launching a satellite next week. as flight director.
I've been learning to fly tailwheel airplanes for the past 6 months, flying roughly once a week. Now I've got 42.3 hours of flight time, with 0.5 hours of that now being PIC--pilot in command! Frankly, flying solo was not as nerve-wracking as I expected it to be. I've been learning new things each lesson with my instructor, but I haven't had to be corrected on stick-and-rudder pure flying technique in a while, so I didn't feel the absence of my instructor's remarks. We flew a couple laps in the pattern (takeoffs and landings in loops, in the airport vicinity) and then he got out, took his stuff out of the plane, and sent me off! I did three landings (and one go-around), and that was that! I did get the feeling of "hey, I'm flying an airplane--by myself. sweet!" This is the type of plane I fly, a Bellanca Citabria. Many of them are around 50 years old. Fabric wings and fuselage! Roughly 110 horsepower! a 4-cylinder engine with a carburetor! Two seats, in tandem (rather than side-by-side) As you can see, the little wheel is in the back ('tailwheel')--it's a more traditional gear setup (most modern planes have a nosewheel) and is harder to fly (takeoffs and landings). The word on the street is that tailwheel pilots generally have better "stick and rudder" skills (i.e. flying technique). I can't really be the judge of that, but it's kind of the equivalent of learning to drive a manual/standard transmission car. Because it's fairly straightforward for a tailwheel pilot to transition to nosewheel aircraft, and not the other way around, you must have a "tailwheel endorsement" on your license to fly tailwheel airplanes. I had to earn that endorsement (even though my license is a student license) to fly solo--so yes, I can do wheel landings. I've also gotten very proficient at performing slips, because there are no flaps on this model. Here's what I see inside. Notice that there isn't even an attitude indicator (also called an artificial horizon)! (Yes, I've had to do my simulated instrument training "partial panel" by default, learning to fly the plane without looking outside and without an attitude indicator) I've got a few things left to do to earn my private pilot certificate-- get 10 hours total solo time, get 5 hours total solo cross-country flight time, do my long cross-country solo, do 3 hours of night flight, and prep for (and pass) the oral exam and checkride (flight exam)! I can't wait for electric airplanes to become more common (https://www.diamondaircraft.com/en/service/electric-aircraft/ !!), but in the meantime I buy carbon offsets because the one thing that really makes me ambivalent about pursuing this as a hobby are its carbon emissions...
Flew a plane solo for the first time today!
Two satellites I've worked on for the past year are launching Friday soon. Early Saturday some morning in the coming week I will be in the hotseat, flying one of those satellites as a satellite operator, using satellite control software our team and I built. Very, very excited! PS: mk there's still the #bugski of editing a post with a Twitter embed; the rest of the post text is not present in the edit box when it first loads.
We deployed two satellites in space today! (now the next challenge begins)
Coffee I bought an espresso machine. An actual espresso machine--with non-pressurized portafilters, a 58mm grouphead, &etc. Very, very excited. To the right of it you can see my coffee roaster. Running This is a little late for Pubski but halfway through November I ran my second ever half marathon. I beat my old time by nearly 11 minutes by running a 1:46:06 (8:06 pace). Race report is as follows: I was trying to beat my "PR" set at the first half marathon I ran earlier this year. I was aiming for 1:55 since my last time was 1:56:59 on a fairly flat course, and I figured that was a reasonable goal since Berkeley is also a pretty flat course. I originally started training with my housemate, but he wasn't as consistent with the training towards the second half of the training program, which will come into play later. Used the Hal Higdon Novice 2 program for the most part. I tended to extend the weekday runs by .25 or .5 of a mile. I rarely (if ever) did the suggested Sunday cross training, and I may have flopped the order of a couple of the Saturday runs. The last two long runs I did in the week up to the race were only 9 and 10 miles, but I did them on some local fire roads to gain the benefit of hilly runs. Most of my long runs were on those fire roads. Before the race, my housemate and I decided that we'd start running together and we'd go our own ways once he couldn't keep with my pace. On race day, the corrals were pretty crowded, and once the race began it was difficult to make much forward progress--we were kind of stuck running at the pace of the group until things began to thin out and we ran onto wider streets. Once we got onto the UC Berkeley campus about 2 miles in, my housemate told me to go on ahead and I started running at a little faster pace. I only ever looked at my average pace on my watch during the race. As we had a sort of slow start, I ran until I saw the average pace hit 8:49, but as the race went on, I kept feeling on top of things and I saw my average pace continue to drop. At that point, I started running based on how I felt. As we crested the last rise before heading all the way down to the edge of the San Francisco Bay, it seemed like it'd be a good time to take advantage of the gradual downhill and keep up the quick pace I was running. At the 6 mile mark I saw my housemate and another friend on the course, running the other direction as part of the race has an out-and-back section. Once we were back in the residential part of town, and passing the mile markers, I clung to the pace that I had mustered for the earlier part of the race and told myself it was only a 5k to the finish. Folks along that part of the course who were cheering us all on were a welcome morale boost. At the 13 mile marker, the finish line was in sight, and I just booked it with all I had--after all, I wouldn't be running for a few days after the race, right? Ran past the finish line and immediately my quads just wanted to cramp up. Thankfully they had volunteers with water and bananas right at the finish line. Checked the final results and was absolutely floored by my finish time. Never expected I could possibly run that pace for that long.
