wow that's really cool. I had only seen the "Iron Man" style jetpack demonstrations that hover a few feet or the jet suits that I thought usually jump from an airplane but I'd never one of these take off from the ground. Must be a really amazing feeling.
The other place where life could exist is in the upper atmosphere where apparently temperatures are much more hospitable. There's a really good write-up with more information here [1]. On earth there exists microorganisms that live in our atmosphere so one hypothesis to explain the phosphine is that there may be a similar situation on Venus. I believe its also been theorized that we could build floating cities on Venus [2] given the climate in the upper-middle atmosphere.
In fact the atmosphere of Venus is the only place outside of Earth where humans could walk outside with just a simple oxygen mask - about 50km above the surface the temperatures are around 0-20C and pressure of one atmosphere. No other celestial body in our solar system has anywhere like that. But it's just like this article correctly identified I think - floating cities on Venus are not as cool as "normal" cities on Mars.
> the atmosphere of Venus is the only place outside of Earth where humans could walk outside with just a simple oxygen mask
Surely a bit of an exaggeration? The mostly carbon dioxide, 1 atm of pressure area is not bad, but it coincides with the thickest cloud coverage. The clouds which are composed of sulfuric acid.
A new novel by Derek Kunsken called "House of Styx" explores in detail human habitation of Venus. In floating cities and airships and realistically dealing with pressures, temps, and the acidity of the atmosphere.
I assume the atmosphere microorganisms on Earth started in a terrestrial tidal pool though and evolved from there. There’s the rub for thinking about atmosphere organisms existing on other planets.
Right, I wont even pretend to be an armchair expert on this just regurgitating what I've read. Long and short of it is we have no idea but from what I recall the original paper was very thorough in trying to explain the phenomenon and life was the most likely hypothesis given what we know. Regardless of the origin it sounds like there is some new science to be found which is exciting.
Oh I did not think about that or know that. That’s true.
“Recent studies from September 2019 concluded that Venus may have had surface water and a habitable condition for around 3 billion years and may have been in this condition until 700 to 750 million years ago.”
Do microorganisms spend their entire lives in Earth's atmosphere, or are they simply found there? It doesn't seem surprising that some would find their way up there, but I have a hard time imagining how microorganisms could maintain a certain altitude. On land, they can anchor themselves to hospitable environments to breed, but in the atmosphere, how could they find one another?
Apparently they do live in the upper atmosphere. [1].
> Although many of the organisms borne aloft are likely occasional visitors to the upper troposphere, 17 types of bacteria turned up in every sample. Researchers like environmental microbiologist and co-author Kostas Konstantinidis suspect that these microbes may have evolved to survive for weeks in the sky, perhaps as a way to travel from place to place and spread their genes across the globe. "Not everybody makes it up there," he says. "It's only a few that have something unique about their cells" that allows them survive the trip.
> it's not hard to create a simple UX that would enable this.
This is a gross understatement. The number of different clients that Twitter supports (apis, third party clients/vendors, mobile, etc) means that it isn't a simple problem. Not only that but they have to support different screen sizes and likely have to crop the image differently depending on the device you're viewing the content on. I can without much mental effort understand how this feature comes to be. People spend more time looking at pictures that are interesting and in order to support all of the different screen sizes they decided it was easier for their users to attempt to automatically frame the image.
Sure but as I mentioned in my original comment you're assuming that Tweets are only created in a Twitter owned property and this just isn't the case at all. I have no insider knowledge here but my hunch is when they were talking about this problem the calculus was "Do we just make photos posted from the Twitter web or mobile client look good or maybe we can use some ML to attempt to make photos from anywhere look good". I am not at all advocating whether they are doing a good job at that or not but reducing the problem to "a simple UX to select a focal point" is ignoring the massive surface of the problem.
I'd argue that "maybe we can use some ML to attempt to make photos from anywhere look good" is also ignoring the massive surface of the problem, with predictably bad results.
They are both large problems which is my point but given the choice between two hard problems I can understand why they chose the one that has the potential to solve the entire surface instead of just part of it.
So what you're saying is, it's easier to create a magical AI that can decide with 100% confidence the best visual area of the photo, than a UI component?
I'm guessing the tweets referenced in that article were based off of the original[1] (that I saw). The original tweet series did a bunch of testing with different variations of the same image to attempt to get to the bottom of why the algorithm is doing what its doing. There was also an official response from Twitter[2].
It's worth reading the full dissent and majority opinion but its a textualist argument that the original legislation did not intend to include homosexuality and transgender in the Title VII law against sex discrimination and its not the courts job to legislate and that if these are to be included its congress' job to amend the laws to be more specific.
