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The crash kicked up a lot of snow into the air, making me wonder if that helped suppress the fireball, as it seemed to die down very quickly. On thing leading to me think this might have happened is video from the recent firefighting in California, where the spray from the firefighting aircraft seemed to snuff out the flames as soon as it descended into them, before it reached the ground.

News of these things does come out from time to time, usually over a shorter time period, and these create embarrassment, shock, pain and anger, but has any had significant substantive consequences? Here is a hypothetical one to consider: FDR secretly informed Hitler that the US would support an invasion of the USSR - how far would be the consequences of such a revelation reach, if it were revealed today?

It's not so much about the impact of the secrets leaking. Instead, its about the impact on communications if diplomats need to worry about their communications leaking.

Despite Musk's whining about the FAA, SpaceX is not facing any difficulties getting its rockets launched from land, so there's no reason, at this point, to add something else with the potential to slow things down.

It did not even want to build a proper launchpad at Boca Chica, which did not work out so well.


It worked out fine. It's an example of iterative design where you find out the problems of an approach by doing the experiment, rather than by analysis, where you find out and have to address all the nonexistent imaginary problems too.

Except we'd already done a lot of experiments and you don't have to test it at full scale to realise it's gonna be chaos.

Yes, there's some interesting papers post-fact on the ejecta but it was still dumb.


My understanding is that it was a matter of timeline. They simply did not want to wait and we're willing to trade off the consequences.

SpaceX was already shipping a fabricated deluge system to Starbase 3 months before the first flight tore up the LaunchPad [1]. At the end of the day, the rocket did get off the pad. The repair was completed and the ready waiting deluge system installed in less than 3 months.

This aspect is always lost in the bluster from Musk, and claims of incompetence from critics.

https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starbase-starship-deluge-sy...


The alternative view is they got off really really lightly for wrecking wetland and sandblasting the neighbourhood.

The reason the deluge system was installed so quickly is exactly the reason you can't argue that 'they wanted to see if they could do without'. They knew a priori that it was necessary, that's why they'd basically already staged the hardware.

Installing a deluge system pre-launch would have cost them a month, a month that they wouldn't have spent afterwards, waiting for another round of sign-offs.

It was a dumb decision and posting fan-blogs like Teslarati isn't a good argument.


Back then I doubt even Musk thought he was going to become CEO of USofA. If he had known that, I doubt he'd ever have been concerned about having any restrictions from any gov't agency. Now, he's pretty much bulldozed a clear path for SpaceX doing whatever it wants. That definitely makes the need for an expensive ocean platform totally unnecessary.

They're trying to make their little slice of land into an actual city. Next stop, carve out that land to become a separate state. Then he can just become governor since he can't be president without having a co- prefix.


> he's pretty much bulldozed a clear path for SpaceX doing whatever it wants

SpaceX is waiting for Starship launch authorisation from the FAA.


I'm sorry, has Musk completed his takeover of the gov't or is he still working?

> has Musk completed his takeover of the gov't or is he still working?

"Pretty much bulldozed a clear path for SpaceX doing whatever it wants" implies the former.


There will be a Democratic administration in 4 or 8 years, and they'll want to settle scores.

Definitely - this launch is mentioned in the article:

"As it turned out, the inaugural flight was a bit of a mixed bag. Neal Casey, an 18-year-old technician stationed on the Midway, later recalled how the missile tilted dangerously starboard and headed toward the vessel’s own command center, known as the island.

"“I had no problem tracking the rocket,” said Casey, according to the USS Midway Museum. “It almost hit the island.”"


The answer given in Stack Exchange and the Wikipedia article linked to in one of its comments provide explanations, though whether you find them convincing is, of course, up to you!

The Wikipedia article says there are solutions to the classical equations of motion: one in which the ball remains stationary forever, and then all those where, after an arbitrary period during which the ball is stationary, it rolls off the dome in an arbitrary direction. What makes this indeterminate is that the analysis of a single initial state yields multiple possible outcomes.

The article goes on to say "Notice in the second case that the particle appears to begin moving without cause and without any radial force being exerted on it by any other entity, apparently contrary to both physical intuition and normal intuitive concepts of cause and effect, yet the motion is still entirely consistent with the mathematics of Newton's laws of motion so cannot be ruled out as non-physical."

This raises the question of what we mean by 'physical', and whether theories of physics define the physical or describe something existing independently. I will leave that to the more philosophically minded; for myself, I will just note that as there are cases (and physically realizable ones at that) where classical physics gives answers that are not merely indeterminate but outright wrong (the ultraviolet catastrophe being a canonical example), I don't think anything of consequence hangs on this particular case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton%27s_dome#Solutions_to_t...


There is Nuclear lake on the Appalachian trail in Dutchess county, NY. Its name is or is not accidental, depending on how you look at it.

https://www.scenichudson.org/explore-the-valley/outdoor-adve...


Race is not mentioned in the article. Ironically, you are doing the very thing, here, which you claim spoils it.

The mention of culture is not out of place in the article, as the marshmallow test (which features quite prominently in it, including in its actual title) does have different outcomes in different cultures, and, in addition, it is hardly controversial to suppose that the way children are brought up is an important factor in establishing and maintaining a culture's cohesion.


Indeed - at no point does the article quote a geologist expressing surprise at the result. There are quotes saying, in effect, that new data overthrows or requires modification of a previously-held conjecture, but that is not the same as surprise. Experts in a given field are usually well aware of how conjectural a hypothesis is, as that is where current research is focused.

You have a point - there are probably no defined rules about whether security risk rules apply when POTUS is employing someone to do something illegal or unconstitutional.

If anyone gets to judge, however, it will be SCOTUS, not voters. It's hard to guess, right now, whether that's a plus for security.


How LLMs tackle addition is an interesting question in its own right, independently of whether their accuracy provides a metric for judging their ability relative to that of typical humans.

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