I suspect the cuts on the pilot's arm are from BEFORE the incident. The blood looks a pretty dried up and the yellowish streaks look like some kind of antiseptic ointment was applied. The oval shaped wound closest to the camera looks like it's been healing. Could be wrong though.
Now I'm just imagining the object hitting the window, the pilot looking down at his arm injury from the bowl of petunias that hit the plane yesterday, and thinking "not again."
Making sure the plane continues to fly would be the top priority for a pilot. Second to that, formulating an emergency plan and communicating with air traffic control. Taking pictures of you wounds should be extremely far down the list
Why would there be a picture of the arm circulating if the injuries are from another incident? I won’t dispute your analysis of the photo because I don’t know anything about the subject
None of the articles I have seen have said the lacerations are a result of the "space debris" incident. The linked article simply says "One of the photos shows a pilot’s arm peppered with small cuts and scratches", and which is not the same as "the pilot said the shattering glass caused the cuts you see on his arm."
I am saying it is possible that the pilot had a previous, unrelated injury, and it just so happened to be captured in the picture of the windshield. That picture is going viral because it was likely one of the first pics from the incident, but it does not mean his injuries are necessarily from the incident. I was only pointing this out based on the way the blood looked more dried up and treated/healing.
Not saying it's what's happened here, but it's very easy for someone to post any image and claim it's from the same incident. Get the post enough attention and if it seems genuine enough other people will share and repost without fact checking, then people will share and reposts the reposts, and so on.
Professional outlets do this all the time, and they're _paid_ not to mess this up. Copying other outlet's bad reporting without fact checking, then once a couple more "corroborating" articles come up (or one from a reputable outlet) and it'll just be repeated as fact, they can't all be wrong right?
The military gliders made sense because they were landing in hostile territory, usually nowhere near a runway for a return trip. Those gliders were pretty much a one-way, one-time-use vehicle. I guess the Waco glider could be used to argue that towing is technically feasible, but it was intended for a totally different use case. I don't see how it can be argued that it's more economical to run, especially considering the safety issues others have pointed out.
I'm no aerospace engineer but it seems like it would be more efficient to fly one single bigger plane than to tow a second one behind it. I suppose this might appeal to certain groups where they already own a plane, and want to increase capacity without buying a whole new plane. But the idea that it's 65% more efficient just seems pretty sketch. I could totally imagine some drug cartels using these though...
If you've got a bigger plane, you also need a bigger runway. This thing should increase the number of usable airfields. That could be interesting for avoiding more expensive routes.
It is, but that only happens at one end of the trip. It can still drop cargo on a smaller airfield at the other because the braking can be done independently by both.
Plus there's an interesting wrinkle here: a lot of the media on the site show the tow plane as one with engines, and not a glider. I'm sure that's because those are the aircraft they could get their hands on, so that's what they made it work with, but the option is there to have the towed plane powered on takeoff. Doing that safely, with the two aircraft tethered... that sounds like a mess. But it's an option!
It's politically convenient to blame PG&E for what happened in Paradise. But I would not say it's 100% on them; I've been to Paradise before the fire, and it was impressively beautiful being surrounded by all the trees and nature, like living in a forest. But even back then, I remember thinking it was a massive tinder box that could go up in flames. For reference, here is a picture of an average street in a relatively urban part of Paradise, before the fire [1]. The houses farther away from the main street had even more foliage. The area is mostly older retirees, who didn't have the energy/will to trim back the growing unburnt fuel on their (massive plots of) land. For argument's sake, it'd be like surrounding your house with barrels of gasoline, then putting the blame 100% at PG&E for starting the spark. In fairness part of the blame is on the property owners, or perhaps the local gov't for not taking fire safety measures to limit the spread or damage.
I remember driving up the main highway into Paradise, CA and saying to myself "if there is a fire here...anyone on this highway is screwed". Fast forward less than 10 years and I was watching the news reports of people driving blind through the fire at nearly the exact spot.
