... getting all those panels up into space is likely going to nullify the benefits of solar. Think about the environmental impact of the amount of fuel required and throwaway rocket components for the thousands of rocket launches required to loft and assemble all the necessary components. Sure, you'll get higher efficiency once the system is orbited, but you have to get it all up there first.

And so far, we haven't figured out any way to get to orbit short of burning an awful lot of hydrocarbons (or use an awful lot to create liquid hydrogen). And even SpaceX still hasn't figured out how to recover their 2nd stage.

It may pay off in the long run, but it seems to me that we have a pretty serious problem right now, and adding all that junk to the atmosphere is a pretty bad idea at this moment.

Is someone aware of any tradeoff analysis showing that my assumptions above are faulty?

"drones all seem to be fairly loud"? Really?

A friend brought his DJI Mavic to my house a couple days ago. We're near an airport, so we couldn't go higher than 180 ft per the FAA. So we kept it below 100 feet, and I never went farther away than my driveway. At that range - 200 ft lateral, 100 ft high - and in a very quiet rural neighborhood, I could barely hear it. Add a normal volume at any airport, due to planes idling on the taxiway, taking off and landing... you really can't hear those drones at all.

No, I'm not a pilot. But I am a 30-year flight test engineer with a specialty in testing military flight simulators. So I'm extremely well-acquainted with techniques, both good and bad, of artificially cueing airspeed for a pilot.

As others have already replied, it's not so much absolute airspeed as the CHANGE in airspeed. But one does get real cues from wind rush, turbulence and buffet levels, and how the airplane responds to control inputs. Those are all native to a well-experienced pilot, and in a simulator, they're all missing to some extent.

The best thing you can use to cue a pilot to airspeed changes is tilting the cockpit forward and aft. But that induces pitch rates to his inner ear, which cause some sensory confusion. And of course, the simulator for these AI tests was a "fixed base" device, meaning it doesn't have that capability anyway.

Another option, in fixed-base simulators, is small motors that push the seat cushion against the pilot's back. They can be effective, but are often simply distracting because they have very limited range. There are also strap tensioners that pull or loosen the straps on his torso; these can be effective but they have some counter-intuitive problems that would take a few paragraphs to explain, and they require wearing a full parachute harness which is often undesirable for various reasons.

I'm not at all surprised by this result. Two problems: information latency, and lousy visual resolution.

The human pilot in a simulator has no seat-of-the-pants sense of airspeed or g level, both of which are absolutely crucial for doing well in a dogfight. He could only see those in his HUD in a VR system, which required him to add, if you will, an extra couple of channels of attention and compensation compared to his usual scan and control inputs. And the update rate in a HUD is limited. Everything he was doing had to be crosschecked against the HUD, while in a real airplane, he just feels the jet respond and knows if he can afford to add more g or roll harder.

Also, the pilot is limited by a low-resolution visual system. An Oculus or other typical VR headset has relatively poor acuity, and knowing exactly which way the other airplane is turning - and even beginning to turn - is critical to any air combat situation. That's why pilots must boast perfect vision to become fighter jocks.

The AI, however, gets all this information instantly, and can make minuscule adjustments to its control inputs to wrest the maximum performance out of the airplane. Unless they crippled the AI with poor or "fuzzy" information on opponent attitude and direction, and some lags on its own g and airspeed info, there's no way the human pilot has any chance of beating an even slightly competent AI.

This trial is really not particularly meaningful, until you put the AI in control of a real airplane using actual optical sensors for opponent position information, and rerun the test that way.

Whoa, there.

"The climate is changing at an unprecedented rate in human history due to humans pumping too much CO2 into the atmosphere. That's a fact."

Not quite; that statement involves some analysis. The facts are this:

1) The climate is changing in an unprecedented rate in human history.
2) Humans are pumping a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere.
3) Many (but not all) scientists believe that (1) and (2) are related.

In other news, many thousands of nurses didn't get infected by their many thousands of COVID-19-infected patients in the last three months, because they practiced proper infection control measures.

While I'm happy to hear this news, and it has good PR value, it really only answers the question about masks properly worn by people who also practiced other good infection-control measures, such as not touching their faces, not touching the outside of the mask, wearing the masks properly, keeping their hands properly washed often, and so forth.

I guarantee you, a lot of the people I see "wearing masks" in Walmart with it hanging off their nose, or sloppy loose, or constantly lifting it up to rub their nose, or touching everything in sight and then rubbing their eyes, wouldn't have the same results as these two people who obviously did things right for 140 clients.

Masks are highly effective when worn properly, and even more highly effective when both people are wearing them. We know this from decades of experience.

Herd immunity only works if a fairly high proportion of the population becomes immune as a result. The flu vaccine demonstrably does not meet that requirement.

From the CDC, past seasonal flu vaccination effectiveness is discussed here:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccin...
It has ranged from 10% to 60%, with an average of 41% effective over 15 years. In other words, out of the people who got immunized, only that percentage actually became immune.

