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DDE

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    Shower thoughts

    in The Lounge

    Posted

    7 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

    I'm unaware of the extent to which early scientific innovations were driven by religious people, although I can list examples (but they may be anecdotal). Newton and Copernicus were Christians, Pythagoras and his followers were Pythagoreans. Tsiolkovsky believed in ethereal beings that transferred knowledge to humans, while a lot of the impetus for the Space Race came from communism vs. capitalism, which entailed atheism vs. religion in the eyes of the American politicians who funded NASA. Perhaps these achievements wouldn't have happened without the religious backgrounds involved (although IMO, the type of "religiousness" present in the four I namedropped is more akin to some sort of spiritualism: being touched by mystical curiosity almost constantly throughout daily life, than the average "religiousness": go to the place of worship once every week but otherwise not think about it too much).

    There's also the anecdotal overrepresentation of Mormons at NASA and in sci-fi. Some have argued that the Space Race was basically cosmists vs Mormons, but I doubt they've cared to include a certain von Braun.

    Shower thoughts

    in The Lounge

    Posted

    42 minutes ago, ColdJ said:

    If the latest generations are more interested in abusing new technologies rather than learning how they are manufactured and repaired, how long till the population turns into the "Eloi" as written about in the novel "The Time Machine", unable to think and fend for themselves?

    It's either an impossibility - such a civilization would be cannibalized by more "grass-touching" neighbors - or it's already happened in industrial and early post-industrial societies, because the basic skills for subsistence survival have already been lost, and the ability to fend for oneself is almost counterproductive because what's needed is a reliable cog in the machine.

    Shower thoughts

    in The Lounge

    Posted

    41 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

    Arthur C. Clarke’s quote… “Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic,” has some disturbing consequences. If one day all of the problems are solved, and ideas become more and more complex, and sufficient time passes that the early discoveries become almost mythical in nature, that history will be easily distortable.

    We are arguably already at this point due to the sheer expansion of science and the complexity of the technology involved - the era of Big Science. Before the semi-conductor, perhaps even in the early Atomic Age, most of the science we relied on could be demonstrated over the course of classroom physics and chemistry experiments and field trips. Today, much of the science we rely on in daily lives has to be accepted as dogma because it realistically cannot be tested when in doubt - much of it will be just appeals to authority all the way down.

    Russian Launch and Mission Thread

    in Science & Spaceflight

    Posted · Edited by DDE

    On 5/17/2024 at 9:03 AM, DDE said:

    Plesetsk, Soyuz-2.1b. Hendrickx suggests it may be a 14F169 Razbeg or three, Novosti Kosmonavtiki and official press-release cofnirm multiple satellites - Kosmos 2551, 2558, 2568.

    Apparently the official press-release meant the subesats. Only one major payload now confirmed, Kosmos 2576, and it's co-planar with USA 314, causing quite the stir in the American media.

    Hendrickx has now revised his guess to a Nivelir or Nivelir Mk2 (14F168).

    Thread to discuss negative things in a very general way, just see where it goes y'know?

    in The Lounge

    Posted

    So, this is an ersatz computer problem thread, right?

    I've got a six-year-old GE75 Raider laptop. Before going away last week I figured I need to give its battery some practice for the first time in half a year or so. That morphed into looking for battery conservation methods, which mean capping max charge, which required me to update the Dragon control center app. I succeeded at that, with a few false starts.

    Here's the problem: the laptop now idles with Fan 1 at 2400 RPM, and the fan makes a quiet but steady whine resembling a distant washing machine. My problem is that I'm not sure when it started. I think it's new and not me just noticing it after being away from it for a week. I'm also not sure if it's something new as a result of my nighttime meddling with the Dragon app - not the least because the actual washing machine was on downstairs.

    So, this is an ersatz computer problem thread, right?

    I've got a six-year-old GE75 Raider laptop. Before going away last week I figured I need to give its battery some practice for the first time in half a year or so. That morphed into looking for battery conservation methods, which mean capping max charge, which required me to update the Dragon control center app. I succeeded at that, with a few false starts.

    Here's the problem: the laptop now idles with Fan 1 at 2400 RPM, and the fan makes a quiet but steady whine resembling a distant washing machine. My problem is that I'm not sure when it started. I think it's new and not me just noticing it after being away from it for a week. I'm also not sure if it's something new as a result of my nighttime meddling with the Dragon app - not the least because the actual washing machine was on downstairs.

    It could just be a loose piece of dandruff or cat fur that fell in there during that one week the laptop was stored. The noise is particular to the idling RPM. I've excluded coil whine - which a lot of sources were talking about.

    To be entirely fair, the laptop has not received any maintenance in said six years. And I dread having to deal with a notoriously fraud-ridden field...

    Russian Launch and Mission Thread

    in Science & Spaceflight

    Posted · Edited by DDE

    Plesetsk, Soyuz-2.1b. Hendrickx suggests it may be a 14F169 Razbeg or three, Novosti Kosmonavtiki and official press-release cofnirm multiple satellites - Kosmos 2551, 2558, 2568.

    Edit: also sox rideshare cubesats from Sitronics Space.

    https://t.me/space78125/2694

    Yes. Plesetsk. Rideshare. And that was under Shoigu. Imagine how things may run now that an auditor is in charge...

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    criogenic storage in space

    in Science & Spaceflight

    Posted

    31 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

    in space, that cost is clearly not a problem. mass, on the other hand, could be an issue. but i don't have the numbers to make the calculations. those refrigerators i saw looked like they were small enough, could be a few tens of kilograms, though i could not find exact data (most people who buy a criogenic refrigerator doesn't really care how heavy it is).

    It was first done back before the golden age of planetary exploration. The problem is lOx, not methane - a propulsion bus is going to trend towards equal temperature across both tanks, and the equilibrium would be disfavorable. Methane and ethane were still top picks, but alternative oxidizers were explored - all of them involving fluorine.

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