You’re missing a few factors:

1. The US would’ve been paying Russia about 10x the cost if SpaceX didn’t exist.

2. Boeing was awarded a ~$3B contract within the Artemis mission and, so far, the outcome is that they can’t safely bring back the astronauts they sent to space.

Those two factors alone indicate that it’s more a mutually beneficial relationship between SpaceX and the government with, arguably, SpaceX providing more benefit relative to the government.

“Normal” and “common” would still be the last words on my mind considering the amount of planning and money that goes into sending people to space and back. The only normal situation would be they go there and then back alive on the same mission as originally planned. Any divergence from that is totally abnormal.

In this particular case, the person of interest published 800 widely cited papers. That seems like a considerable collapse.

I see this as a pruning process and an inevitable part of science.

But I would further argue against what others were saying about personal ethics. Science must remove the human as much as possible from the process.

“NASA considering sending FlossX to extract moss from teeth”

Maybe they meant to reference nix-direnv?

> Hmm. "We rub our Tubes with Buck Skin", he says in the same letter.

My immature brain didn’t get past this sentence.

He was merely investigating what happen if persons touch one another after exciting the tube, on or off wax.

Lol

Using the word “accumulator” wouldn’t be enough to differentiate batteries from capacitors, inductors, etc. which are also accumulators.

> inductors, etc. which are also accumulators.

In what sense do inductors accumulate?

Batteries and capacitors accumulate (i.e. integrate) current.

Inductors differentiate current: v = L di/dt means you get voltage out of current changes.

The main way that inductors function is by storing energy in a magnetic field, exactly analogous to the way capacitors store energy in an electric field.

The voltage an inductor creates will restore the current. It's storage.

And while a capacitor's voltage is the integral of current, a battery's voltage isn't.

I think this might be why accumulate is a good term. If one needed an accumulator that regulated voltage an inductor might work.

Warning I barely know what I'm talking about.

If you apply a constant current to a capacitor, the voltage across the capacitor will increase linearly as the capacitor stores energy in the electric field.

If you apply a constant voltage to an inductor, the current through the inductor will increase linearly as the inductor stores energy in the magnetic field.

Perhaps part of why the intuition can break down is that in real life, inductors tend to be much "leakier" energy storage devices than capacitors. If you store some energy in an inductor and then change the voltage across it to zero (practically: short its terminals together), in theory a perfect inductor will maintain a constant current forever and the energy stored does not change. In practice inductors (with an exception for things like superconducting magnets) are made from wire that has a resistance, and so the current in a real shorted inductor will eventually decay to zero. This means that in practical terms inductors are mostly only useful for short term energy storage. On the other hand, real-life insulating materials (like air, vacuum, or Teflon) can can be pretty close to perfect insulators allowing real capacitors to store energy more or less indefinitely... certainly on timescales of years.

Inductors accumulate a magnetic field.

In system design that distinction may not matter.

Seems like capacitors, inductors and batteries differ only quantitively in their response curves, not in qualitatively? As in they all do different things to the circuit on the voltage, amperage and time axis? We would need separate words for them, but accumulators seems like a decent umbrella.

> So it scares me a bit when something like Ozepmic pops up and tons of people jump on it, without knowing the long term effects that might appear.

Test in production. YOLO!

Considering it's not ethical (or legal) to spin up a test human what else are you going to do?

One could also argue that this continuous feedback loop is the scientific process in action.

It helps though with remembering where you are in your codebase. Rather than cluttering my brain with the info that Nerdtree provides, I can instead use the extra brainpower for other things.