> but its a textualist argument that the original legislation did not intend to include homosexuality
Ah, but that's not textualism. Textualism is a method of statutory interpretation whereby the plain text of a statute is used to determine the meaning of the legislation. Instead of attempting to determine statutory purpose or legislative intent, textualists adhere to the objective meaning of the legal text. [0]
I'm not sure why they are trying to tie an experimental engine test so tightly with the crew launch. I know the two events are temporally close to each other but seems a bit alarmist to start the article attempting to connect the two. They do continue to say they are unrelated but why even bother bringing up the crew launch at all?
I'm sort of surprised they went ahead with the Starship test, assuming they knew it had a likelihood of failure, given the temporal proximity to demo-2 and the inevitable bad press if the Starship test ended in an explosion.
It's amazing how much a technique like rubber ducking[1] helps to work through issues. The number of times I've felt like I have no idea how to solve a problem until the moment after I ask someone else is incredible. I think the act of thinking how to explain the problem to someone else really helps trigger the problem solving side of the brain. That and the number of times taking a 10 minute walk has been more productive than hours of debugging time is frankly mind boggling.
I was stuck debugging a chip for a day until I finally decided to write to the FAE. I sit down, write my problem in the simplest possible language, list all the tricks I tried and asked for a solution. Then I'm reading my email to make sure everything is in order and voila - one last thing to try. and that step worked.
They call it the Einstellung effect[1]. It's a recommended strategy to take time away from the problem to let your brain subconsciously work on the problem.
The hours of debugging were still a critical part of the process. It “loosened the jar lid” so to speak. (It’s not like long-distance walkers are some of the best debuggers.)
But once you’ve put in some substantial effort, taking a break and a walk (or a sleep) is often the critical last step.
I've heard this concept called the cardboard colleague - you explain the problem to a cardboard cutout representing a colleague instead of an actual person.
Of course it remains a concept, I don't think anyone would go so far as make one :-)
Many years ago when I was designing and programming embedded controllers (early '80s) I worked alongside, but not with, another engineer who was building devices using the same fundamental components (6520, PIA, etc.) In our tea breaks we would explain our problems to each other. Neither of us suggested any solutions to the other or responded with anything other than simple platitudes and sympathy for each other's troubles. It was remarkable how many problems had simply vanished by the end of the tea break.
Rubber duck debugging is extremely useful to unblock. I very rarely use an inanimate object, though — for me, the real help is the first or second (apparently very basic) question that the other person poses to me. That key question usually comes at what would seem the beginning of my explanation, but there lies the magic.
My understanding is that pay for parking (aside from large garages) is generally about space availability rather than making money. Public street parking in Boston is fairly cheap per unit time and my understanding is that the maximum time limits are meant to allow new people to come in and take the spot to do whatever business they need to do in the area. Otherwise people would just squat on spots all day and the businesses would be starved for customers.
Not disagreeing with all the other shenanigans you listed for Ma though.
I've heard that cities also charge for parking because of an interesting social factor: many people will drive in circles for half an hour looking for a free spot rather than pay for parking in a private lot. Everyone driving around in circles creates more traffic. So the city charges for curbside parking, in order to make the cost more comparable to parking in a private lot, with the hope that it will lower the psychological switching cost from "finding a curbside spot" to "giving up and paying for a garage spot".
My annoyance with metered parking in the area isn't so much the cost which, as you say, isn't very expensive. Rather it's that a lot of 2-hour metered parking has been extended from ending at 6pm to ending at 8pm. What that means is that, if you come in for dinner and an evening event, your meter will probably expire before 8pm.
(There is a hack with the online parking app to "feed the meter" although you can potentially get ticketed for that.)
Exactly. If parking time limits weren't enforced, commuters would just park there, hurting local businesses. (I say this having been on both sides of the equation.)
I agree with your assessment, but not entirely. If it weren't at all about making money you could just stand up a kiosk that dispenses parking tickets and not charge money for them. The ticket-to-park method of parking enforcement doesn't require the payment element to enforce parking laws.
Old opinions strongly held. I think Angular 1 left a bad taste in peoples mouths and that gets carried over in perpetuity. Take php for example, I'm sure you can find plenty of devs who haven't touched php in 10+ years but will still say they despise it.
This stack overflow[1] post goes into some more detail about why specifically that syntax.
tl;dr is that you can actually redefine the keyword `undefined` since its actually a global property and not reserved. void 0 will always return you the true value of undefined so it will work in all cases regardless of external shenanigans. Pretty neat.
Undefined on the global object has been read only since es3.1 I think.
However you can still declare variables named undefined that get their own storage and so can have any value. Originally “undefined” didn’t exist in the global scope so many sites had “var undefined” or function f(..., undefined){..} to get a reference to the value.
