michaelwilson
Joined 13 years ago
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221
Submissions
49
Member since
Jul 19
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
Wait, wasn't there a "sweetener" for recent X debt buyers that they'd get XAI stock?
The levels of .. self-fertilizing transactions here boggles the mind. I guess that's the idea.
Comment · 1 year ago
People don't talk about it now but when he first started the "established" telescope making folks spoke derisively of him, his techniques, and his telescopes.
Why?
To start with "we" - he and his students - made the mirrors out of old portlights (the glass in portholes), so it was "assumed" they would flex (since they were thinner than store-bought mirror blanks) and would be subject to thermal issues.
Then of course was the fact the telescope tube was made out of a heavy cardboard concrete form called a "Sonotube", which you'd waterproof and paint - paint color and pattern choice being one of the most creative parts of the project. The "diagonal" - the mirror which directed the light path 90-degrees out to the eyepiece - was mounted on a 1"-2" dowel with 3 slots cut into it and held in place by wood shingles.
The mirror mount itself was a 3/4" piece of plywood with 3 bolts in it, which you'd use to collimate the mirror once it was mounted in the tube.
And then the mount. Not only was it "alt-azimuth", it was made of plywood. You built a box around the tube, and two circles on the box fit into 1/2 circles in the mount.
There are more details on the Stellafane page - https://stellafane.org/tm/dob/index.html - but those are even fancier than the ones we made!
But Dobson's ultimate heresy was his approach to figuring the mirror:
Instead of using a "Foucault Tester" to measure and figure the mirror, he'd mount the polished mirror in the telescope and point it at a point source of light - usually the sun's reflection off a ceramic power line insulator.
By moving the image in and out of focus and looking for bright rings in the image, you could tell the shape of the mirror and whether is had hills or valleys in the figure. The end result was a parabola accurate to 1/2 or 1/4 wave (he said he could get it to 1/10th wave, and I have no reason to doubt it).
To the folks used to using much fancier foucault or even more advanced testing methods on much more expensive mirror blanks this was impossible and widely derided and, frankly, made fun of. People weren't very nice.
But when they took the mirrors and tested them with their foucault and diffraction testers they got a big surprise - the curves _were_ accurate and of high quality. And, _big_ - people regularly made 16" telescopes this way, and the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers had a portable 24" for goodness sake.
(I think people kind of forgot he used to be a physicist, and probably knew a thing or two about light).
The other big beef was the alt-azimuth mount. Not only did it not have setting circles to find things in the sky by RA and Dec, it wouldn't automatically track, so it could never be used to take pictures (you can get Dobsonians which will do that today natch now that we have computer controlled stepping motors).
But the point was _none of that mattered_: He wanted to make telescopes for people to look through, not take pictures with. So if he could build a telescope he could wheel out into Golden Gate park, set up in 15 minutes, and have 100 people see stars, planets and nebulae, that was The Win.
And teaching regular people - including kids - of both genders - how to make their own telescope, well that was almost as good. A big part of that was it was _affordable_, which meant many, many more people could make telescopes than otherwise. In Dot-Com vernacular, he grew the TAM (Total Addressable - or would that be Astronomical - Market), well, astronomically.
(Bada-Bing, I'm here all week folks).
But seriously, I can tell you from experience, no astrophotograph you take will ever, ever, compare to seeing Saturn, or M31, or any one of many other things with your own eye, and in a telescope you built.
Sorry for the long screed - got started and stirred up some memories there.
Comment · 1 year ago
I made my first 10" telescope - rough and fine ground, polished, figured, and built the telescope and mount at 10 under the instruction famous (later) John Dobson in San Francisco. It's not hype to say he was one of the most significant figures in popularizing astronomy in modern history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dobson_(amateur_astronome...
I later went on to make a 16" and then "fell off the wagon" and bought refractors, equatorial mounts and cameras. But I never could have gotten started without him.
Comment · 1 year ago
Thanks to the generosity of Stewart and Tiny Speck releasing all the artwork and other assets for the game into public domain, a few non-Flash versions of Glitch showed up. One, Odd Giants (https://oddgiants.com/) is particularly successful and worth checking out if you're a Glitch Fan.
Comment · 1 year ago
Let's just hope we're not on his "People to Haunt" list.
Comment · 2 years ago
...under "a few" to 20 kilometers of ice even.
* Richard Greenberg suggests "a few" kilometers. * Robert Pappalardo suggests ~20 kilometers.
Comment · 2 years ago
"More than anything, I think it's good for things to end"
You know who else said this (in spirit)? Bill Watterson, author of Calvin and Hobbes.
There are few other people I'd be proud to be in the company of :-).
Comment · 3 years ago
So does this include paying off all their past obligations, including, but not limited to: Rent(s), Vendor Payment(s), Employee termination and back pay, etc, etc?
And this are only the debts which have been talked about _publically_.
Comment · 3 years ago
There's a story that when Cameron pitched it, he wrote one word on the board and the studio was sold: $Alien$.
Comment · 3 years ago
I often wonder if it's the writing that's bad or the translation.
I really get the impression lots of the sentences and paragraphs are stilted translations which don't succeed, either because of the translator of the inability of english to express the nuance of what the artist meant. To be clear, I think the latter limitation goes both ways, indeed any time you are translating between languages.
Comment · 4 years ago
It may appear that this may get Musk off the hook for buying Twitter because "Look how bad they are!" but, as I recall, Musk's problem is that his offer with without contingency - e.g. "Yah, I'll buy it, whatever".
So it may just be another event which will drive Twitter's price down even further and make it a _worse_ deal for him.
From Bloomberg "The buyers could only back out of the agreement in the case of a material adverse effect, a high bar that excludes issues like market volatility or industry challenges." (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-07-13/elon-m...).
I suppose one could argue that the Whistleblower's report is "material adverse affect", something I'm sure will come out in the trial.
Comment · 4 years ago
I've actually asked scammers ("Amazon" or "Apple" representatives who are calling me to help me with a "problem" with my account) this question:
"So, tell me, do you go home to your Mom and say "Hey, I robbed 6 people today! Aren't you proud?"
It usually doesn't go well.
Comment · 4 years ago
Was "Manchin" taken?
Seriously, they should use this mechanism to call out legislators that refuse to act on client, or, even worse, block client action.
They should also include international figures - "Heat Wave Bolsonaro" has a nice ring to it.
Comment · 4 years ago
Well, at the risk of your productivity: https://www.oddgiants.com/
It's in "Alpha" and works pretty well.
Enjoy!
Sooo, did that debt get paid off, and they got XAi stock. If so, buying that Tesla debt might not have been the complete bloodbath it should have been.