efaardvark
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Status Updates posted by efaardvark
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Wait.. is that a zombie hiding in the shadows there on the left??
I might have played too much minecraft this weekend.
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Was up all night at work supporting the Artemis sploosh and lunar flashlight launch/initial ack. Got home at about noon and crashed. I’m just opening my eyes from a ~4hr nap & my body’s in that totally confused jet lagged shift-worker state. Hungry, but is it breakfast time or dinner? Is the rainy dimness coming thru the window morning? Or night? Think I’ll start by rebooting my brain with coffee.
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Watching Relativity’s first attempt at launching their 3D-printed rocket..
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We finally got our “new” Linux workstations out of the boxes where they’ve been sitting for the last year and installed! CentOS 7 and a 3.10 kernel but I’ll take it. It may be older tech - I’m running a 5.4 kernel at home - but it beats the Sun-branded ultra-80s they’re replacing.
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We got to play with the InSight Emmy when they brought it by for a photo op here in the SFOF today.
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We're setting up for the annual open house at work. This weekend! Saw a Mars Sample Return vehicle mockup already unpacked as I was leaving & by the end of the week I'm sure they'll have models of all the rovers and a number of spacecraft set up as well. All part of the (somewhat) controlled chaos that is public outreach.
Hope it isn't super hot this weekend. A few years back before the covid shutdown we had a weekend with over 40,000 visitors! Parking was a nightmare and the temperatures got up over 100F, provoking real health concerns since the JPL campus simply isn't set up to accommodate so many people. (Normal employee count is more like 6000. Even less now that a lot of them are still doing the work-from-home thing post-covid.) We had to start requiring tickets to limit the visitor count for safety reasons. Tickets are free but limited in number and tied to specific times to keep the visitor count at any one time from getting out of hand.
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Weird.. today I've had several people ask me if my car is ok, or if I'm worried about it.
Ok, rewind a bit for some recent local history. Over the past couple days my area has had some very dry, warm, high-velocity winds come through. In the past these sorts of conditions have caused power lines to get knocked down into dry brush and the winds whip up the resulting fire(s) into extremely dangerous wildfires. Fires, evacuations, and/or electricity outages have been a hot topic of conversation around here for the past couple days. The power companies' web sites have hundreds of thousand of customers in the area on notice for potentially having their power cut off, either by the power company itself, ostensibly for preventing downed power lines from starting said fires, or by the fires and wind taking out the power distribution lines.
So back to the strange question. At first I was like, "huh?". Did I not get a memo or something? Did I park somewhere I shouldn't have? Did they see my car on the news get run over or pushed off the road by a fire department bulldozer? (Sometimes this happens when the fire department needs to get access to a fire and their trucks or other firefighting gear is blocked by cars parked on narrow streets.)
In a word, no. Apparently people are concerned that people like me with electric vehicles might have trouble evacuating if they have to because of the power outages that tend to accompany the fires.
Again, "huh??", but with a different tone of voice this time. Thanks for the concern, but of all the stupid things to worry about that's .... not a problem.
First of all, I don't even have an EV. I have a pluggable hybrid. I do have an electric motor (or three) and batteries, and a charging socket on one side of the car. I also have the usual slot for gas (petrol for you crazy furriners) on the other side, connected to a gas tank and a somewhat normal internal combustion engine. Not worried at all here. I'm covered either way.
Second, if the power is out then gas cars would have exactly the same problem as pure EVs because gas station pumps run on electricity. No electricity, no charging (duh), but also no gas. I've actually had this problem before with my old (gas) car. In fact, standard operating procedure around here is if you hear that high winds or dry/dangerous fire conditions are in the forecast then stop at the gas station on your way home from work and top off the tank, just in case.
Third, that typically doesn't matter because gas or electrons, there's always going to be something left in the "tank". (Unless you're one of those people who is always running on "Empty", but that's a whole other discussion.) When the police/fire department comes pounding on your door and tells you to evacuate then you just get in your car and leave with what you have. Gas or electric doesn't enter into it any more than the color of your socks.
(That said, even if you're one of those "I'm not out of gas the car is still moving" people, chances are better your electric car will be at least somewhat charged. More than when you parked it anyway. Unlike a gas car, you can "refuel" an EV at home by plugging it in, and most take only a few hours at most to fully recharge. Assuming you're not so extremely lazy that you can't even be bothered to plug in your car when you park it in your garage, chances are that by the time the power goes out and/or you have to evacuate you'll have at least a partial charge on your EV. A gas car's gas gauge of course would still be on "E", and the nearby gas station that's out of power is not going to be able to help.)
There is one actual problem with gas cars however. It has even been reported on the local news, and warned about at press conferences with the fire department spokespeople. Sometimes when people wait a bit too long to evacuate there's so much smoke in the air that it can clog the air filter and cause a car to stall. Cars have to breathe too you know. At least gas cars that rely on oxygen in the air for combustion do. EV cars obviously don't have this problem. (And again, don't worry about me.. my hybrid has an EV-only mode that's only a button-push away.)
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Interesting, never knew people would think of something like that just because someone has a (semi-)electric car. Probably seems still unusual for them?
