Not too much to add from what others have mentioned but this looks like a good (low cost wide fov) photon bucket with low complexity (important for reducing stray/scattered light).
In calibrating satellites getting folks like you to go out with sensors on the ground to send back well vetted data is an expensive and limiting factor. Much cheaper (and often preferred) to do as much as possible from space and do smart ground processing/data analysis to build confidence.
Independent thinking like that could never be encouraged or rewarded in a place designed to produce just smart enough replacement labor. Hell, equivalent stunts in places like university or the workplace wouldn't necessarily end up in your favor (similar arbitration resulting in the organizations desired outcome likely being the case).
That's cool to see, I remember in high school the ROTC came to track practice to get people to come out for orienteering meets. Turned out to be a fun/useful experience.
I'm guessing you're in in automotive or aerospace based off the engine piece. I agree, but I would presume a day long meeting leading up to a wind-tunnel test for example would have a full agenda of presentations based off simulations performed, set-up/teardown overview, scheme of testing to be performed, facility status, emergencies, data acquisition, etc. For this all the relevant teams would expect to have significant engagement and contributions. I think this is different from what people complain about. I work in satellite ops and we suffer from those types of issues (unnecessary stand-ups, status reports that could be an email etc.) despite the need to sober up and have runs where it's a lot closer to the former than the latter.
Yep, a lot of places allow for 80hrs/2wks of "training". Crazy how popular those Agile/SAFE/AWS/Azure/etc. conferences are in a destination location, meanwhile engineers asking to have time prorated for some graduate coursework is unfathomable.
Several people from my high school went to Deep Springs. They were all incredibly bright, high potential students but definitely wanted "different". The ones I knew went on to UChicago, MIT, and (I think?) Harvard after their terms. I went to a Service Academy and couldn't help but think that their experience sounded much more challenging than what I went through.
Weightlifting is interesting, "most" elites have really good technique (tempo, maintaining angles throughout the pull, bottom position, lockout, etc.) indicating some level of mastery from years of practice. But I think a good amount beginners and intermediates (i'd consider myself somewhere in there) let their strength hold them back, which after obtaining the requisite positioning/flexibility can be "spammed" ( i.e. run a squat program while getting touches on the classical lifts and seeing your total increase the first time you test it). I guess the strength aspect is a dependency that must be optimized as some lifters have an excess strength reserve and can't snatch/ clean n jerk what their squat numbers would indicate.
Control theory doesn't come up much in what I do but as a practitioner are Root Locus ever utilized? I've been unpleasantly surprised to see that exact positive feedback instance existing in places you wouldn't want (things wobbling above earth after a control input). Poles and Zeros felt like a lot of magic until a foray into complex analysis ripped that band aid off ;)
Not sure what the exact context the blog refers to (they are a scientist turned software engineer?, their field is data/software intensive and see this as an improvement area?). Our team does engineering test and evaluation that include aspects of R&D and struggle with this. Scientists have academic approaches (must have sufficient sampling/statistical significance, sometimes delaying findings/reports checking additional aspects when a sanity check will suffice) but it does give rigor. On the software side, we definitely have spaghetti code, tools that rely on some file sitting in someone's H-drive, and plug-ins built by someone's old collaborator with little documentation. This is juxtaposed by the PM types that must be agile (fine when tasks are understood and defined enough to go nicely into a sprint, not always the case). Better communication on both sides would probably alleviate some of this but that is the great challenge in any group.
For the interested reader: https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/
(The Good Commander has dedicated himself to exposing problems of this sort that plague our Navy)
I had the pleasure of spending part of my service trying to escape the shipyards. I lacked the perspective of these widespread issues as a lowly Junior Officer (I was trying to survive the equivalent of the daily standup without getting flayed for any number of issues that would become our responsibility with little agency to help). But I mostly fought against system upgrades that had no semblance of deconfliction ( my tracker had something like 8-10 medium mods with another 2 large ones eating our bandwidth). A shop of a handful of sailors that had to provide maintenance support, and operational support, conduct training/development and also quite literally babysitting some of the shipyard workers and many lacked experience (I certainly did). The QA work was poor as was acceptance testing, and always created issues later as kicking cans down the road created issues during workups. Also culture goes down the drain as the leadership has no incentive to address the inevitable scope increases ("growth work") will require more time in the shipyard which is unacceptable. I've read a lot of administrative action proposed (which is part of the issue) but as others have stated the quality must improve, shoddy work does absurd damage down the line (fires a la Bonhomme Richard and Oscar Austin) and defeats the purpose of mooring up to get the vessel right.
I agree with having shared team documentation but this has always been gray for me. My notebook ( and my softcopy log for the week) are incredibly raw (one-lines through mistakes, my personal commentary/snark, "napkin math",etc.). I am willing to share them with teammates/our lead/ or whoever may benefit but this has backfired on me. We perform analytical verification work and I've seen middling performers on our team look to avoid performing thorough work by copying from the notes of someone else ( I get this is work and not school so typical academic rules don't apply but our work is very investigative/exploratory in it's nature, performing derivations to ensure our approach is correct is encouraged and not considered a waste of time. Also contexts change quickly and a deep understanding is necessary) Thus when someone is trying to take a shortcut it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Also "micro-managers" see pages of notes open and treat it as fair game to pull up to my desk and expect immediate updates instead of requesting reasonably or waiting for the appropriate forum. I get this is a culture/staff issue more so than other things.
Sounds like a good project to me (we did this for a couple of labs in an undergraduate [sophomore maybe junior year] control systems class). The "inverted pendulum" problem and its subsequent derivations should be a good model for this. When the object is nearly upright (or at small angles from the vertical axis) a nice linear control loop should suffice but if you leave that region the control solution becomes more difficult (would make a good target for improvement after initially getting it going).
Right?!? Plenty of highly intelligent athletes exist (countless examples from President Ford to Dr. John Urschel) but football helping them sit in the oval office or on the MIT Faculty probably had nothing to do with a boost in cognitive function.
I think these engineering marvels whose FWHM (sorry I'm a bit rusty on what the right parameter for light gathering ability in this application) will be leaps ahead of current instrumentation is important. But have the science missions it will host (spectrographs etc.) received the same attention? Along those lines follow up observations are critical, for the groundbreaking work done at the bleeding edge meter class instruments at universities/labratories/observatories are needed too (also grad students,researchers, data reduction etc.)
Yeah this article should be more forthright in describing meta-materials/left handed media. This media is highly dispersive and described by changes in constituent properties (permittivity, permeability) usually coinciding with frequency/wave propagation constant changes. From there we can describe the energy propagation via Poyntings theorem and this is no violation in a physical sense.
This media is usually very complex/anisotropic and incredibly challenging to fabricate outside of a lab, wake me up when we can manufacture these /s