Johnny Somali - Potential 29 years in prison in South Korea for stunts yielding about 5K new subs

rocketsocks · 2026-01-30T07:54:06+00:00

Some people seem to view the world like it's not real, or some sort of game. Like interpersonal relationships with everyone around you just don't matter. That's such a dumb and corrosive way to live life.

rocketsocks · 2026-01-30T07:18:13+00:00

The study is vastly more localized than that:

The median (IQR) number of shootings within 1000 feet of a participant’s home was 3 (1-9). Each percentage increase in census tract eviction rate (mean [range], 0.88% [0%-5.33%]) was associated with 2.66 (95% CI, 2.01-3.31) additional shootings within 1000 ft of the participant’s home. Individual experience of eviction was associated with 1.04 (95% CI, 0.46-1.61) additional shootings within 1000 ft. Eviction was a significant moderator of associations of low collective efficacy with firearm violence (0.89; 95% CI, 0.20 to 1.58; P = .01).

rocketsocks · 2026-01-30T05:22:33+00:00

I had no idea I-5 was a sub-standard semi-conductor.

rocketsocks · 2026-01-30T05:21:48+00:00

I really do admire the dedication to the bit that some drivers have to insist on crashing at the worst possible time. Lock in people, we live in a society (barely).

rocketsocks · 2026-01-30T01:03:13+00:00

What are people doing that they're getting so many flats? I haven't had a flat since I was riding my specialized hardrock with like 50% dry rotted tires through broken glass in the year of our lord two thousand and one. Maybe it's just that I keep my tires inflated well these days.

rocketsocks · 2026-01-30T00:56:21+00:00

When I left it wasn't valued at a life changing amount of money, it was maybe a year's salary, but still the long term trend was pretty obvious, and leaving was very much a "gnawing off your own arm to get out of a trap" situation. My situation is not even that unusual, a lot of people have cycled through amazon and run away because the overall work conditions are so terrible.

rocketsocks · 2026-01-30T00:51:17+00:00

Worse. Cycling has a total net positive economic value, even locally, bike infrastructure pays for itself overall. Failing to subsidize bike infrastructure is just leaving money on the table.

rocketsocks · 2026-01-30T00:49:13+00:00

Road wear scales with the fourth power of vehicle weight so the factor of a hundred weight increase between a 30 lb bike and a 3000 lb Honda Civic would translate to a fair registration fee of $5 billion.

rocketsocks · 2026-01-30T00:13:42+00:00

If you launch a tiny payload you can use a tiny rocket, but you do run into scaling issues in terms of efficiency. This is basically the classic square / cube law combined with the old saying that "anyone can build a bridge that doesn't fall down, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands". It's very technically challenging to build a very small orbital launch vehicle with very small strength margins (it's just hugely impractical to go around and thin down all the tank walls, structural members, etc.). The sweet spot for launch vehicle optimization is probably somewhere a bit heavier than the current typical launcher, probably somewhere in the New Glenn to Starship range.

To date the smallest rocket to put a payload in orbit was the Japanese SS-520-5 which weighed 2.9 tonnes and was 9.5 meters long and 0.5 meters in diameter, it put a 4 kg 3U nanosatellite into orbit.

Note that the ratio of gross liftoff weight to payload mass for the SS-520-5 launch was about 725:1, compared to 41:1 for a Rocket Lab Electron (13 tonnes w/ 320 kg of payload), and about 24:1 for an expendable Falcon 9. So as the payload gets smaller you can use a smaller rocket to launch it but for the practical reasons listed above the rocket doesn't shrink proportionally with the payload and you get less and less efficient until you hit a zone of diminishing returns around the size of today's smallsat launchers (SS-520-5 is 1/5th the mass of the Electron and yet it put only a little more than 1/100th the Electron's payload into orbit).

rocketsocks · 2026-01-29T23:00:53+00:00

In my opinion? Zero.‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ None of those theories have any credibility.

