> The Mali trip was notable for random types firing weapons at our aircraft while we were running lines with 80m ground clearance - we had to armour the cockpit bellies and stuff the fuel tanks with mesh.
Datums can get dull fast but there's adventure inherent in surveying. You should write a book, or at least a chapter or two. "Nadir Point" has a nice ring to it...
There was always something happening, whether it was shipboard fires in the disputed parts of South China Sea or India / Pakistan engaging in cross border nuclear tests in our survey zone.
That last one followed several of us about for years, anytime we crossed a US controlled border they got interested in how we knew what they didn't ...
.. look, we just happened to be there with a 42 litre doped Sodium Iodide crystal pack and 256 channel gamma ray spectrometer just as the tests kicked off ...
It really would be nice to have a convenient renderer for it though. It's genuinely surprising something like firefox doesn't have a markdown reader builtin already.
"... many European cars have the fuel door located on the passenger side, while many Japanese and American vehicles have the fuel door on the driver side. Both techniques have valid reasons. European automakers place the fuel filler on the passenger side for the sake of safety when a vehicle has run out of fuel and has pulled off onto the shoulder of the road to fill up from a canister. Meanwhile, American OEMs tend to place the fuel door on the driver side of the vehicle for convenience reasons, so that a driver doesn't have to walk around the vehicle when filling up at a gas station."[0]
Brings to mind the Dead Kennedys album name, "Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death"
As I understand it, hypersonics only got the focus they did in russia and china because US missile defence had evolved to the point where it was too much of a threat to existing ballistic missiles. No fundamental reason to think hypersonics won't in turn suffer the same fate.
They transitioned to hypersonic development after US withdrew from ABM treaty in early 2000s, historically moving to hypersonic was not reaction to US having a working shield (it didn't), it was more proactive move demonstrate US pursuing missile shield is likely not ever going to be viable. It took another 15+ years for US ABM tests to consistently intercept ballistics, and even then under very favourable (scripted), not operational conditions, i.e. FTM44 in 2020 was first time US intercepted an "ICBM representative" target. Current US ABM defense #s is not remotely credible threat vs salvo medium/high end ballistics, i.e. current US has ~50 GMDs, it functionally doesn't matter for strategic level exchanges.
For theatre/tactical performance, again early Kinzhal was functionally ballistic and interception rate was ~25%, dropped to 6% when RU added some terminal maneuvering. So US has not only not caught up to ABM defense outside of North Korea tier threats, ABM defense currently on trend to lose the physics race (against capable adversaries). There are fundamental physical reason high end hypersonics will likely only extend the interception gap. The TLDR is terminal speed past mach 6+, the intercept window compresses so much it becomes almost mechanically impossible for interceptors, i.e. g-load on interceptors will physically break them apart. Kinzhal (which US/PRC categorize as ballistic tier) terminal is ~mach4, PRC DFs (US categorize as proper hypersonic) are estimated to sustain mach 5-10, i.e. high machs until final seconds, basically physically impossible engagement envelopes. DEW doesn't have dwell time vs hypersonic already shielded against plasma sheath. Current golden shield bet is on glide phase interceptors, which doesn't really answer magazine math, i.e. multiple expensive interceptors (especially midcourse) is going to lose the attrition game regardless, maybe not vs smaller adversaries, but vs PRC. Extra lopsided in context of naval defense with limited magazine depth where it's not even about $$$ but inability to defend against saturation.
Is there any generally agreed upon and reliable source for replacement batteries? Given the fire risk, I'm much less willing to take the risk of substandard aftermarket parts when it comes to batteries.
Lenovo stopped selling the batteries for the T480, so the only sources are various 3rd party manufacturers I've never heard of.
There's a lot of machinery for moving the wafers around precisely in vacuum. But that's ordinary engineering, although the speeds at which ASML moves wafers are impressive.
I used a similar setup to translate CEC user commands (volume/fwd/reverse/etc), that travelled from my TV remote to the TV to the CEC bus to a pi that was plugged into the TV via HDMI. The pi was running jukebox software (moode audio). Similar to the article, the pi had a shell script that reads all the loglines coming from cec-client and acted on them when appropriate, in my case translating a subset of the CEC user commands to moode commands.
Worked pretty well, was nice to CEC-ify a pi program and eliminate the need for special-purpose hw/sw to interact with the audio player.
The CEC spec has all of the user control codes on the 2nd last page[1], in table 27.
I made myself a little HDMI dongle (about half the size of a classic Fire Stick) with a WiFi modem that I use to remote control my TV from Home Assistant. My remote is the HA app.
Why? Because Google Home's TV remote stuff can do a lot, but not turn on the TV. CEC can.
Datums can get dull fast but there's adventure inherent in surveying. You should write a book, or at least a chapter or two. "Nadir Point" has a nice ring to it...
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