Humor Random Comments Thread

[Thunder Chicken]

Also, any sane engineer would run away, with liability wavers like that, no structural analysis or testing or certification. It was a suicide pact, and I don't think any engineer will like to have his name on this.

There is a joke: What do you call a medical school graduate with a 2.0 GPA? Answer: Doctor. This works the same way with engineers.

This winnowing process unfortunately means you are left with less than capable engineers that may not be the brightest or even sanest of people. Especially since the CEO very deliberately worked to avoid regulatory oversight, he probably wasn't hiring engineers with professional licenses from any jurisdiction that has a code of ethics. He threw out all the ethical, capable engineers to retain the compliant and inadequate ones.

 

[steph]

Not sure if I should post here or in the astrophoto thread, but I managed to screw up the focus anyways, so they,re not that good as astrophotos

I was doing a night timelapse with my spare phone, a Samsung S10, using the Intervalometer app. Basically, I just put it on a tripod mount and pointed it straight up. With the right settings and clear skies, one can even get the Milky Way nicely visible, especially with some post-editing.

When looking at the resulting photos, I noticed (besides the fact that they're too blurry), two lights, from 01:56 to 01:58 AM. Photos are 30 second exposures at 1600 ISO, so the lights themselves , while certainly visible, might not have been that bright. There's a 'normal' frame between the two events, so it might not be a 'flicker', but two separate events.
I was thinking it might even have been a flashlight or something, but the weird thing is that there are no signs of intrusion, nothing's missing (phone included), not to mention that my usually paranoid dog didn't seem to get triggered. As for me, I was fast asleep.

So, basically, I'm looking for websites that would allow me to identify past flares based on time and location, or perhaps sites which report stuff like this. At 4 min long, I wouldn't even rule out a space junk reentry

 

[Arvil]

heavens-above.com shows a schedule for visible satellites and radio satellites in any location, with a great sky map to see the path, and it used to predict Iridium flares when that was a thing. I’ve their app for years. I don’t know anyone who predicts space junk in reentry.

 

[steph]

Yeah, I have the heavens-above app, I just didn't realize it can also go backwards from the current date. Oh well, one just needs to use the calendar feature. Turns out there was nothing too bright at that time. I guess I'll juat have to file it as 'unknown'

edit: even looked up the fireball detection networks around here, and the latest event seems to have been in March, so it probably wasn't a fireball either

 

[Arvil]

Ohhhh! I had not realized there was a calendar feature to backdate. Just tried it. Thanks for that info.

 

[Thunder Chicken]

Wreckage of the Titan has been recovered and was offloaded in St. John's.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1674021888039723010

I suppose that most of the carbon fiber bits are confetti and they won't be able to recover it all, but I hope they can find enough to study and understand the failure in detail and someone can publish the results.

Sometimes innovating away from proven design methodologies leads to better designs, but sometimes it causes you to stray to places where experienced engineers know better to tread, where physics will simply say "No."

 

[Urwumpe]

Sometimes innovating away from proven design methodologies leads to better designs, but sometimes it causes you to stray to places where experienced engineers know better to tread, where physics will simply say "No."

When your engineering results in the appearance of experimental physicists, you know you are in trouble.

 

[Linguofreak]

Sometimes innovating away from proven design methodologies leads to better designs, but sometimes it causes you to stray to places where experienced engineers know better to tread, where physics will simply say "No."

If physics said "No", they're wouldn't be a problem. Instead, it says things like "F around and find out", and "Congratulations, you've stopped being biology!"

 

[TheShuttleExperience]

I'm very afraid only by the look of the interior of that piece of pipe...

This looks more like a school project partly made of stuff one can get from Amazon (like that rubber flooring which I also use for my homemade flight sim). How on mother Earth would one spend 250.000 USD for a ride with something like that, not even researching beforehand who build it and how it was designed, tested and certified? That would be my first question. This really looks like a private suicide proposal.

 

[TheShuttleExperience]

Somehow I feel very sorry for him. He seemed so convinced and enthusiastic. And it failed so badly.

 

[jedidia]

I'm realising that Bethesda might just have coined the term "Nasa-punk"... Googling for it gives nothing but results for starfield.