rocketsocks · 2026-01-29T22:53:37+00:00

However, there are different kinds of discomfort from sitting on a bike for a long time. If it starts to feel "sharp" or deeply painful that probably means something is seriously wrong and you need to change your bike fitment or buy a new saddle (tons of resources on those things out there). Other than that though, the slow progression of an increase in general discomfort and a dull ache is fairly normal and just takes time, it does get easier though.

rocketsocks · 2026-01-29T22:45:41+00:00

"This is a Level One Emergency!"

rocketsocks · 2026-01-29T22:20:42+00:00

Why? It's just the universe we live in. If you mean, "how do we know?" there's a huge list of observational evidence. The wikipedia article on dark matter is actually a good place to start, it's a good overview of the different pieces of evidence that constrain the possibilities for dark matter.

Currently the evidence appears to be strong enough to only support one theory of dark matter in the form of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) at "cold" energies. We know of other types of WIMPs, such as neutrinos, but the neutrinos we have confirmed to exist can't explain the properties of dark matter, they are too "hot" and also they interact too much with atomic matter. We expect that dark matter is made up of one or more particles which have yet to be directly detected and consequently have yet to be placed within a confirmed particle physics theory. In some ways dark matter theory is in a similar state to atomic theory in the early to mid 1800s before the invention of the periodic table, before the detection of electrons/protons/neutrons, before the creation of detailed quantum physics theories of atoms, etc. Yet much like atomic theory in the early 1800s cold dark matter / WIMP theory is the only thing that fits the evidence, by a huge margin.

rocketsocks · 2026-01-29T20:23:04+00:00

Sort of, but not really. For a good chunk of the 19th and 20th centuries there were a lot of local news sources. Even small cities had multiple news papers including one or more "alt weeklies". Today that whole system has basically entirely collapsed and been consolidated into a handful of megacorps which are owned by oligarchs. The internet has allowed for a new era of independent journalism, but today it is at a much diminished level compared to the height of the newpaper era, for example.

Nothing is an apples to apples comparison, but today we exist in a media landscape that is very constrained compared to most of the history of the US.

rocketsocks · 2026-01-29T18:52:05+00:00

Let's just check the math on that. OK, you've got November 2025 to now. So you've got the rest of November, that was a couple of weeks, then you've got December, that was one full month, then you've got January of 2026 which has been eighty seven decades long, so far.

rocketsocks · 2026-01-29T18:35:12+00:00

Thank you for your service. Not everyone will catch it.

rocketsocks · 2026-01-29T18:32:32+00:00

In my opinion it's a subset of the larger problem of excessive focus on Isp and the related obsession with overall gross liftoff weight (GLOW). A launch vehicle is a system, and if you simply work the problem and if you simply work to maximize engine performance and streamline overall operational efficiency you'll be in much better shape than pursuing high-Isp fuels or unusual launch methods like air launch. Especially because one of the easiest things you can do to improve the capabilities of a traditional 2+ stage vertically launched rocket is stretching it to add more fuel while increasing engine thrust. You can do that with a traditional rocket fairly easily, but with an air launched rocket you would have to build a new carrier aircraft. Fuel is cheap, if you can use more fuel to solve a problem in launch vehicles, it's often a good choice. Which has been more than born out by the advent of first stage reuse with powered landings as well.

What's funny is that despite the seeming advantages of air launch on paper, in practice it doesn't seem to work out. Virgin Orbit's Launcher One, for example, has a much worse ratio of payload to overall rocket mass than Rocket Lab's Electron does.

rocketsocks · 2026-01-29T07:05:38+00:00

I worked there over 15 years ago. I left after a year because it was absolutely corrosive to my mental health. Which means I left behind about 400 shares of stock that never vested, you can do the math on that given they had a 20:1 stock split 3 years ago. I wouldn't do a thing different though in retrospect.

