derstander

> As i look through, my binder has so many backs of mailer's i've received and scribbled on. cant figure why.

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 does mean detached, offhand, poised, aloof, unperturbed.

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. ;)

The article is from February.

*32MB of RAM (plus 4MB of video RAM and a little sound and IOP memory).

Only a dabbler in Love2d here but I’d expect that update to be a bit down the line. If I’m not mistaken the current Love2d version 11.5 is (mostly) tied to Lua 5.1 because of LuaJIT, though I understand some later Lua features are backported. And the changelog for the in-dev 12.0 release talks about compiling Love2d for Lua 5.4 as if it’s an optional thing.

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!

Wait until you hear about September through December not being the 7th through 10th months of the year.

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.

Should this be David Gingery instead?

This is probably a reference to a quote attributed to Stalin: “The Pope. How many divisions does he have?”

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

I didn't say nor mean to imply it did. I assumed your initial question about a congressional mandate was about Artemis rather than the layoffs specifically as that's what sparked this comment chain (the wonderment at NASA spending money on Artemis and the Lunar Gateway).

This is a particularly bizarre part of the article to me. Certainly Eric Berger, the article's author who's written more than one book on space at this point knows this.

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.

> Laying off what is presumably the bottom 10% of the NASA workforce is probably a healthy decision in an environment where Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams still have not returned home.

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").

> But with SAR you're not beam forming. You're illuminating everything - the whole ground below you. And you get a return from everywhere all at once. Two equidistant reflectors will return signals simulatenously. If your flight path is between these two points, and the distance is always equal, how can you differentiate them?

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.

It's not clear to me that administering an entity with as many people and as much land as the United States could be done in a simple enough way that would satisfy these objections (not necessarily yours specifically, but this broad class). Though I certainly don't object to the notion that there's fat to trim and ways to make things less complicated.

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.