Definitely worth a listen if you get the time.

For me personally, I feel this project is the greatest engineering effort in human history bringing together the work of Newton, Kepler, the mathematics of the celestial navigation, gravitational assist techniques[1], etc. necessary to keep a little probe on its route accurately over 50 years in space.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/08/02/1191341035/nasa-voyager-2-spa...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Minovitch

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48528215

Points: 9

# Comments: 2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48450476

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

The character of Cameron Howe resonated with me greatly.

What a fantastic show.

If you haven't already, I would highly recommend this book[1] on Seymour Cray. An amazing read.

1. https://www.amazon.com/Supermen-Seymour-Technical-Wizards-Su...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46568769

Points: 48

# Comments: 159

Fantastic early history of the people that eventually comprise the Manhattan Project. I feel any person who is interested in physics should read the book.

It is mindblowing the scale of the facilities that they had to build to generate a very small amount of the fissile material needed.

Strangely enough, I started on (a few times already) the second part, 'Dark Sun' [2], which is about the making of the Hydrogen Bomb focused on Edward Teller but I haven't been able to complete it yet.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Sun-Making-Hydrogen-Bomb-ebook/d...

Just for the construction work alone, they mentioned that the pipefitters local union membership has doubled since 2020. Refinery level complexity on the specialized piping needs for the plants.

Special training programs geared towards the semiconductor industry being offered in the local Community and Trade schools training people to be the skilled and semi-skilled workforce for these companies.

People who were teachers now making four times the income working on the construction project.

https://siliconmaps.com/silicon-desert/

The topic for the last several days was on the CHIPS And Science Act and the new Semiconductor Fabs being built by TSMC and Intel in Phoenx, AZ.

It will be several years before the plants already being constructed will go into production but there is a whole ecosystem of current construction, education of the future workforce that will need to be hired in the future. Not to mention all the ancilliary companies that are needed to support these gigantic plants in the area.

The dollars from CHIPS Act are not only bringing in the manufacturing plants but will be essential to bring this lost capability back to the US in the scale needed both from an economic and national security perspective.

It was great listening to the show and the impact the CHIPS Act on people's lives already happening now and in the future.

For anyone interested the links to the specific shows are available as podcasts here.

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/381444600/marketplace

No, not because I had some brilliant insight but for the simple assumption that my predecessor may not have been aware of how to write functions or use parameters to supply variable data to the SQL query. They had literally written the same SQL statement inline with a couple of changed values in each SQL call.

I just rewrote the code making the SQL call as a function call with bind variables as parameters into the function. All the replicated inline code was replaced with the function being called in a loop with the changed bind values supplied from an array.

Just watching 'Tokyo Vice'[1] on Amazon Prime now.

There was an episode or two where Jake is chasing down a Yakusa Fan Magazine author to get intel on Tozawa.

Amazing Show! Reminds me a bit of 'The Wire'.

1. https://www.amazon.com/Tokyo-Vice-Season-1/dp/B0B73QR4TM

I wish I had seen the original articles in time to order one from the first batch. I am eager to order one when they decide to make another batch.

[1] https://www.msx.org/wiki/Spectravideo_SVI-728

I don't know what it was about those fellows but I felt emotionally attached to them. It was not that they had any visible means of conveying emotions. They just went about their tasks quietly and diligently.

For some reason they pulled at my heart strings. It was quite heart wrenching to see them destroyed in the last part of the movie.

[1] - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067756/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Even though NASA would likely have restablished connection with Voyager 2 sometime in October during the next pre-scheduled alignment window there would be an element of uncertainty about its health. However they have detected signs that the spacecraft is still functioning.

What an amazing project and a testament to the foresight to plan for such eventualities.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36959062

Points: 8

# Comments: 2

What a wonderful classy portrayal of the character!

I enjoy it more with each repeated viewing.

Its a bit long winded but I tried to touch upon everything that a new entrant to the space would want to know to start playing with the board immediately.

I am not a natural public speaker so please excuse my verbal (or other) tics.

I have also linked the presentation PDF. [2] You can scan the entire PDF in less than 10 minutes to get the gist of the 45 minute+ YouTube video.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ctB8VMm6RA

[2] https://github.com/spicecoaster/pycaribbean2017

When I am forced to use a Windows environment I find myself reaching out to these evergreen tools in many situations and is frustrated by having to find workarounds to these tools that should be ubiquitous tools in any OS.

Everything I learned almost 30 years ago still holds true today when it comes to the basics.

And yes I know of Cygwin, MKS toolkit etc, but trying to convince corporate IT in a Microsoft Centric world to install these usually hits a brick wall.