• 6 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Very likely. Lots of super geeks on staff.

    But it’s also possible some astroenthusiast did the math and emailed it to NASA, and whoever got that endo thought it would be cool and passed it to someone who could schedule the instrument. If you think about your geekiest friend and how they’d react if you sent them something truly unique about their geekdom that they could act on - well, that’s pretty much how every engr/scientist at NASA would react.





  • You could say the same for a finite element model. A junior engineer with just 4 years of training can solve, explicitly, the deflection at the center of a slender, simple-simple beam of prismatic section and produce an exact (if slightly incorrect) answer. Building a FEM of the same can solve the problem and take longer (to make the model) with similar accuracy, both of which are good enough for design work.

    Only a fool wouldn’t have a FEM around though, as it can solve problem that would take centuries for a human to solve. They may as well make a cartoon with the child digging a 3” hole in beach sand and then showing a backhoe making a jagged edged hole of the same size.


  • A movie-set must have certain features (full, even, ready for shooting on schedule) and there are millions of dollars on the line - you don’t just plant a field and hope it meets spec - I would think someone was making case it would be ready for filming. That that’s time and effort. The movie industry unions have livable - one might say exceptional - wages, even for someone just checking to make sure the corn field is maturing properly, much less planting and tending the crop.

    An un-referenced medium article says he invested $100,000 in the corn field and he generated $162,000 in revenue, with no indication of the expenses of monitoring or harvesting. The best result would be $62k (compared to the $20,000,000 Nolan was paid for the film) in profit if the “investment “ included all of the miscellaneous expenses I mentioned above (as well as the lawyers cost for acquisition, travel and time spent finding the plot and securing all of the contracts for farming and harvest) and wasn’t absorbed in the “film budget”.