Cross Check

2018 May 01 Wizz Air Low pass in capital city Budapest air show above Danube - Maria Bruscha

I've seen similar photos of airliners flying into Taipei, so I wanted to see if I could find this place on Google Maps.

3D view of Budapest

I did. It wasn't too hard. The S-curve shows up very well in the map. When you zoom in on a Google 3D view, Google doesn't just enlarge the image, it moves your viewpoint closer. To get the same perspective as the photo at top, you would have to zoom way out and then the resulting cropped image would be much smaller:

Same view, different viewpoint

Makes me wonder how much storage space Google has in their server farms. Also wonder how long it will be before airliner flight tracking programs start to offer a 3D portrayal of the airplane over a real-time, 3D background. Don't know what possible use that would be, but we seem to spend an inordinate amount of time on stuff that has no real purpose, kind of like this post.

Be nice to conspiracists

Be nice to conspiracists
S.G. makes some good observations about belief, religon and psychosis. He also has good advice which I doubt many people will heed. Still, he's trying and he deserves credit for that.

Glencoe High School Robot

Glencoe High School Robotics Team

Glencoe High School Roboitics team went to Houston for a competition with other high school robot builders. They came in fifth, which I think is pretty respectable for a small town high school. Okay, it was a small town when I moved here 25 years ago, but it's grown considerably since then, mostly due to the massive Intel presence. Think that might have had some bearing on their success? Glencoe is where my kids went.

Marmoset Coverage

In which is purchased Marmoset Coverage

Because I had to stifle a guffaw.

Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design

Spacecraft

Stolen entire from Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design

1. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.
2. To design a spacecraft right takes an infinite amount of effort. This is why it's a good idea to design them to operate when some things are wrong .
3. Design is an iterative process. The necessary number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time.
4. Your best design efforts will inevitably wind up being useless in the final design. Learn to live with the disappointment.
5. (Miller's Law) Three points determine a curve.
6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.
7. At the start of any design effort, the person who most wants to be team leader is least likely to be capable of it.
8. In nature, the optimum is almost always in the middle somewhere. Distrust assertions that the optimum is at an extreme point.
9. Not having all the information you need is never a satisfactory excuse for not starting the analysis.
10. When in doubt, estimate. In an emergency, guess. But be sure to go back and clean up the mess when the real numbers come along.
11. Sometimes, the fastest way to get to the end is to throw everything out and start over.
12. There is never a single right solution. There are always multiple wrong ones, though.
13. Design is based on requirements. There's no justification for designing something one bit "better" than the requirements dictate.
14. (Edison's Law) "Better" is the enemy of "good".
15. (Shea's Law) The ability to improve a design occurs primarily at the interfaces. This is also the prime location for screwing it up.
16. The previous people who did a similar analysis did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis over yours. There is especially no reason to present their analysis as yours.
17. The fact that an analysis appears in print has no relationship to the likelihood of its being correct.
18. Past experience is excellent for providing a reality check. Too much reality can doom an otherwise worthwhile design, though.
19. The odds are greatly against you being immensely smarter than everyone else in the field. If your analysis says your terminal velocity is twice the speed of light, you may have invented warp drive, but the chances are a lot better that you've screwed up.
20. A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.
21. (Larrabee's Law) Half of everything you hear in a classroom is crap. Education is figuring out which half is which.
22. When in doubt, document. (Documentation requirements will reach a maximum shortly after the termination of a program.)
23. The schedule you develop will seem like a complete work of fiction up until the time your customer fires you for not meeting it.
24. It's called a "Work Breakdown Structure" because the Work remaining will grow until you have a Breakdown, unless you enforce some Structure on it.
25. (Bowden's Law) Following a testing failure, it's always possible to refine the analysis to show that you really had negative margins all along.
26. (Montemerlo's Law) Don't do nuthin' dumb.
27. (Varsi's Law) Schedules only move in one direction.
28. (Ranger's Law) There ain't no such thing as a free launch.
29. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Program Management) To get an accurate estimate of final program requirements, multiply the initial time estimates by pi, and slide the decimal point on the cost estimates one place to the right.
30. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Engineering Design) If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept.
31. (Mo's Law of Evolutionary Development) You can't get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.
32. (Atkin's Law of Demonstrations) When the hardware is working perfectly, the really important visitors don't show up.
33. (Patton's Law of Program Planning) A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.
34. (Roosevelt's Law of Task Planning) Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.
35. (de Saint-Exupery's Law of Design) A designer knows that he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
36. Any run-of-the-mill engineer can design something which is elegant. A good engineer designs systems to be efficient. A great engineer designs them to be effective.
37. (Henshaw's Law) One key to success in a mission is establishing clear lines of blame.
38. Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say.
39. Any exploration program which "just happens" to include a new launch vehicle is, de facto, a launch vehicle program.
40. (alternate formulation) The three keys to keeping a new human space program affordable and on schedule: 
1. No new launch vehicles. 
2. No new launch vehicles.
3. Whatever you do, don't develop any new launch vehicles.
41. (McBryan's Law) You can't make it better until you make it work.
42. There's never enough time to do it right, but somehow, there's always enough time to do it over.
43. Space is a completely unforgiving environment. If you screw up the engineering, somebody dies (and there's no partial credit because most of the analysis was right...)