 

[Urwumpe]

I'm realising that Bethesda might just have coined the term "Nasa-punk"... Googling for it gives nothing but results for starfield.

They use still the old engine for Starfield, right?

 

[jedidia]

They use still the old engine for Starfield, right?

I don't know. The game involves a lot of ProcGen, but that could be handled by middleware, similar to NMS, so it's highly probable that they're still using it.
But then, You don't really want to completely replace an engine this mature. Bethesda is having enough issues with Bugs as it is, I don't really want to know what it would be like if they suddenly went "Hey, we wrote a completely new engine, check this ouuuuuuuuuuuu[SEGFAULT]".

 

[Urwumpe]

I don't know. The game involves a lot of ProcGen, but that could be handled by middleware, similar to NMS, so it's highly probable that they're still using it.
But then, You don't really want to completely replace an engine this mature. Bethesda is having enough issues with Bugs as it is, I don't really want to know what it would be like if they suddenly went "Hey, we wrote a completely new engine, check this ouuuuuuuuuuuu[SEGFAULT]".

I don't know since I can't talk about their sources, but sometimes its better to throw the old junk away and start from the scratch with ALL the lessons you learned in the past. Its a matter of mature developers, not mature code. In case of Skyrim, some bugs are so mature, they already sent their smaller bugs to college.

 

[N_Molson]

When your engineering results in the appearance of experimental physicists, you know you are in trouble.

That's a very ordinary day for the Kerbal Space Program

 

[TheShuttleExperience]

I had a strange but yet a very awesome dream last night. I found myself in the White Room just in the middle of crew ingress for the Artemis II mission ?!? I didn't say it loud, because I was standing next to the astronaut support personnel. But I asked myself silently: what the f... am I doing in here??? When I looked down at my body and saw the white clothes I was wearing, with certain patches on it, it turned out that I was part of the closeout crew obviously I was like: ehm... tell it to the marines! But ooookay then... I don't know how I got my little a** in here, but damn this is f******* awesome

I was standing in front of the open hatch of Orion, but of course you couldn't see much of Orion itself from the outside as it was covered by the launch abort system. And also the room was smaller than I thought. I could make out Christina Koch and Victor Glover, which were just about to enter Orion within the next few minutes. The vibe in this room was between sheer excitement and professionality simultaneously. I couldn't resist to touch and inspect Orion's hatch and take a look inside the spacecraft from where I was standing. Someone from the crew next to me said: it's an awesome vehicle, isn't it? I said: yeah. We started talking about details and materials here and there. We supported Christina Koch and Victor Glover entering the capsule. Then I woke up.

I rarely have such dreams. And why closeout crew? But damn, it seemed super realistic. It was very different from what I know by viewing videos/livestreams. One could feel that it was on top of a huge steel structure as you could actually feel it moving very slightly due to winds outside. The noises were also different (of course no "narrator" but different machinery sound and talking going on). It was almost like boarding an airliner. And it was strange do dream in the English language. Didn't seem like a dream at all. Interesting how the brain can create an environment you actually know, although you never were there in reality.

That's when you realize that you obviously a passionate about something more than you thought. In my next life I will study and apply for a job at ESA...

 

[Arvil]

Perhaps an alternate universe and timeline has crossover events through dreams and you are one there. So, did the other you have a dream playing Orbiter?

 

[Urwumpe]

Maybe some people here are also interested in the Age of Sail, especially the life on board of the ships, I found this page while looking for the answer "What kind of bookkeeping is done on a Royal Navy Vessel?":

Late 18th, 19th and early 20th Century Naval and Naval Social History - Index

Maybe not as entertaining as a Patrick O'Brian novel, but detailled.

 

[Arvil]

With my Navy background, I’ve read all of the O’Brian series, and am reading Forester’s Hornblower for the Kazillionth time. Enjoy it every time.
Yeah, my modern Navy was WAY better.

 

[Urwumpe]

With my Navy background, I’ve read all of the O’Brian series, and am reading Forester’s Hornblower for the Kazillionth time. Enjoy it every time.
Yeah, my modern Navy was WAY better.

For me, reading this stuff is like Star Trek: Next Generation gone wrong: Lots of weird technobabble ("...in the van of Admiral..." ... Sounds dangerous), but after a few minutes, it seems to be plausible....