The entire town was on a ridge with tons of fuel (pine trees)...elevations below that was nothing but dry grass.
Although the fire was caused by power lines...All it would have taken was cigarette butt.
Best I could come up with was that they're trying to make a mockery of Texas's position on the case. But the odd capitalization isn't frequent enough to make it obvious, so I too wasted minutes of my life looking for some kind of pattern.
I know someone who works at Apple QA. A lot of it is done by wholly unqualified contractors who blindly check off test cases as passed. Sad to say it, but most of these contractors aren't very bright and have zero experience or training, let alone interest in doing a good job; strange why apple continues to work with the sourcing firm.
I’ve worked with (as in, directly on their team) some of Apple’s QA when I was an intern. They were quite bright and dedicated people. It’s just that their job truly sucks and the rest of the company doesn’t value them. When I was there their daily task was to run the same runbook of basic actions from 8 AM to the afternoon. It used to be to the end of the day, actually, until someone wrote up a Python script for them to save several hours on some of the checks. I had a chat with the actual engineers writing the code they were testing, vaguely pointing towards “hey I heard about CI and automated tests, wouldn’t this make things a lot better?” and he just point-blank rejected it. QA was there to test the code he wrote. There was zero self-reflection on how he could improve or that this process sucked. My impression is that a lot of Apple has a similar mindset which they are slowly working to change.
Far and away the best "QA" people I ever worked with were people who couldn't write a line of code. Because they didn't have a programmer mindset, they also didn't approach using the software like a programmer, which is exactly the sort of person you want doing QA for you.
My guess - the app's users uploading university course material to a third party is likely a violation of school rules. Emory IT disabled the button to generate Canvas access tokens, and the 'workaround' the kid developed in response caused the IT folks to escalate.
An LLM trained on course material could in theory be used to generate homework answers, so they wanted to shut it down before it actually happens. (Hell, the demo question on their website[1] sounds taken straight from a problem set) It would be as if the answer key to the homework leaked, except its for every homework in every course. The punishments are to discourage others from building clones. Though I suspect this is going to cause a Streisand effect.
Thinking out loud here, but why sand and not water? Yes, water is only 1000kg/m^3, but probably much easier to transfer around using pumps and pipes. Water can make good use of the horizontal space within the mine, unlike sand. (The graphic in the article shows them using conveyor belts or trucks to move the sand horizontally which seems silly.) Thus the mine could basically be a mini pumped hydro power station, build a new reservoir at the top and use the mine as the bottom reservoir, then pump water water between the two.
When I thought about that silently, my answer was that storing water underground is a challenge when unprotected walls can turn into sludge. Water would require expensive preparation of the existing mine volume, whereas dry material could just be filled in, even stabilising the mine a little in the process. Water and sand sit at different points in the cost per W vs cost per Wh spectrum.
A machine for lifting/lowering loose material is more complicated than a pump, no doubt about that. But a deep shaft would mean that you don't build one machine per shaft, you build a few dozen smaller ones with a good handover mechanism and start getting small serial production benefits right from the first installation. Capacity would be virtually infinite, because with excess energy you could just mine more of whatever stuff is down there.
I guess if it's expensive to switch the dry mass mechanism between directions or speed states, it might be worthwhile to prepare some basin volume up and down and run a small capacity pumped storage in parallel at the same site for higher frequency load changes and short peaks. You might even find yourself discharging the wet battery while charging the dry one or the reverse if there is a sufficient delta in dispatchability.
The above is the Google Earth view of the area. Interestingly you can still see the (former) airstrips from the satellite view; just south of the point at Snag and slightly north of Aishihik; they were part of the Northwest Staging route.
Since the plane radio'ed in at Snag but failed to check in at Aishihik, in theory it would have crashed somewhere between those two points. The biggest lake between those points is Wellesley Lake, depth 65 feet. Might also be on land, anyone good at Where's Waldo?
