Jump to content

mikegarrison

Members
  • Posts

    5,123
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Reputation

6,384 Excellent

4 Followers

Profile Information

  • About me
    IRL Aero Engineer (ret.)

Recent Profile Visitors

The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.

  1. I still remember the time before the breakup of the USSR when the official story from the Soviet Union was that there had never been any attempt to make a manned lunar mission.
  2. Here's how it works, to the best of my knowledge. You write a plan of what you are going to test. The plan gets approved. You conduct the test. If things go according to the plan, that's fine. If they don't, that's what needs to be investigated and resolved. It's up to SpaceX what they write in their plan. If it had just said "Splashdown of the first stage, destructive reentry for the second, both at predetermined spots..." then that would have been good enough. Obviously the plan must not have said that, though.
  3. That's just standard engineering. You always have to balance margins of performance between the risk that you unexpectedly exceed the limits versus the risk that you overdesign and fail for cost, weight, etc. The skill and experience is in knowing how close to the edge you should get. Race car engineer Carroll Smith wrote in one of his books: "An engineer is someone who can do for a dime what any fool can do for a dollar."
  4. My name is not "Mikey", I'm not your boy, and why are you trying to make this argument personal? (Against the forum rules, I will add.)
  5. He's the CEO (and has about 80% control of the voting shares). He can call himself the "head engineer" if he wants -- nobody who works for him is going to tell him otherwise. But the higher you go in management, the less actual engineering you do, despite sometimes being the person who ultimately says yes or no about major decisions. FWIW, he has an economics degree, not an engineering degree. Not that I'm saying having a degree is necessary, but it is somewhat indicative. If you look at his history, it's not at all clear he has ever worked as an engineer. Shotwell, on the other hand, does have an engineering degree and clearly has worked as an engineer in her professional background.
  6. I am quite confident that Elon does approximately 0% of the engineering on any SpaceX rocket.
  7. Everything can be said to be a step in the development process for everything else that comes after, but as I understand it, Falcon 1 was originally expected to be a viable launcher, not just a step on the way to Falcon 9.
  8. I know a guy who was a professor at UAL-Fairbanks for a while. Got a lot of ice climbing practice in the winter.
  9. Of course the main issue is that metallic hydrogen may not even exist. But the reason hydrogen has the potential for a high ISP is because it is the lightest atom. Any other atoms added to the reaction mass will only lower the ISP if they are also carried onboard. If they are drawn from outside (ramjet, etc.) then yes ... but that obviously only works in the atmosphere and has so many other problems that it has never been done except for "Stage 0" of air-launched rockets.
  10. More like the equivalent of a landing you can crawl away from, with two broken legs. Like, it *could* have been worse, but not by very much. Manual lockouts are intentionally unable to be flipped remotely. They didn't want any chance that somebody was staring into a non-eye-safe laser when somebody remotely flipped a switch to turn it on.
  11. If you are a herbivore, a lack of fear tends to be dangerous. But running away from harmless things is also dangerous (unnecessary caloric output, plus the chance that you alert or even blunder into something actually dangerous). At some point many animals learn to be cautiously trusting around other animals that don't seem hostile.
  12. It's 30 years old now, but a decent place to start if The Language Instinct, by Pinker. When I was in college, my gf was working in Pinker's lab. She was doing things like searching through transcripts of kids' recordings, looking for very specific grammar errors. One thing that you find is that, unlike LLMs, kids learn language by figuring out the rules, rather than just associating the words from the usage that they hear. This can be shown by how they will make a certain kind of grammar error that they never hear adults say -- regularizing irregular constructions. A kid has likely never heard an adult say "Joe goed to the store," so it's clearly not the kind of learning that a LLM does where they just regurgitate the things they were trained on. Instead, the kids internalize the rule that you add -ed to the verb, but don't (at first) pick up the irregular nature of the verb "to go". They aren't just using things they have been taught by hearing other people say, because other people don't say it. Yes, it's a "pattern" that they learn -- add -ed to the end of the verb -- but that implies that have already recognized some words are verbs and some are not, and that different tenses have different suffixes, and so forth. If they were learning like LLMs, they would always use "went" instead of "goed", because all their training data uses "went".
  13. They are not. Pattern recognition is only one sub-system of the brain. Human brains are mostly focused on a few things: keeping you alive (breathing, heart, etc.), controlling your body (walking, etc.), language, and vision processing. But they also have a lot of other specific and general capabilities. Vision processing is much, much more than pattern recognition, which is why robots find it notoriously difficult. Essentially what you are doing is doing a real-time mapping of a 2D image into a 3D model. It's the much-harder task that 3D video games do in reverse, when they take a 3D model and project it into a 2D image. The reverse mapping is basically impossible (not enough data to find a unique solution) unless you already have a bunch of built-in concepts about the 3D world, like object permanence and the idea that objects obscure what is behind them. You also have to know, for instance, that an elephant seen from the side and an elephant seen from the front is the same elephant, even though the 2D patterns look much different. True language processing is also much more complicated than pattern recognition, and involves grammar like nouns, verbs, modifiers, and the like. Moreover, for it to be useful, you have to be able to use the same (or close enough) meanings as other people, as well as the same grammar.
×
×
  • Create New...