The estimated minimum threshold for effective herd immunity for the flu vaccine is 50%, based on this analysis:
https://www.quantamagazine.org...

In the time frame of the analysis in the first link above, only 4 out of 15 years reached that 50% threshold.

In other words, the flu vaccine is woefully ineffective at reaching herd immunity thresholds, even if 100% of the population were to be immunized every year. And we all know that has no chance of happening. According to this CDC study,
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/fluvax...
the typical rate of vaccination is maybe 40% of the population at best.

So the IMMUNITY rate is something like 20%, less than half of that required for herd immunity for flu. Even at a very high compliance, say 80%, the herd immunity threshold would still not be reached.

Given the anecdotal rate of flu or flu-like symptoms actually CAUSED BY the vaccine, and its demonstrated inability to provide herd immunity, I'm not willing to be vaccinated for the flu simply to reduce the transmission rate, when I'm far more likely to become ill as a result of getting vaccinated.

To be perfectly clear, on the other hand I absolutely DO support vaccination for diphtheria, polio, tetanus, and measles, which have very high transmissibility and also very high success rates for vaccination immunity, and where herd immunity has been well-demonstrated.

Believe it or not, for live music purposes latencies as low as 10ms begin to cause problems for a good musician. 40ms is considered the worst tolerable latency. So current âoelowâ latency BT above 100ms is absolutely unacceptable.

Consider that for 120 beats per minute, a typical dance tempo, a single beat occurs every 500ms (a quarter note). 100ms is therefore an entire 1/5 of a beat. That is a huge error for any musician. Most musicians in various studies easily detected much smaller errors.

The Bluetooth headphone latency is entirely unacceptable for any live music purposes. That pretty much eliminates any real-time audio uses of the phone - and there are more than a few apps and devices that do handy things like guitar amp simulators.

Aerospace flight test engineer here, with almost 30 years' experience including 737-based aircraft. No, 737 MAX is NOT inherently unstable. Rather, it is slightly LESS stable than the FAA's minimum standards, but still stable. The amount of force that must be applied to the pitch control to maintain steady level flight is slightly reduced in certain situations, but it definitely still has positive stability, just not as much positive as before.

Note that stability is not a 1 or 0 binary choice. It's very analog. An airplane (or any system) can be very strongly stable, or weakly stable, or neutrally stable, or slightly unstable, or strongly unstable. Imagine a golf ball sitting in a bowl. A wok is weakly stable; the ball can move around a lot but will still tend to return to the middle. A shot glass is very strongly stable; the ball will always stay in the middle. The MAX design is still well in the stable regime, just less far towards strongly stable than is required by FAA minimum requirements for certification for an transport-class airplane. Imagine that golf ball in a small soup bowl (737) versus a bigger soup bowl (737 MAX).

Also note that instability is the norm for modern fighter jets. Computers keep them pointed in the right direction by constantly tweaking the control output to make the airplane *act* stable in most circumstances. But stability is the enemy of rapid maneuverability, and maneuverability is the key to winning fights. Hence, we intentionally design unstable aircraft that carefully avoid that instability when it's not needed.

ANY Bluetooth audio, even the "super low latency" variety currently being promoted, has too high a latency for a musician. Since I use my laptop as a sound-generating system for playing with a team (essentially as the synth connected to my MIDI-controller keyboard), any perceptible latency will throw me off. A hardwired audio port is essential.

Many manufacturers claim that people cannot hear 100ms latency, but that's a self-serving metric. It is only true when you're talking about the eye-to-ear split where the human eye/brain combination could readily detect the difference between lip motion and spoken words. It's not really a good metric for music; have you ever watched a music video where the drums were visibly out of sync? But for anything other than music and speech, the delay isn't really a big deal, and 100ms is probably fine.

After all, our brains are accustomed to seeing the lag due to distance; at 100 feet away, with a speed of sound of 1000 feet/sec, there's a 100ms lag in the audio. And nobody really notices that in real life; our brains just compensate transparently.

For interviews and movies with dialog, 33ms (one frame in a 29.97 frames/sec video) is about as far off as you want to be for video; the brain sees a close-up image processes it as if we were close. Then the 1/10 second lag becomes problematic. At 33ms, however, you cannot visibly detect any lip/voice disconnect, and the brain's visual lag processing does a fine job of "auto-correcting" without you noticing.

But for a musician, you're talking hands-to-ear, not eyes-to-ear, and having the instrument react even 1/30th of a second later (a 33ms delay) is incredibly jarring. The brain is NOT built to ignore or time-shift a physical sensory delay like it does a visual delay; the brain is trained for nearly instantaneous touch response. For the musician playing at 120 beats/minute (a typical rock or house tempo), a quarter note (one beat) is 500ms, and 33ms is 7% of a beat and corresponds to a 32nd note, which is easily playable by any competent musician. So for syncing up with a band, or hearing your own performance in your headset, 1/32 of a note offset is unbearable. But at 10ms, it becomes nearly imperceptible - not totally, but close enough to ignore.

