MalbertKerman

12 ms·

1.
by MalbertKerman 12d ago
> 1. Use a soldering iron that can hit 400, and use a needle tip I have to disagree with that. Almost every time I've been called in to rescue a frustrated novice at the soldering bench (which has happened a lot), I've found t
2.
by MalbertKerman 2mo ago
That only holds in the near field of the reflecting surface, which is roughly (it's a fuzzy boundary so who cares about a 2 pi here or there) where the ratio of distance to width of the surface is less than the ratio of the width of th
3.
by MalbertKerman 2mo ago
> Why does detection scale as the 4th root of the RCS? Because the power returned to the antenna scales as the -4th power of the distance to the target, and detection depends on that power being greater than some threshold. If the fourt
4.
by MalbertKerman 5mo ago
To me, all-lowercase text comes across one of two ways: (a) I felt speed was far more important than readability (reasonable for rapid-fire short messages or constrained typing ability such as a flip phone, also a common way to imply "
5.
by MalbertKerman 6mo ago
I don't know whether to feel proudly clever or frighteningly jaded at having spotted this one by "industry standards." Nice.
6.
by MalbertKerman 10mo ago
> then wouldn't that require a razor's edge of criticality? Yup. From the device description in its decommissioning plan: The CFX was a sub-critical assembly of uranium-2-35 surrounding a Cf-252 source. The function of the
7.
by MalbertKerman 11mo ago
And quality educational content like "Hokay, so, here's the Earth, chilling. 'Wow, that's a sweet Earth,' you might say. ROUND!"
8.
by MalbertKerman 1y ago
The hard part isn't having a telescope, but analyzing the images for objects that have moved between successive observations. Digital astrophotography and analysis software have been getting steadily cheaper and better, which leads to
9.
by MalbertKerman 1y ago
> 100 days with zero emissions By my back of the envelope math, burning 600000 kcal should produce couple hundred kg of CO2. You could also make that crossing in less than a third of the time under sail, with about a third of the daily
10.
by MalbertKerman 1y ago
> MCUs particularly from microchip had really good documentation Oh how the mighty have fallen. I've only worked on one major project with a Microchip MCU (PIC32MK), but their documentation and support were terrible . No detailed
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by MalbertKerman 1y ago
How fitting that it ends with September, whether that's September 30th, 2025 or September 11718th, 1993.
12.
by MalbertKerman 1y ago
No (Betteridge, 2009).
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by MalbertKerman 1y ago
I did get a lot of that in the lower level math courses, where it kinda felt like the math faculty were grudgingly letting in the unwashed masses to learn some primitive skills to apply [spit] to their various fields, and didn't real
14.
by MalbertKerman 1y ago
> and I was annoyed that nobody had just told me that because I would have gotten it instantly. Right?! In my path through the physics curriculum, this whole area was presented in one of two ways. It went straight from "You don&#x
15.
by MalbertKerman 1y ago
It's quietly reversing the traditional "We approximate the cow to be a sphere" and showing how the spherical math can, in fact, be generalized to solutions on the cow.
16.
by MalbertKerman 1y ago
The jump from spherical harmonics to eigenfunctions on a general mesh, and the specific example mesh chosen, might be the finest mathematical joke I've seen this decade.
17.
by MalbertKerman 1y ago
The hard part is not realizing that one should stop caring. It's learning how to stop caring. For most of us, caring is an automatic, reflexive response, and changing it is not a trivial matter.
18.
by MalbertKerman 1y ago
On my personal 2017-vintage i5-7200U, GIMP opens in under 5 seconds. On the computer I had for my last job, a 2023-ish i7, about 30 seconds. The problem was the shitheap of corporate security software that bogged down the zillion file acc
19.
by MalbertKerman 1y ago
> To be fair, the quality of software has dramatically dropped, apps now take 10 seconds to load, memory usage is maxed, games crash and people needed to reinstall their OS so frequently that Microsoft literally added a "reset PC&qu
20.
by MalbertKerman 1y ago
Somebody just discovered E. E. Cummings and thought "I'm gonna be original just like that guy!"
21.
by MalbertKerman 1y ago
Combustion cycles that run the turbopump exhaust into the main combustion chamber are called "staged combustion." The Soviets had staged combustion engines putting payloads in orbit in 1960, and the US flew its first in 1981. Spa
22.
by MalbertKerman 1y ago
The rocket folks call them "turbopumps" rather than "turbochargers," and most of them are powered by a separate combustion apparatus (with non-obvious terminology: if, after going through the turbine, the gas will then
23.
by MalbertKerman 1y ago
There are 25 unique responses in that 1000-line file.
24.
by MalbertKerman 1y ago
And aligned to a properly synchronized cardinal grammeter.
25.
by MalbertKerman 2y ago
> Ye olde Rutherford experiment nicely illustrates the points of 'yes it is all empty space' No, it does not. It illustrates that the portion of an atom that strongly scatters alpha particles occupies a small fraction of the
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by MalbertKerman 2y ago
> To be fair, what he proposed isn't (immediately obviously) mutually exclusive with your points. If it were true it would be almost impossible to detect experimentally. The obviousness or lack thereof is subjective, but the exclusi
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by MalbertKerman 2y ago
I don't know if it's generational or a matter of background. For me, as the sort of person who knows exactly where to find the SCE power switch, it would be impossible to conceive of this font as ugly. So much ingenuity has been
28.
by MalbertKerman 2y ago
It's only true for a single junction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limi... Multi-junction cells beat that limit, but they're still horribly expensive to manufacture which confines
29.
by MalbertKerman 2y ago
> Refrain from making decisions until all possible stakeholders can weigh in > Create overly-ambitious timelines and set impossible-to-keep deadlines > Send unnecessary meeting invites then cancel them last-minute > Don't u
30.
by MalbertKerman 2y ago
"Bent pipe" dumb repeaters are still common for geostationary satellites, AFAIK. Being future-proof against anything except spectrum reallocation (modulation and protocol upgrades can be implemented just by changing equipment on

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