 #40 is my favorite. #20 might be the most useful.
Via Detroit Steve.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Official Trailer - Teaser (2017) - Movie I watched it on Amazon Prime. It's available on YouTube for $5.

It's about equal parts silly, amazing, and fantastic. You get dragged through a zillion different worlds (ok, maybe only a couple of dozen, not a zillion), but you only get to spend a few seconds there and then you get drug off to someplace new. And some of these places are fantastic. The giant tank of water that is home to a bunch of dinosaur-size creatures. They're pretty ugly. Reminded me of fleas for some reason. Dinosaur-size fleas, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

It's silly because we've got the whole boy-girl relationship thing front and center. It's silly because they only get a few seconds to work on that relationship before another dinosaur-sized flea interrupts their deliberations. To sum it up, the boy is a typical male expecting to score with any female he sets his sights on. The girl is a monument to civilization, holding out for marriage and commitment.

It's amazing because of the technology that the movie makers imagined. One is the scale of things. Since there is no gravity in orbit, it should be very easy to build enormous structures. There might be a problem with getting the materials you need, but once you have a factory that can turn an asteroid into girders it ought to be a piece of cake.

It's silly because it's got all your standard tropes. It's got your corrupt government autocrat committing genocide against the graceful, peaceful natives of a primitive planet, who never-the-less manage to not only master our technology but better it. It's even got the infamous garbage chute scene.

It's fantastic because they make an attempt to imagine what technology might be able to accomplish in the next few hundred years. They are using some high-tech gadgets that are like something straight out of science fiction. Kind of like of some the gadgets we use now (like cell phones and GPS) that were totally science fiction not all that long ago.

It's amazing because Luc Besson let his imagination run wild. Luc also did The Fifth Element.

Parentheses

Parentheses

I'm working on this program to generate a series of variations of an expression to see if we can generate all the numbers in the world, or at least these up to 11,000 or so. So I am writting an expression generator and I have written expression evaluator to evaluate the expression generated by the expression generator and that all seems to be working fine. But so for we don't have any parentheses. As you know, if you have ever mucked around with algebra or computer programming, parentheses can dramatically change the value of an expression. The problem seemed simple enough, all you have to do is take your expression and then combine it with each of the possible combinations of parentheses that can be applied to it. If you only have 2 elements, like A + B, no amount of parenthesizing is going to affect the value of this expression. When you have 3 elements, there are three combinations, one with no parentheses: A + B x C, or one where you enclose and A + B and another where you enclose B x C. With four elements it starts to get complex and when you get to 9 which is where I am heading it's downright complicated.

For 9 elements, there are

• 8 ways to enclose 2 elements
• 7 ways to enclose 3 elements
• 6 ways to enclose 4 elements
• 5 ways to enclose 5 elements
• 4 ways to enclose 6 elements
• 3 ways to enclose 7 elements
• 2 ways to enclose 8 elements

For a total of 35 ways, and that is with only one single set of parentheses. Now inside of each of those groups of 3 elements, there are three ways to further affect those parentheses, as we saw above, so that means 7 times 3. I don't know how many this is going to get to, but it's going to be on the order of hundreds.

So here's how I am going to generate all these combinations of parentheses.

Top level, we run through all of the items listed above. Then for each of those cases, we divide our task in three, one for subdividing what's inside of the parentheses, and one for subdividing the elements before the parentheses and one for after. There is going to be some simple reduction here. We cannot subdivided a group of two elements, two is as low as we can go. And if we have enclosed 8 elements, then there is only one element left over, and putting parentheses around that won't help.

I've been thinking about this, off and on, all afternoon. I just hope this explanation will be as clear in the morning as it is now.

Update next day. I figured out how many different ways parentheses can be applied to an expression containing a few elements:

There are 603 ways parentheses can be to an expression containing 9 elements.