gusgordon
Joined 17 years ago
Karma
414
Submissions
246
Member since
Aug 15
contact: [email protected]
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Comment · 2 years ago
I was doing some analysis of a solar-electric plane that can fly indefinitely: https://github.com/gusgordon/atmospheric_satellite
Seems feasible, never went past the analysis phase though :)
Comment · 2 years ago
This is awesome, nice work! In case it's useful, I made a Python package for calculating solar irradiance at altitude: https://github.com/gusgordon/airmass
Takes into account lots of stuff (e.g. attenuation from air, ozone, and water vapor) with the goal of estimating solar power at any altitude/latitude/day/time.
Comment · 2 years ago
Totally - right now it's using the USDA food nutrient database [1] which has all nutrients, so all the nutrients on the back-end are there. Calories is the most important thing to the majority of people (in my experience), so there's a balance between showing too much information vs. keeping things simple. Probably should just add a setting to show everything, though.
Comment · 3 years ago
Stopping by to say this is super cool! I've been pretty obsessed with this idea for a while — here's an analysis I did a few years back: https://github.com/gusgordon/atmospheric_satellite
I got a minimum wingspan of around 8m for self-sustaining flight on the winter solstice with a small payload — pretty close to what you all built.
The biggest problem I ran into when creating this analysis was accurately estimating solar irradiance at different altitudes. Here's the module I built for estimating that, in case you find it useful: https://github.com/gusgordon/airmass
Congrats and good luck!
Comment · 3 years ago
Given that there have been multiple mass extinction events in Earth’s history, it seems reasonable to spend a small fraction of GDP on colonizing another planet. How about something roughly equivalent to the amount we spend on chapstick?
Comment · 4 years ago
Yeah, that’s basically what I do, but I often find I need to play around with intermediary data within functions.
Comment · 4 years ago
What’s your recommendation in terms of tooling for cases where it’s not just prototype -> production, but an iterative process? I love notebooks for prototyping, but I find it’s a lot of work to make sure notebook code and prod code are in sync. Maybe just debugging with IPython?