How tides work
Our experience on earth makes us think that the tides are causing by water following the moon and sun. It turns out the water isn’t chasing the moon and sun. The water stays in the same place as the earth rotates inside the two bulges of water. More on this in the video and on wiki.
Song written by GPT-3 deep learning model
This country song was written by GPT-3. The AI was only fed the title of the song, River of Love. The song was performed by singer Anna Vaus. It’s a bit catchy.
How we’ll get to Mars
We’re fortunate to live in a time when we have two new launch rockets intended to enable crewed launches to Mars.
The two rockets on the left have flown already. The Falcon Heavy flew in 2018 and is currently 32M miles from home traveling at 58K mph. The Saturn V launched the Apollo Missions between 1967-1973.
The two rockets on the right haven’t flown yet. Boeing’s Space Launch System is more expensive and also is not reusable, so it has larger expected price (green bar graph) and $ per kilogram (blue bar graph) characteristics.
Sage from creator Casey Neistat
Casey Neistat is an observer of the modern world (e.g. NYC bike lane obstructions), and he has sage advice about avoiding basic embellishments.
68 bits of unsolicited advice from a 68 year old co-founder of Wired
My favorite part is that Kevin teaches most readers a new word, with the last word on his list –– “Pronoia” is a neologism coined to describe a state of mind that is the opposite of paranoia..
Here are 3 of of my favs from his list:
1- Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.
2- Don’t be the best. Be the only.
3- Promptness is a sign of respect.
This list reminded me of the sunscreen song, which is also good.
On self-driving cars
We’re a decade from self-driving cars. When I write self-driving I mean a car that drives you around while you sleep, which is level-4 and level-5. Since I think we have 10 years until that, in the meantime let’s talk about level 1, 2 and 3 in a granular way.
Continue reading “On self-driving cars”#ToMarsAndBack
In 2021 pieces of Mars will land safely on earth as part of Mars 2020. The Mars 2020 rover collects samples and leaves them in canisters on the surface. The lander deploys a fetch rover to collect the samples and deposit them in an ascent vehicle, which blasts into Mars orbit. There, a return orbiter collects the samples for transport back to Earth.
Video- The Nine Gravity Assists That Bring Our Satellite to Orbit Around Mercury
The BepiColombo mission launched in October 2018 will enter orbit around Mercury on December 5, 2025. Here’s an incredible animation of its 9 gravity assists past Earth (once), Venus (twice) and Mercury (six times).
Video– Visualizing how much fuel a Saturn 5 used per second in terms of elephants
The Saturn V rocket got to the moon burning 20 tones of fuel per second. An African elephant weighs roughly 5 tons. So roughly 4 elephants worth of fuel per second. Amazing video illustration: