frederikvs

Sounds like it could improve the production efficiency of glyptal-impregnated, cyanoethylated bushings for turbo-encabulators!

I'm a diver, DAN is the only company I can name that specialises in diving insurance.

Huh, apparently they're registered in Malta, what a coincidence...

Removing the brown ones from a bowl of M&Ms is a 5 minute job that can be handled by anyone. I would expect a lot of people would go "well that's a bit eccentric, but if it makes the band happy, why not".

I doubt the band would say "you didn't redline this weird but inconsequential request, we can't work together.

If they wanted to be sure the redlining process worked, they should have put in something like "remove all fire extinguishers from backstage".

To use a dog metaphor, a chainsaw tends to growl before it bites.

I believe the author is mistaken about why chainsaws don't cause more harm than they do. There are multiple of ways in which a chainsaw will kill or destroy, without any warning. Kickback is very quick. A tree falling in the wrong direction comes without warning.

Personally, I suspect there are 2 main reasons why chainsaws don't cause more harm.

A) They've been around for 100 years, and they've been causing fatalities and injuries for 100 years. People have invented ways to reduce the risk. Any chain you can readily buy is a low-kickback chain, and the saw comes with a chain brake. It doesn't completely remove the risk, but it substantially reduces it.

B) They've been around for 100 years, and they've been causing fatalities and injuries for 100 years. People are aware that chainsaws are inherently dangerous. Even someone without any training, and without looking at the safety instructions, understands that one of these will take off a limb without blinking.

What this means for the rest of the metaphor, I'm not sure.

This is why I need to have 10 different map apps on my phone. I hate it.

Google maps is good enough for find my way in a city, or getting to a destination by car. And when I get there, I whip out another app to pay the parking. If I forget where I parked, my car has an app with a map. To plan a longer trip with an electric car, ABRP is better. And when I'm just looking for a charge pole where my card will work, Plugsurfing. If I want to use car sharing, another app with another map.

If I want to go for a run or a hike, outdooractive has some routes. Komoot has some others. But if I want to find some rock climbing routes, I need 27crags. Meanwhile, my sports watch also has a map which can show me the route I just ran.

None of these are fundamentally different. All show a very similar map, just with other points of interest, other routes, other layers, other navigation algorithms.

But all of these apps have different UI, different features, and just behave slightly differently.

I wish I could just have a single map app, where I enable the layers I'm interested in.

Linux's `make menuconfig` [0] and GDB's TUI interface [1] are the first ones that come to mind. Both are very powerful once you get to know them a bit, and are still valuable tools today.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menuconfig

[1] https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb.html/TUI.h...

From the article, Proba-3 has 10 thrusters, so that would bring the total to 150 Watt.

I don't know the power budget for the satellite, but we can make an educated guess : the occulter is 1.4 meter diameter, or a surface area of 1.54 square meter. That's an upper bound for the surface area of the solar panels - there's nothing sticking out beyond the disk, that would interfere with observations.

Solar power at earth is about 1.3kW/sqm, solar panels are maybe 20% to 30% efficient. That puts you in the ballpark of 400 to 600W.

150W on standby would be a pretty big bite out of your power budget.

Many observations of the sun's corona just use a disk attached to the telescope, as you're suggesting [0]. However, for Proba-3 they want the disk to be over 100m away from the telescope, which isn't practical. Also, one of the goals of Proba-3 is to develop formation flying technology, because it will be useful for many other missions in the future.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronagraph

I'm not familiar enough with the project to answer why specifically cold gas thrusters were chosen. What I can say : if old, proven technology will get the job done, there's a strong preference to use that.

When needed to achieve the mission, new technology will be developed - sometimes the whole point of a mission is specifically to develop new technology. In this case, one of the major goals of the mission is to develop formation flying technology. Learn what the pitfalls and the tricky bits are, and make the technology available for future missions.

But when the mission can be achieved with old technology - technology with a long record of being used in space, where the problems are known and understood, where we know what works and what causes problems - then the mission will use old technology.

If you use newer technology, there's always a risk that you'll hit a new issue, previously unknown. Maybe you can work around it, maybe you can't. But this isn't web development where you can refactor, switch to a new framework and continuous deploy your way out of it. For the hardware, you get one launch and that's it. Why run the risk if you can avoid it? It'd be a shame if the mission can't achieve its primary objective (learning about formation flying) because it chose some new type of thruster, and encountered some new issue with it.

The goal is to have them a bit more than 100m apart. During observations they aim to maintain millimeter precision.

I'm pretty sure the risk of collision has been analysed to death. I would expect they've analysed what would happen if one or both devices suddenly stop listening to commands, and that even then there's essentially no risk.

From what I can see on wikipedia [0] the first FEEP to be used in space was in 2018. Proba-3's implementation phase started in 2014 [1]. The choice of thruster technology was probably made well before that. They wouldn't use a technology that hasn't flown yet, unless it was crucial for the mission.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-emission_electric_propul... [1] https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Techn...

That's what's been done so far [0], both on the ground and in space. As I understand it, the further your disk is from your telescope, the better. But your stick needs to be rigid enough to keep the disk exactly in its place. And a rigid stick has weight.

For Proba-3 the goal is to have the two satellites more than 100m apart. If you want to do that with a stick, your stick has to be longer than the ISS. That should tell you a thing or two about the complexity and cost of building and launching that stick.

