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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The SR-71 used an Astroinertial Navigation System that used stars to keep the navigation information accurate as the plane flew over long distances. Normally an inertial navigation system degrades in accuracy over time and distance due to small errors building up and something called gyro drift. The NAS-14V2 used a catalog of known stars and a gimballed telescope to identify specific stars (even during a cloudy day) and determine the position of the stars in relation to the aircraft. Using this information the position of the aircraft can be used to revise the inertial navigation system’s data every so often so the accuracy is much better.









  • Everyone should learn the basics of troubleshooting!

    When trying to resolve a problem it’s really important to keep as many variables under control as possible so that you can find the root cause and fix it.

    I see lots of people who try a bunch of things without isolating the issue first but can’t figure out what is wrong. Then because they messed with it so much it’s almost impossible to figure out.

    This is important for car maintenance, home maintenance, electronics, computers. Just about everything that can break or stop working right in your life.







  • It is undefined because the inverse of division is multiplication. If you multiply by zero, every answer is zero. If you try to invert that operation you can’t know which number was multiplied by zero to get zero because multiplying by zero doesn’t produce a unique answer for each operation.

    Additionally, if you take the limit of 1/x as x approaches zero from the positive side the result approaches positive infinity. If you take the limit from the negative side it approaches negative infinity.

    An interesting thing to think about is whether multiplication by zero really makes much sense in the concrete world. You can’t really have zero groups of something or some number of groups of zero. Zero groups of anything is still nothing. We can think of that abstractly once we have the abstract concept of numbers, but in the real world that idea is nonsense.






  • This is the hottest question in theory of mind right now thanks to David Chalmers. It’s called the Hard Problem of Consciousness and it’s about connecting the reductionist view of the brain’s function with the first-person experience of consciousness.

    I think that any explanation of consciousness completely from “the outside” will result in not being able to quantify the experience part of it. Any explanation completely from “the inside” will eventually run into the same issues as empiricism where it will be limited by subjectivity. I think that fundamentally we can’t rigorously combine these two views because they aren’t compatible. The starting points for each view carry different base assumptions.

    Both may be true from within their perspectives but combining them is basically just stating that a subjective experience “maps” to a physical function. There isn’t any explanatory usefulness of mapping. It doesn’t explain why the subjective experience is there just that it happens when these other physical things happen. I’m not sure we’ll find an answer that truly resolves the hard problem, but we’re still trying.