This can all be worked around with a quality external dongle - but why should I have to? and this introduces more issues because the sound quality for such external dongles is usually not as good as the onboard systems.

At least right now, I'd never buy a laptop without a hardwired audio output. If they get the latency down to sub-10ms, I might accept it.

Meanwhile, news popped up today that there are one million more available jobs in the US than unemployed workers. The problem is not people unable to work, it's people unWILLING to work, because they've been trained (by the government) that the government will give them free stuff for sitting at home making babies and smoking weed.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/t...

"Here's your sign."

"Big strike #1" is totally incorrect. "Boeing produced a dynamically unstable airframe" is not the case. Rather, the engine change slightly reduced the stability to less than the minimum required by FAA regulations, thus requiring a compensation system to artificially increase the stability back to the minimum required. It was never unstable, PERIOD. It's still quite stable even without MCAS - just not quite as stable as required by regulation.

I cannot disagree with the incredulity of designing this system with just one AOA sensor as an input. I also cannot fathom how they could possibly design it to NOT have a practical upper limit of its authority, or without an extremely visible notification of the action of the MCAS system. In the name of "we won't have to retrain the pilots" it violates a key tenet of automation: when you change the mode of operation, you notify the operator or user.

FWIW, I am an aircraft flight test engineer with a specialty in stability and control, with 29 years of experience in the field, and over 10 years of testing on Boeing-derived commercial-class aircraft and autopilot systems. I've flown simulator variants of the 737 and its autopilot, and know exactly how confusing automation can be, especially when it does something unexpected. From the cockpit in real flight, I've watched trained, highly experienced test pilots completely lose their ability to focus on where the airplane is headed because they're trying to troubleshoot a relatively unimportant system that just messed with their sense of expectation. I have a lot to say about this crash, and none of it is good for Boeing.

Did he actually die...?

Just think about the implications of $137mil of untraceable funds that aren't strictly controlled by any national regulations.

Let me throw out an alternate opinion, one which I haven't seen in the previous 100+ comments.

I'm happy this is happening. There is a lot of good non-porn stuff on Tumblr, and I will finally be able to remove Tumblr from my router blacklist without feeling tempted by the sea of porn. Believe it or not, it has nothing to do with being a right-wing or Christian or Islamic or Jewish religious nut. You see, I chose to stop using porn because I didn't like what it was doing to me, and I saw far too many studies of how damaging it is to the human male.

So I added tumblr.com to my router and OpenDNS blacklists, because I decided not to let myself wander the halls of porn on any website, and it was just too tempting to go down the wrong trails when I stumbled on a Tumblr link.

I'm sure the "damaging" thing is going to raise eyebrows, but let me explain. Don't mod me down because you disagree - I'm just hoping to pass along a lesson learned, giving people something to think about, even if they don't come to the same conclusion.

Here's what I observed about porn use in my own life. For one thing, it kept me thinking about things that were alien to my relationship with a wonderful woman who is a terrific lover already. By training me to focus on what *I* wanted all the time, it made me selfish instead of focusing on how to please her. It made me unsatisfied with a love life that was far better than as a teenager I ever dreamed it could be. It taught me to respond better to my own hand than to my partner. I realized that when I wasn't frequently jerking off to porn, my sexual response to my partner was far, far, far more satisfying, even if it took some patience and time and had the risk of not being perfectly in control. It made me unsatisfied with my partner's imperfect body, so that whenever I was enjoying her I was distracted by thinking about some imaginary set of "perfect" breasts and impossibly lithe flat tummy that were unavailable to me. Sorry, but childbirth isn't friendly to most women's bodies, and you don't see any porn stars with stretch marks. Finally, it was a huge time-waster. I got back hours a week to do better things. And all these things were born out by numerous studies that show that an awful lot of sexual dysfunction today is caused by porn, by men training their minds and bodies to respond to impossible things that have nothing to do with real women and relationships based on give-and-take and selflessness.

In short, my decision was based on real, practical observation of myself, not a religious standard. So I'm happy that I can finally have un-tempting access to Tumblr content.

Before you say "yeah, you just don't have any self-control; you're counting on Big Corporation to keep you in line." To that, I reply: For one thing, I put the block in place, and I was quite able to bypass it if I decided to do so (and I did so from time to time, despite my better intentions). It was just a simple barrier that reminded me of my own decision. For another thing, how many times have you told yourself you watch too much porn? And yet you keep at it? Sometimes, having someone else help you stick to your own decisions is a good thing. If you have such great self-control, more power to you - but you're in the minority, according to many surveys.

So don't disparage this point of view because you're better than me - recognize it may help others with what they want to improve in their lives.