I do have to admit I'm not exactly sure what the advantages are of having the disk further away from the telescope. I suspect it's to do with the interaction between the light and the edge of the disk, but I'm not sure.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronagraph

I work at the company building these satellites, I've seen them sitting in our clean room.

If there's any questions, I might be able to give some answers. However, I'm not involved with Proba-3 directly, so no guarantees.

I would expect James Webb has the same issue, and similar ways of dealing with it. It's just that it never hits the press, since it's a normal part of operations.

I'm not sure why Euclid's icing issue is getting some attention now, from the ESA article this was expected. Maybe it's just that it's slightly worse than anticipated, and they're changing their way of dealing with it?

I believe the primary goal was stage separation. Secondary goals were for the booster to make a controlled splashdown, and Starship to make almost a complete orbit, before splashing down near Hawaii.

So they achieved the primary goal, which is a good result.

It could even be argued that they got pretty close to one of the secondary goals. Starship was fairly close to shutting off its engines. If it would have completed that part of the flight, the next hour or so it would just be coasting. Physics alone would guarantee they'd end up near Hawaii.

The last few falcon launches weren't on YouTube, only on X.

You should be able to watch it on the spaceX website too [0]. I don't know what quality to expect though.

[0] https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-...

There's a recent article about a climber who had to use this iPhone SOS feature. Turns out that actually getting in contact with emergency services is not easy - even though the satellite communications worked perfectly.

There was a lot of back and forth over the system, but it did not help at all. The thing that saved her was one 40 character message to a friend. Because apparently you get one of those, and no replies...

https://www.climbing.com/news/iphone-sos-button-saves-injure...

A bit further in the article :

Of course, the same device couldn't have been used in a standard cryptic crossword as word length breakup of solutions - (7, 7) vs (3, 4, 7) - would have given the game away.

Clinton would be 7 letters, Bob Dole is two words, 3 and 4 letters respectively.

I've never seen a crossword that does this, the ones I see just use the grid to show word breaks. However, I've also never seen a crossword that has one hint that cuts across a black square, like this one does. But I'm not an avid crossword puzzler.

The thrust of 100 tonne isn't really that important IMO. The Raptor has far less thrust than the F-1 engine used on the Apollo missions, but if you strap 33 Raptors to a rocket, they can beat five F-1s.

I'd say it's pretty impressive. Building and igniting a rocket engine is hard. For more detail, I can recommend watching "Why starting a rocket engine is so hard" by Tim Dodd [0].

It's not "never been done before" impressive, they're a few years behind e.g. SpaceX's Raptor engine, which uses the same propellants, and is also reusable. But still, a new rocket engine is no small feat - the engine is probably the hardest part of a rocket. This is quite literally rocket science.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAUVCn_jw5I

ESA really needs to work on how they present this kind of thing. Igniting a brand new rocket engine is a sensational event - I would have expected at least a video of the full 12 second burn, from a good viewpoint. Ideally from multiple camera angles.

But we just get one still image, taken from what looks like the worst position.

ESA is doing really cool stuff, but they're doing a bad job of convincing people that they're doing cool stuff.

If there's an AED around to use instead that would be FAR more preferable.

AEDs still require chest compressions. In fact, they'll give you rhythm to follow and talk you through it.

I would expect a very similar rate of injuries from compressions - perhaps a bit less if the AED means the compressions don't need to be performed for the same length of time.

I'm not involved with the study, just a bit of space nerd, so this is just an outsider making a guess. But I see 2 aspects to it.

The first is a whole bunch of practical questions. Do they need to modify the spacesuit to account for the prosthetic? Is it better to create a new prosthetic to fit the suit and/or the station? Does the missing leg cause issues with the exercise equipment on station? What other practical limitations are there?

Secondly, it's simply a way of seeing how it goes. We don't expect any big obstacles, but you can never know for sure until you've tried it. Once it's been done, and we know the obstacles, it can become just a normal thing to do.

John McFall, the person chosen for the parastronaut study, probably is one of the very fittest humans we can send. Participated in paralympics and all that. He probably runs faster than many of the other astronauts that made the selection.

Additionally, when in weightlessness, a missing leg is not that much of a hindrance.

My interpretation was always that the do-nothing script was just a starting point - once you have it, you can gradually start automating the steps.

Once the script actually automates a few of the more tedious steps, people are much more likely to use it. And when they use it, they're likely to help maintain it when new situations need it.

Eventually, you may end up with a script that does automate it all, and can be put in CI/CD. (Hey, I can dream, can't I?)

I really wish the article would give easy to remember explanations. E.g. it mentions :wq means "exit after saving". Explaining :wq as "write and quit" makes it a lot easier for new vim users to remember.

I doubt this is specific to the internet. Seems to me that people have always had a tendency to separate everyone else into "good people" and "bad people".

To me, the big lesson here is : if your company wants to offer a free service, be sure that you can keep offering that for free. Any limitation or restriction you put in place later will result in bad press.

Offer the free service, but put limits in place right from the start. Only this many free repos, only this much free data, etc. Removing a limitation later on is easy to do. Putting a limitation in place is hard, and results in bad press.

It's also fairer to users - they know what to expect, they know the limitations and the rules. They aren't caught by surprise when the rules change on them.

Yes, disabling promotional notifications is an option - except if the app developer applies the dark pattern described in the article. But even when it works, the app developer just goes on their merry way, annoying other people too. I believe it's better to send a signal, and educate developers about what we as users want.