hanche

NTSB is the relevant institution, not FAA.

There’s an old story about that. Possibly apocryphal, but here goes:

IBM mainframes used to come with documentation in ring binders. Some pages might indeed be marked “This page intentionally blank”. And they would from time to time send out update packages to their customers, with instructions to replace pages so-and-so with the included replacements. On the replacement pages, text that had been altered would be marked with a change bar in the margin.

Lo and behold, one day an update package was received, replacing one completely blank page with one bearing the text “This page intentionally blank”. Complete with a change bar in the margin.

You can't know. However, it is a consequence of the axiom of choice (AC). You can't know if AC is true either; but mathematics without it is really really hard, so it usually assumed.

Heh. To borrow an idea from xkcd (measuring gas consumption as area): The kWh measures energy, right? And energy is force times distance. So energy divided by distance is force! Let’s all start measuring EV consumption in newtons, folks. It even makes intuitive sense: It correlates well with how hard you need to push the car to get it going at the usual travel speed. But it sucks if you need to figure out how far you can travel on a given charge.

Even worse with just two digits for the year! 01/02/03 could be 1 Feb 2003, or 2 Jan 2003, or 3 Feb 2001. Let’s just be thankful no one ever uses any of remaining three permutations.

71. So far, the oldest to respond. Only a tiny minority of readers are likely to respond, though. And all you will learn from the responses is the age disribition of that tiny minority! Who knows how well that correlates with the totality of HN users?

Good point about pluralization. I tend to be confused about that because we don't pluralize units in Norwegian (except the equivalent of degrees). But confusingly, in English, you sometimes see people trying to pluralize the abbreviations, such as kgs for kilograms. Or (even worse) ms for meters. That way madness lies.

If you’ll excuse a bit of trivia: SI units named after people are not capitalized. So we have newton, joule, weber, kelvin, named after Newton, Joule, Weber, and Kelvin. (But their abbreviations are capitalized: N, J, Wb, K.)

I could have sworn it was Asimov, but now I’m not so sure. As I remember it, the problem was communication with astronauts in the outer reaches of the solar system.

That makes no sense, and is not consistent with video evidence. Max flaps (40 degrees or so) are typically used only for landing. That is very obvious when you see it! Usual flap setting for takeoff is on the order of 5–15 degrees.

They have a RAT (ram air turbine) that deploys automatically under specific conditions. It’s basically a turbine providing electric and hydraulic power. It was almost certainly deployed on the accident flight. It will only power the most critical equipment, though. Possibly, that does not include the ADS-B transmitter (which broadcasts position and related data).

With the Alt key, that adjusts the width of all columns.