Is your mailbox a short walk from where you normally work? Walks have been credited for the assist in idea generation from Aristotle to Nietzsche (and beyond).

I personally just keep a little pocket notebook and a couple pens on my person at all times. That replaces the need for the distributed folders of your system. Every week I go through and add them to either my paper notebook or my digital notes.

I don’t really trash the “bad” ideas either since my notebook is bound. I try to be neither precious with the good ideas nor embarrassed of the bad. I treat them all as just a record of thoughts.

Cool is from “Old English col "not warm" (but usually not as severe as cold)”. If you’re using it to mean detached you’ve already accepted that words can change meanings (add, remove, or modify) over time. ;)

I don’t really follow LuaJIT too closely so I’m not sure if they’re even targeting Lua 5.4 let alone 5.5. I remember reading some GitHub issue that suggested some of the design decisions in Lua 5.4 wouldn’t really support LuaJIT goals re: performance.

With that said I’ve been enjoying Love2d even with Lua 5.1 features — as a hobbyist it works just fine for me.

Would certainly appreciate any corrections by those more in-the-know though!

https://www.lexaloffle.com/picotron.php

They don’t even give you a sense for _when_ they are. Or, more accurately, they give you the _wrong_ sense for when they are by name alone.

Stalin disregarding soft power in favor of military might for international diplomacy.

"The Administrator shall ensure that NASA carries out a balanced set of programs that shall include, at a minimum, programs in— ... (A) human space flight, in accordance with subsection (b); ... The Administrator shall establish a pro- gram to develop a sustained human presence on the Moon, including a robust precursor program, to promote exploration, science, commerce, and United States preeminence in space, and as a stepping-stone to future exploration of Mars and other destinations. The Administrator is further authorized to develop and conduct appropriate international collaborations in pursuit of these goals."

Artemis grew out of these efforts and enjoyed fairly bipartisan support over the years (including by President Trump in his first term, see [1]).

[0] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-109publ155/pdf/PLAW...

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/new-space-policy-directive...

The President appoints NASA's administrator (subject to Senate approval, of course) and Congress controls NASA's budget. How anyone is puzzled by NASA's focus is beyond me. If I'm being pessimistic, I would assume such people are woefully ignorant of how NASA (and maybe the government as a whole) works. I try to be pessimistic instead of cynical because if I were cynical then I would assume a bunch of negative ulterior motives.

Per the article, the 10% includes both people that have taken the deferred resignation offer and probationary employees. The former are probably generally older staff that are already considering retirement. The latter are, according to what I could find on the definition of federal probationary employees, either new hires or existing employees that were promoted or otherwise moved into a new position.

I don't see how you square that with "the bottom 10% of the NASA workforce". On the back end you're losing institutional knowledge. On front end you're losing your future contributors (see the old adage about "eating your seed corn").

There are a couple conceptual ways to think about SAR. One is, in fact, as beamforming. Each position of the radar along the synthetic aperture is one element in an enormous array that's the length of the synthetic aperture itself: that's your receive array.

Regarding your question about scatterers that are equidistant along the entire synthetic aperture length: typically, SAR systems don't use isotropic antennas. And they're generally side-looking. So you would see the scatterer to one side of the radar, but not the equidistant scatterer on the other side.

If you had an isotropic antenna that saw to each side of the synthetic aperture, then the resulting image would be a coherent combination of both sides. Relevant search terms would be iso-range and iso-Doppler lines. Scatterers along the same iso-range and iso-Doppler lines over the length of the synthetic aperture are not distinguishable.

As to your question earlier in the chain, my preferred SAR book is Carrara et al. Spotlight Synthetic Aperture Radar: Signal Processing Algorithms. Given the title, it is of course geared toward spotlight (where you steer the beam to a particular point) rather than strip map or swath (where your beam is pointed at a fixed angle and dragged as you move along). It has decent coverage of the more computationally efficient Fourier-based image formation algorithms but does not really treat algorithms like the back projection that Henrik uses (I also think back projection is easier to grasp conceptually, particularly for those without a lot of background in Fourier transforms). But my book preference might just be because that's what I first learned with.

I would be interested in an existence proof of this: an entity of similar population and size with a budget that's simple in comparison.

My naive expectations are that more authoritarian countries will hide a lot of budgetary items and countries with coalition-style governments will have even messier budgets than the US. Looking into that would be interesting but it's not going to make it onto my Sunday morning short-list.

My opinion about this remains that if the governed are really interested, they need to put in the ground work to understand the material that's available. Some things just are complicated and require studying to understand.

What do you envision this looks like? To my mind this is already done. For example, here's the appendix to the FY2018 budget: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2018-APP/pdf/BUDG...

Note that the appendix is described thusly:

"Contains detailed information on the various appropriations and funds that constitute the budget and is designed primarily for the use of the Appropriations Committees. The Appendix contains more detailed financial information on individual programs and appropriation accounts than any of the other budget documents. It includes for each agency: the proposed text of appropriations language; budget schedules for each account; legislative proposals; explanations of the work to be performed and the funds needed; and proposed general provisions applicable to the appropriations of entire agencies or group of agencies. Information is also provided on certain activities whose transactions are not part of the budget totals."

I feel like a lot of people clamor for this and it's right there for everyone to read. Not that I expect citizens to read >1,000 pages of budget information alone every year: I certainly don't. But let's not pretend the information isn't there for people who want it.

“With the PCI Express slot ready to go, you need to choose a card to go into it. After a few years of testing various cards, our little group has settled on Polaris generation AMD graphics cards.

Why? Because they're new enough to use the open source amdgpu driver in the Linux kernel, and old enough the drivers and card details are pretty well known.

We had some success with older cards using the radeon driver, but that driver is older and the hardware is a bit outdated for any practical use with a Pi.

Nvidia hardware is right out, since outside of community nouveau drivers, Nvidia provides little in the way of open source code for the parts of their drivers we need to fix any quirks with the card on the Pi's PCI Express bus.”

Reference = https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/use-external-gpu-on-r...

I’m not in a position to evaluate his statement vs yours, but he’s clearly thought about it.

Is this categorically true? Asking honestly. I’ve thought about it a bit and haven’t come to a firm conclusion. Part of me thinks that human beings are supposed to forget a bit over time. Maybe forgetting is part of helping with mourning and grief, for example.

One thing that I wasn’t aware of until I happened upon a blurb somewhere is that Adderall is harder to get in many other countries than in the US (and seemingly impossible/illegal in a few).