“Long-distance travel takes months or years because the specific impulse of chemical rocket engines is very low, so the craft takes a while to get up to speed,” she said. “But if we make thrusters based on magnetic reconnection, then we could conceivably complete long-distance missions in a shorter period of time.”
I strongly doubt she said this, as it is factually incorrect. While the specific impulse of chemical engines is low, their thrust is high so they get up to what speed almost instantly.
And there's a catch with increasing specific impulse. Specific impulse is proportional to exhaust velocity. The energy required to expel the exhaust is proportional to the square of exhaust velocity.
Because nothing is 100% efficient, high specific impulse means dissipating a lot of waste heat. Increase the thrust too much and you melt your vehicle.
That looks like a Freudian typo. They get up to their top speed faster, but that top speed is lower. Their high thrust comes from spewing out lots of mass at relatively low exhaust velocity, i.e. low specific impulse. And delta-v is directly proportional to specific impulse:
The lady's quote may have been a reference to gravitational assist, which must currently be used to get planetary probes to destination with puny chemical rockets:
Katago is the leading opensource go AI program, and it is on track to beat Alphago. They need folks to lend their GPU's to compete with Deepmind's massive resource advantage.
As the author of this article, but without trying to sound too self promotional, I disagree. I was the only Android engineer on an app that is currently featured on the front page of http://market.android.com
Entrepreneurship is awesome. I have self generating, passive income from my personal Android apps and I respond to most customers emails personally.
As far as my skills on SoundTracking:
I already had 2 years of solid Android experience under my belt, and over the course of the project, I learned a shitload more about Android.
I made use of my teammates extensively.
I released early and often.
I managed to generate positive relationships with over 20 api partners to make this project happen.
I discovered new ways to make objected oriented abstractions work in Android.
Correct. Not trying to toot my own horn, but after 10 years of getting better each year, I am solid programmer. I literally just finished working on SoundTracking.
However, I have focused solely on programming the last 10 years, and I believe my focus depleted from other skills that are highly necessary to balance someone out: product development, winning friends and influencing people, sales, marketing, physical builds, the arts and humanities, entrepreneurship and finally understanding and gettings your hands deep and dirty into real business experience:construction, food and restaurants, medecine, education, finance, fashion, etc, etc.
My intention is to help others not go down such a narrow path as I have.
Reading the Steve Jobs biography really lit a fire under me.
Keep your skills sharp. Every product that has software has a purpose. Google is a search engine. Android is a phone and an app market. A good app has a clear purpose and is easy to use.
But, work on your social skills. An idea that is coded with someone else as a sounding board is generally stronger than an idea coded by someone sitting alone at a desk.
