"Why's Pluto not a planet any more?" ... it means 20 other things would be too, and 100 later on ... "But what's wrong with 100 planets?"

100 planets isn't really a) teachable, especially to young children, b) able to be memorized, and most importantly, c) reflective of the classes of objects we see now.

Those classes of solar system objects, with ( Read more... )

In order to be successful, I think that open source projects will always be small in code size, highly modular, or a copy of something else.

The reason why is project management and requirements.

In order to pull off something the size and scope of Photoshop for the first time, you need to have a massive staff with a clear, consistent vision of what ( Read more... )

My side project, which I'll call FP here, has a @username notification system a la Twitter's on it. The users use it all the time. There are N users total.

It's slightly more flexible than Twitter's. I call it the @reply system. This is a software design overview of that system. It's basically a "how-to". I'll compare it to Twitter's implementation ( Read more... )

"Did any of you ever imagine that in the 21st century there'd be less than 10 people in space? ... Humans could've done so much more"

I've been reading a lot about astronomy lately. This wistful, romantic sentiment keeps coming up, particularly from members of my generation. It's been sticking in my craw.

"Humans could not have done so much more"? ( Read more... )

So I've been looking at the costs of spaceflight, lately. Here's my basic mental model of it works.

Spaceflight Mass and Fuel

In the end, spaceflight is all about weight. And the weight is mostly fuel. The best example is the Space Shuttle. Here is a summary of its weight at liftoff:

• 509,480 lbs (231.1 metric tons, or "mT")* - weight empty aka "dry"   ( Read more... )

I think Google is about to launch a massive campaign to change mobile phones. They'll change how mobile phones are routed, and in the process, undercut every existing mobile phone company and provide superior service for lower costs.

(Forgive me if this is totally obvious to you - it just struck me a few days ago.)

The goal is a iPhone/Android-level ( Read more... )

The Riemann Zeta function is a relatively famous mathematical function that has a number of remarkable properties.

One of the most remarkable was discovered by the Russian mathematician Voronin in 1975: its "universality".

In short, the Riemann Zeta function has within it all other functions. That is, along a particular strip of the function, you can ( Read more... )

I'm messing around with RDispatch, an alt Ruby Markdown library, and I'm reminded how skeptical I am about the Markdown spec. Specifically, its rigidness.

The best example, I think, is that Markdown doesn't translate newlines to br tags. So this:
some text and a (no?)
newlineBecomes this:
some text and a (no?) newlineAnd newlines aren't even ( Read more... )

I had an idea about a science poster someone could do that'd be similar to Kokogiak's great All Known Bodies in the Solar System Larger than 200 Miles in Diameter poster:
http://www.kokogiak.com/gedankengang/2007/03/all-known-bodies-in-solar-system.html

Basically, it'd be a poster of the history of our chemicals/particles from the beginning of the ( Read more... )

(After someone pushed back on a generous time estimate for debugging.)

Sometimes, setting up the right test cases takes an hour.

Sometimes, some 3rd party code you have no control over assumes it's ordered A-to-Z, and you have to spend half a day tricking it into thinking it still is, when it's not. (This kind of thing happens far more often than one ( Read more... )