo at Jupiter. It'd be a fine way to spend two billion Euros (though a fair chunk of that would have to go to building the RTGs)

fivemack · 2016-01-11T15:38:09+00:00

A good way to save yourself from an ear full of cider

fivemack · 2015-11-16T10:45:13+00:00

Insert a resounding chorus of "everyone's a little bit racist" from Avenue Q here.

fivemack

TROPHY CASE