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jccooper

3,007 karmajoined 15 years ago

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jccooper
·4 hours ago·discuss
There's not much older than the Vasa that is essentially intact. The Vasa is in good enough shape to have been recovered as a ship, and not as a shipwreck or an archaeological dig, which is pretty remarkable. I think there's one Ottoman galley a bit older that's been continuously maintained, and that's about it.
jccooper
·yesterday·discuss
> The Mycenaean palaces had developed a syllabic script, which we call Linear B, to represent their spoken Greek. This form of writing is entirely lost. In the 8th century, the Greeks will adopt an entirely new script – borrowing the one the Phoenicians are using – to represent their language

You've misread something. Linear B encoded Greek, but is not related to the Phoenician-based script.
jccooper
·3 months ago·discuss
Crew Dragon flew an automated demo flight before flying with crew. It was proceeded by 20 flights of Dragon 1 over 10 years.

Starship's heatshield has already been tested full-up half a dozen times. Many changes have been made as a result.
jccooper
·4 months ago·discuss
Belgian glasses, like wine glasses, leave room for head and aromatics.

Belgium is also fanatical about matching the glass with the beer, and Europe has the very sensible pour line on glasses, so it is designed for a certain fill and filled to the design.

It's designed for experience, not volume.
jccooper
·4 months ago·discuss
I don't see that Google cares much about backlinks any more. Seems like it's all about "content" keywords and maybe a little time-on-site. The domain is a huge signal, which is probably where the problem comes from here.

Sadly, Google's generally better against all the new AI-generated content farms than other players, so maybe they're still running PageRank somewhere.
jccooper
·5 months ago·discuss
Industrial buildings are typically built at dock height. Even if they don't do any grading, that would put the building well above any plausible flooding in that area.
jccooper
·5 months ago·discuss
There is a problem with the number of dimensions. Even a t-shirt is described best in neck, chest, waist, and you could add several parameters for sleeves and also for heights. Neither consumers nor manufacturers can really handle the combinatorial explosion, so you have to boil it down to one or maybe two dimensions.

But the reason even that isn't done is mostly history and market expectations. There are clothing categories that sell in actual dimensions, and (aside from the terrible dimensional accuracy of clothing in general) it works fine. But those are all on the "men's" side, and it seems the industry believes women will not like buying based on actual numbers.
jccooper
·5 months ago·discuss
"Plaster" can be lime, gypsum, or cement, in rough order of historical adoption. Sometimes you even use different types on the same wall; cement rough coat and lime or gypsum top coat, for example.
jccooper
·5 months ago·discuss
See also the "Ventinari clock": https://github.com/iracigt/ventinari-clock https://www.akafugu.jp/posts/products/vetinariclock/
jccooper
·5 months ago·discuss
Because this is not about charity, but about politics. Specifically demonstration with the intention of advocacy. The advocacy falls down when the demonstration is less applicable.
jccooper
·5 months ago·discuss
The idea here is that the economics of launch are changing with Starship such that the "incredible cost" and "overspeccing" of space will become much less relevant. There's a world where, because the cost per kg is so low, a data center satellite's compute payload is just the same hardware you'd put in a terrestrial rack, and the satellite bus itself is mass-produced to not-particularly-challenging specs. And they don't have to last 30 years, just 4-ish, when the computer is ready for retirement anyway.

Will that come to be? I'm skeptical, especially within the next several years. Starship would have to perform perfectly, and a lot of other assumptions hold, to make this make sense. But that's the idea.
jccooper
·5 months ago·discuss
It's a mid-50s bomber. The skin will be easy to replace. Drill out the rivets, rivet on new sheet metal. I don't think it even dragged the wingtips.

Might be some complications with the nose gear and the payload bay (the main gear is on the wings, and untouched) but nothing terribly complicated. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was designed with some assumption of belly landings; it's a warplane after all.

Repairs surely isn't automatic, and who knows how tight that's program's budget is, but planes are repaired from such landings all the time, and if they attach any value to the vehicle it can be repaired, and not at great cost.
jccooper
·7 months ago·discuss
I think the point of this headline is that they're not being blamed in this one instance.
jccooper
·last year·discuss
Cute. But 3/16" is way too large a pilot hole for any reasonable screw. I think a #24 screw, which is the largest size of wood screw, has a 3/16" pilot size... and uses a #4 Philips, which is not the bit on this thing (and is sufficiently rare I don't even have one.)
jccooper
·3 years ago·discuss
An explicit renewal regime with some reasonable fee would allow most works to pass into the public domain, and avoid objections from owners of still-valuable properties. (I like the concept of renewal fees escalating each period, a kind of dutch auction against the public domain, but I'd accept even a fairly trivial flat fee as the price of avoiding ever-longer universal copyright.)
jccooper
·5 years ago·discuss
Low volume products need high margins to be worthwhile. Which is another way of saying "no one has found it worthwhile to sell a simple rechargable bicycle light for $18."
jccooper
·6 years ago·discuss
They've deorbited 5 of the 540 launched so far, and a few more of the first launch seem to be derelict.
jccooper
·8 years ago·discuss
The first one had a bridge that you could only cross once. Any subsequent times it would collapse. Really nasty "puzzle", especially in a semi-open map game.
jccooper
·8 years ago·discuss
If anyone ever refuses to believe this, have them steer using just their palms. Especially, try to turn left or right using just one palm.