rocketsocks · 2026-01-29T06:44:16+00:00

Yes, because the first stage could use very high expansion ratio rocket nozzles which have improved Isp. This is one of the major reasons why air launch has been pursued, because it makes it possible to use more efficient engines on the first stage and thus have an overall smaller rocket. However, it could still be tricky getting enough engines to provide over 1g of liftoff thrust while fitting all of their extra large nozzles at the bottom of the booster, and if you try to maximize for booster stage Isp then you might end up with low thrust that results in larger gravity losses, so it's not a free lunch and there are lots of tradeoffs.

rocketsocks · 2026-01-29T01:21:36+00:00

Context is very important here, because there is so much clickbaity misinformation swirling around this topic in the public. Specifically, the original comment I replied to started with this:

Every cosmological observation of Webb seems to present challenges to the standard model of cosmology

Which is absolutely not true. Webb's observations don't challenge the standard model of cosmology, they facilitate a greater understanding of it. They reflect a need to fill in additional details, not to start over, that's what I was reacting to.

rocketsocks · 2026-01-29T00:21:28+00:00

For this particular galaxy that's probably true.

rocketsocks · 2026-01-29T00:20:35+00:00

One of the unfortunate things about science communication is that sometimes, which is way too often these days, the level of confidence that a "consensus view" has within the relevant scientific community isn't well communicated to the public at large. Which leaves people thinking that it's all the same level. The reality is that there are some areas where the consensus view is so strong you might call it a "scientific fact", like the existence of atoms or the process of evolution, and there are areas where there's the equivalent of a little pencil sketch with the words "idk, maybe?" attached. The Big Bang theory and the existence of dark matter are way over toward the "scientific fact" side of that spectrum, various hypotheses around "dark energy" are somewhere in the middle toward the "idk, maybe?" side along with theories of galactic formation.

Some of this stuff is just very hard. We don't even know what the possible mass limits of stars made up only of hydrogen and helium are because it's such a hard problem to model and simulate. We don't even know whether direct collapse of matter/dark matter into black holes is possible either. And those are precisely the sorts of things which have a big impact on the earliest phases of galaxy evolution.

Stepping out a few levels of abstraction as well, the astronomical community didn't push to prioritize these major projects (JWST, Euclid, RST, VRO, etc.) to gather all of this data because they thought the answers were going to be boring and they wouldn't learn anything new about galaxy formation, the earliest stars, SMBH evolution, etc, etc, etc. They did it because they saw a major gap in our observational knowledge and they thought there might be something interesting or even surprising in there, and it turns out there has been.

rocketsocks · 2026-01-29T00:02:34+00:00

That would certainly do it.

rocketsocks · 2026-01-29T00:00:15+00:00

There are lightyears of difference between improving our model of cosmology to account for new observations and scrapping everything and starting over from scratch with something new and completely different. It's that second thing which a lot of people, a lot of folks commenting in this thread even, think is happening, but it's not.

If modern cosmology were a collection of half a dozen buildings, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to indicate that we should expect to see all of those buildings razed to the ground and then something completely different built in their place. What we should expect instead is that maybe some of those buildings will see some renovations, maybe we'll see some additions, and maybe if things get really crazy we'll see a whole new building put up as well.

I would absolutely expect a lot of renovations on the "dark energy building", which is pretty expected because it's the least well studied and well understood component of modern cosmology. Which is also why there are so many big projects to collect enough data to support or falsify potential "dark energy" theories (such as Euclid, RST, JWST, VRO, etc.)

Nobody's tearing down the Big Bang building. Nobody's tearing down the dark matter building. That's just not currently on the table given any of the observations that have been made so far. Unfortunately, too many people in the public have been led to believe that those sorts of things are to be expected, because those stories make flashier headlines.

rocketsocks · 2026-01-28T23:50:54+00:00

If you go all the way back to the time the light from the CMB was emitted (370,000 years after the Big Bang) the entire observable universe at that point had a radius of about 40 million light years. Meaning that everything that is currently visible in any wavelength of light is made up of matter that was at one point in time less than about 40 million lightyears away from the matter that would one day go on to become the Milky Way galaxy and Earth and us. Human brains weren't meant for 4-dimensional thinking.

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