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Moon Trips
My computer is now calculating about 800 million ways to get to the moon. That should take it 3-4 days using both CPUs. I'm expecting that the pareto-optimal results will only be about 40 trajectories at each inclination, but it might be more. This seems like a waste of time to me, because I already showed that doing a plane change on the way to ( Read more... ) -
Time
I think that I have things worked out now so that I can basically get everything in my life to go the way I want it to for the foreseeable future. The problem is that there are a few critical details that I need to work out (which may end up not working out). I expect that there is about 2-5 months of work to finish working out those details. The ( Read more... ) -
(Untitled)
I had a meeting with my advisor today where I explained what I have been working on for the past couple of months. He seems to think I am making good progress even though I haven't gotten anything to actually work. But I am probably close to having one of my algorithms work. The other one requires math I don't really know yet. I have to write out ( Read more... ) -
The national debt
The US government has been in technical default on its loans since sometime in late January. They have been borrowing money from the government's pension fund to cover the difference (they intend to pay it back with interest or something like that, which has been done in the past). This will apparently be insufficient as of next week. The result is ( Read more... ) -
School Things
I'm taking a class again this semester: General Relativity. This is the first time I have taken a class where I really, truly do not meet the pre-reqs. This is the first real physics class I've taken since 8 years ago when I was in high school (unless you count 8.03, and even that was 4-5 years ago). The funny thing is that I find the actual ( Read more... ) -
Zillow
Somebody hooked up a property database to google maps at Zillow. Now house-hunting can be even more fun, because you can walk around looking at houses while carrying a laptop with wireless and find out how much someone's house is worth while borrowing their internet connection! I'm not sure how accurate their price estimates are, or how frequently ( Read more... ) -
weather
It seems that the weather has decided to let summer continue indefinitely this year. It is still 60 here, and the Atlantic is still generating tropical storms. We are now up to tropical storm epsilon. I find the idea of a hurricane named epsilon to be amusing. Even the NHC forecasters think this is going too far. From the first discussion about ( Read more... ) -
My Computer
My computer is smart enough to realize that it will melt or burn if it gets too hot, so it has temperature sensors to shut it down before that happens. My computer is smart enough to realize that temperature sensors might fail, so it has fan sensors to determine if the fans are still cooling the computer down. My computer is smart enough to have an ( Read more... ) -
Hurricanes
Hurricane Rita is much too strong now. The NHC charts show a prediction that its sustained winds will go over 180MPH for a while overnight. Here is the current wind speed forecast:
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Moving
I have now moved 9 times in my life. Most of them have been in the past few years, since I got to MIT. I have never seen someone manage to be as good at moving as Mira is. Almost everything is unpacked except for my class notes, which no longer fit on the bookcases (because Mira's bookcases were built in so now both our books are on my bookcases). ( Read more... )