waves I'm still here! Name: demure Location: northern california Age: the ripe age of twenty Now: what can be learned? so much. also, at the moment rejoicing in my resumption of playing and learning the carillon Then: let's just call it rocket science and leave it at that. Soon: the future is bright and the paths are many. On occasion: The Sunday Paper -- perhaps a publication resumption is in order.
It's been a while, barkeep. A tall glass of something cold and refreshing. - Moved from Los Angeles to Seattle. - Finished out my internship at SpaceX, started one at Boeing. - Place in Seattle has a grand piano, which has been amazing. - I made this data visualization over the weekend. - I bike to work now (don't always bike home...¯\_(ツ)_/¯) So yeah, things are good.
- I should be able to customize the way my name appears (color, font, points, etc) for people who follow me.
<blink> <marquee> demure </marquee> </blink>
It's been a long week. It's going to be a long week. I'll have had a long week. I'm having a long week. Tuesday evening: 1.5 hour choir rehearsal Wednesday evening: an hour of meetings, 1.5 hour piano trio rehearsal, 1.5 hour debate practice Thursday evening: 1.5 hour choir rehearsal Friday evening: 1.5 hour debate practice Sunday: Debate Tournament, AND THE FIRST ROUND OF COLLEGE APPS ARE DUE. I need a drink...* On the bright side I'm going to the symphony on Monday night with a pretty girl named birchbarkcanoe, and I've confirmed my trip to New York for Thanksgiving (nowaypablo) *another goddamn cup of coffee
I think that people have risen up in a very polarized fashion because of the way Hubski's foundation seems to be made. From where I see it, Hubski's the neighborhood pub, a reference seen in its stickers and its community--for the most part, people who have stuck around the site for a while seem to know each other on at least a name-familiarity basis. See sounds_sound comment in the other thread: This means that for us (read: me), it is important for a user to stand by his/her/its (eg thundara's lambda bot) opinions and also the reputation they gain or lose for their approach to speaking about topics they feel strongly about. I'm one of the opposing camp. I don't see a place for anonymous posts/comments as they might tend towards those jabs and harsh words by people who wouldn't say those things if their reputation could be tarnished as a result. There are certainly people who go against the grain here, and certainly people who have more klout simply because of the follower count they have. But I respect those people when they approach a debate in a logical, calm, respectful manner, just as i expect the same in return. People are going to have opinions on this site no matter what. #thesundaypaper is a heavily editorialized publicatiom, for sure. But i think i speak for many when I say that the community and everything which makes the community what it is (the closeness, the notion that we are all really real people) is what led me to stay with Hubski and I think it's what people are trying to protect. But maybe that's just me.
Good modeling will constrain the possible values of the parameters being used so that they reflect known physics, but bad ‘curve fitting’ doesn’t limit itself to physical realities. For example, we discuss research by Nicola Scafetta and Craig Loehle, who often publish papers trying to blame global warming on the orbital cycles of Jupiter and Saturn. (emphasis mine)We found that the ‘curve fitting’ approach also used in the Humlum paper is another common theme in contrarian climate research. ‘Curve fitting’ describes taking several different variables, usually with regular cycles, and stretching them out until the combination fits a given curve (in this case, temperature data). It’s a practice I discuss in my book, about which mathematician John von Neumann once said,
With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.
Shut it down, thundara. Experiment over. Quick, before it jumps servers! [13:56] lambda: Yes i am a human being. Really, is there any doubt?