If Tesla brings out its 1 million miles battery out and graphene batteries really turn out to be all they are supposed to be (allegedly there already are car batteries that charge over 30x fater and go over 500 miles with one charge), or any other superior battery type, most gas cars will quickly become a thing of the past anyway. -
Apparently there was a "news" story citing losing electricity during an emergency as one of the drawbacks of EVs. Probably FOX.. they're always pushing the "burn, baby, burn", anti-climate agenda.
And yes, EVs are the future. Not only do they make city planning SOOO much easier, their TCO is much lower because there's none of the complicated or fiddly mechanical bits like crankshafts, timing belts, or transmissions to go bad. The writing is on the wall. Daimler ("Mercedes") has already announced that they're not going to develop their internal combustion engines any longer. Going forward all their R&D is going into electric drive trains, and eventually all their cars will be exclusively electric. Even planes will be electric in a few decades.
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Well that was close...
https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2020 QG;old=0;orb=1;cov=0;log=0;cad=1#cad
Closest approach was 2,900km and we didn't even see it until 6 hours after it went by.
Probably 3-6m in diameter (about 1/3rd the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor) and travelling at 12.4km/second. Definitely would have made some noise and got people's attention.
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The size was a factor, and also the trajectory. It came in from the sunward side. It was both smaller and slower than Chelyabinsk so in terms of energy this was probably less than a quarter of that. Though that one was maybe up to 500kilotons so even that much would have been significant. The first atomic bombs were "only" around 10-20kiltotons.
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Well, looks like Chandrayaan-2 launched successfully. Launches are fun to watch, but the DSN's job doesn't really start until they actually deploy and we start getting data on the ground, and the first few tracks after launch are apt to be .. interesting until the critical spacecraft checkout is done and things settle into a routine.
At least it is a swing shift schedule for me so I got to sleep in. My boss had to be there at 2am for the launch.
OTOH, I'm once again batting cleanup so I get to deal with any issues not caught in pre-launch testing that crop up.
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Went over to the "SAF" - spacecraft assembly facility - today at lunch & saw NISAR being built in the bay.
Also saw the color-by-numbers version of the first picture of another planet from space, and the crayons that were used to color it. Fun bit of history on display there.
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Went to visit my mom last night for Saturday evening dinner. She's in a memory care / assisted living situation and when I got there they were doing a karaoke(?) activity. I'm not a great singer myself but this was ... something else.
At least everyone seemed to be having a good time.
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When I was a kid we had no internet, no cellphones, no computers. Forget Minecraft, we didn’t even have Legos! No seatbelts in cars. Dodgeball, clackers .. and have you ever seen lawn darts? Not those blunt-end, lightweight things sold under that name these days. No, I’m talking about the lethal ones - heavy, pointy, metal things that killed thousands* before they were taken off the market.
*slight exaggeration for dramatic effect
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When you put it like that I must admit there's a certain attraction to the situation.
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Not a problem. My crunchy backlog alone would take several months to work through. Then there’s all the books in my ”to read” stack. I still haven’t finished my last/latest “career” game of KSP either, and there’s a couple games in the queue after that.
As long as the toilet paper doesn’t run out and my glasses don’t break I’ll be good.
<queue Twilight Zone reference>
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Woke up early Saturday so dizzy I could hardly stand. Turns out there's a loose stone in my head (who knew?) that's rattling around in my inner ear and affecting my balance. Got some medicine from the doctor, but it knocks me out. So my choices for this weekend have been either sleep or feeling like I just got off a slightly too-long ride on a playground merry-go-round.
On the plus side, it is quite a bit better today than yesterday. This morning the room was not spinning when I woke up like yesterday, and in fact I've found that if I keep my head still then I'm pretty much ok. It is only when I tilt or rotate my head that I get in trouble. I managed to - carefully - do a bit of laundry today and I'm watching TV, but unfortunately the xmas shopping and decorating I'd had planned for this weekend was not to be. Things like driving a car and climbing on ladders don't sound like things I should be attempting at the moment.- Show previous comments 3 more
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@Illusion of Terra the stones in question are calcium carbonate crystals. They apparently are part of structures (otolith organs) in the ear that let your ear detect head orientation. For a variety of reasons they can occasionally become dislodged and interfere with the process. They listed a few - head trauma, disease - but none seemed applicable in my case. I'm old enough that it may just be they're wearing out and breaking down after all these years.
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working.. not from home.
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@leinwandname state-of-the-art vintage equipment!
@Illusion of Terra .. for some stuff we can do the VPN thing. Actually, for most of it ssh’s DISPLAY redirection (and a local x-server) is all that is needed for our monitoring tools. An RSA token and a web browser can be used for email access. The voice nets and some of the C&C links can’t be accessed from outside the critical/flight LAN however.
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Would so like to anime and chill for a few months. I feel like I haven't slept since approximately last May too, so maybe I could work in a nap as well?
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Yesterday was one of my twice-yearly trips to the middle of nowhere in the California desert.
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You know what Putin is missing? Baghdad Bob. I miss Baghdad Bob. The anchors for the state-owned Russian "news" outlets are quitting en-mass, but BB - pro that he was - stuck around until the end. Putin needs someone like Baghdad Bob.
So far Re:Zero S2 is the main casualty. Plus the E3 Game Show was also cancelled.
