dakr

7 ms·

1.
by dakr 1y ago
This argument reminds me of theists asking, "without a god, what is there to keep you from being amoral and running around killing people?" Humans are capable of and do, in fact, act on more than just one or two simplistic externa
2.
by dakr 1y ago
You've probably heard it before, but research and progress go hand in hand, and science is not synonymous with unpractical. For example, data from NASA missions that track water over the globe are used by climate scientists, yes, but a
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by dakr 1y ago
But who would have had the idea to make the technology? We don't know what's possible until after we do it. Science research pays dividends in knowledge and technology that we didn't know to look for otherwise.
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by dakr 1y ago
I don't think it's as simple as that. Many strings were attached, many changes were made to work that had already started. It's a mess to be sure, and NASA was not the only cook in the kitchen by a long shot. I'll just l
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by dakr 1y ago
At your work you're hopefully not held responsible for the business decisions made above you, just your assigned piece.
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by dakr 1y ago
A rocket it was told to spend money on by lawmakers. It's not NASA's own creation.
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by dakr 1y ago
If it were cutting back, I can see your point. This, however, is a gutting. The proposal is a nearly 25% cut in one year to a funding level not seen since 1961. Talent will leave, institutional knowledge will leave, and rapidly. Knowledge t
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by dakr 1y ago
The interview where several billionaires floated the idea of getting rid of congress so that private industry can then somehow operate unfettered.
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by dakr 1y ago
Tax cuts aren't what people are waiting for to grow their families. It's parental leave, childcare, affordable healthcare, and the feeling that the system their kids will grow up in isn't getting actively gutted in favor of t
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by dakr 1y ago
The audiologist I went to said tinnitus is anything you can hear that doesn't have an external source. In his case, he's always been able to hear his own heartbeat.
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by dakr 1y ago
I saw one of those billboards on Ventura Blvd. the other day and wondered what kind of PR scam it was. Who pays for those things? Billboards are pretty expensive around here.
12.
by dakr 1y ago
There is a lot of handwaving going on here. The below, however, is an egregious misunderstanding of how percentages work. That, or it betrays very sloppy work. Doing it right would actually make the specific case they make stronger. "T
13.
by dakr 1y ago
> Why are you parading your ignorance of my position as an informed rebuttal? Nicely put, but I say ignorance because your post was a flurry of questions asking someone else to tell you information about multiple subjects rather than add
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by dakr 1y ago
An act can be illegal. I don't see how a person can be illegal. Being in a country illegally is an act, not an inherent property of a person. Trying to say a person is illegal seems like a non-starter for useful reasoning because it se
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by dakr 1y ago
[flagged]
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by dakr 1y ago
If there's bias, I think it comes from people being concerned that there are people coming into various govt. offices, demanding and receiving write/read, non-logging accounts on systems containing sensitive information. The acces
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by dakr 1y ago
Agree. I've been trying to be more proactive in supporting companies and institutions that are doing important work. That includes news organizations that I was previously using archive.ph to read. Vote with your dollars (and of course
18.
by dakr 1y ago
I don't think this is lost on anybody, even if it's not the main mission. SMAP also provides a near-real-time data product which may interest people in this area.
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by dakr 1y ago
A wonderful example of the useful, sometimes unintentional secondary effects of doing science. SMAP as a mission is firmly in the Earth science category, so very much in the crosshairs of the current administration. The data is used for Ear
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by dakr 1y ago
You didn't cite a source there, but aside from finished products, American companies that make things domestically source many materials from China. I remember a few years ago a news story about a company that makes crab pots being imp
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by dakr 1y ago
Free oxygen combines with other things very readily, so you need a steady source to replenish it. Abiotic sources may not be common/strong enough. It's been a long time since I've kept tabs on that research, however.
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by dakr 1y ago
"somewhere along the line it seems like NASA had the ability taken away to advertise properly." This is literally true. JPL had its science communication, education, and outreach teams gutted last year. For that small investment i
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by dakr 2y ago
Trump 1 mostly targeted climate and Earth science (when it came to NASA funding). Trump 2/Musk is going after everything. They've just shut down the Office of the Chief Scientist at NASA and are planning to cut fully half of the r
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by dakr 2y ago
They're working on it. NASA HQ has already cut their "Office of the Chief Scientist" (among others) and the current proposal is to cut 50% of the science budget (which would effectively kill it, it's already been squeeze
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by dakr 2y ago
Fuel will be a huge percentage of the weight, and won't that be mostly exhausted after taking off and then doing a powered descent? The center of gravity will move quite a bit upwards.
26.
by dakr 2y ago
The spacecraft is privately owned, as the company is private, but I don't know that I would say that it is privately funded. NASA paid tens of millions of dollars, not just for delivering a payload (paying for a product/service),
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by dakr 2y ago
Judging by the comments I've seen go by the on the ticker, this is less a telegraph simulation than an observational experiment in how terrible people can be. It's a real shame.
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by dakr 2y ago
Not a consequence of units used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Flawed_...
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by dakr 2y ago
Thanks! This is pretty cool. I do often run shell commands on entire lines/ranges of lines in vim, but haven't tried it with just parts of lines. I just tried with vim's rectangular selection, and while it does correctly give
30.
by dakr 2y ago
Can you give an example of using dc like this? Seems like something I would find really useful!

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