Space launch vehicles emit combustion products into every layer of the atmosphere. International regulation of these emissions is absent - a more pressing topic as the sector continues to grow.
Our paper with
@olivier_de_weck
in the MIT
@scipolrev
:
“People don’t care WHAT you did your PhD on, it just shows them that you have critical thinking skills” is an interesting position because if I was truly in possession of critical thinking skills I would not have done a PhD
Honestly… it owns that Interstellar spent the first 2.5 hours reeling us nerds in with “here is the most scientifically accurate depiction of a supermassive black hole ever to exist” and then in the last 30 min hit us with “the physics works because the 4th dimension is love”
When people said doing a PhD would be difficult I was thinking more along the lines of "challenging math to be learned" rather than "the culture and bureaucracy of academia will demean you and wear you down day after day for 5+ years"
Before Uber we had to be much more innovative in getting home from a night out. For example, I once convinced Pizza House Ann Arbor to deliver both a pizza AND me to my apartment. This is the kind of critical thinking that got me into a PhD program.
MIT in 2020: we can deliver a quality education entirely virtually
MIT in 2021: a quality education can only be delivered 100% in person. One cannot simply RECORD lectures for later viewing and put course materials ONLINE... what are we, some kind of institute of technology
no offense to einstein, but it took him most of his career to learn general relativity whereas i was able to learn it in a single undergraduate physics class
The MIT experience is googling a homework topic for help and finding out that not only is your “intro to statistical methods” class NOT intro, but there is nothing on google about it because it’s a new and advanced kind of math the professor invented in 2018
beam of natural light striking me like lightning at my desk, blasting my vitamin d to levels previously unseen at the massachussets institute of technology
Consider:
1. I have reached the stage of grad school where I've accepted that I know absolutely nothing
2. Socrates says that “the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing”
Therefore: I have attained true wisdom and thus peaked academically, mere weeks into my PhD.
QED
Never forget when my mom told me she met "someone who was also working on space stuff. big into the space thing, like you" and that she would connect me with them... and then 2 days later I received this email
Yes I am back and my updates are as follows:
- work at JPL now
- published some papers, please read them
- almost died of typhus but obviously didn’t, which took up a couple months (never do that)
- made a JWST mirror for my house
- have a guava tree now
Girls only want one thing, and it’s robotic missions to explore the atmospheric chemistry of Venus and observations of its surface composition in the near-infrared
Consider:
1. I have reached the stage of grad school where I've accepted that I know absolutely nothing
2. Socrates says that “the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing”
Therefore: I have attained true wisdom and thus peaked academically, mere weeks into my PhD.
QED
This was probably one for the drafts or the alt, and I'm sorry that you all relate to it. I hope you make the choice to treat others in the field with the respect and recognition that you also are deserving of
Stand back, I’m… gonna do it… I’m going to tweet professionally…
Optical comms is crazy!! We’re going to send info across our solar system with lasers! I love it! Send tweet!!
All space missions beyond Earth orbit rely on the Deep Space Network. To overcome the distances you need huge antennas like the 70 m dish in California. It received Neil Armstrong’s “one small step for man” speech from the moon & picks up signal from Voyager 1, 24 billion km away
In fact, not every venue, appliance, and experience needs its own app… having to download like 5 apps per day just to exist in the world may actually be the thing that sends me over the brink
What is the appeal of a standing desk? Normalize the opposite of that: a workstation that allows me to be effectively horizontal... An ottoman palace-style lounging throne connected to a projector that displays Matlab on the ceiling, for example
This was intensely challenging and rewarding, probably a singular defining experience of my life, and I will miss this place and its people. “The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
@coryfrontin
Pizza House was a beloved (by me) late night pizza place across the street from the bar we used to go to. I lived far away. I asked PH if I could order a pizza for delivery and also go with them in a 2-birds-1-stone arrangement. 30 min later, pizza & me dropped off at home!
The NYC subway was an engineering marvel. The DC metro is a landmark of brutalist design. The Boston T boldly asks: what if we allowed the forces of nature to replace a load bearing column with some kind of sewer water stalactite
we need a weather app called "do you need a jacket?" which JUST answers that question. no extraneous information about wind speeds, temperature, or cloud coverage. just a quick yes/ no on the jacket question like the lord intended
This weekend I saw the Ivanpah solar thermal power facility in the Mojave desert. It uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto the receivers in the middle which generate heat to drive steam turbines. It has a capacity of 392 MW and also looks... like this???
The graph looks like this not because the stars themselves are moving, but primarily because they are graphed relative to a single position on our rotating Earth (fun game: try to guess which latitude this data is charted from)
Thinking about the time in high school when our teacher asked “can someone give me an example of an imaginary number?” and this girl answered “boggleworf”… mathematicians take note
once at the Boston airport i got stopped by TSA because they did not think my Latvian passport was from a real country....... yes, i committed a felony offense by forging a biometric passport from a country that I made up, cheers gentlemen
My elderly neighbor tells me to have a good day at school every time she sees me leaving the house… I don’t have the heart to tell her I’m just an adult with a backpack
The paper: we demonstrated the first ever laser communications from deep space, at speeds of 267 Mbps
What I tell my family: I’m working night shift at NASA downloading cat videos from 19 million miles away for science
The star position data comes from the Hipparcos satellite, which was a space telescope launched in 1989 to provide the first precision astrometry, although astronomers from around the world have been charting the position of stars for nearly the length of recorded history
when you went to engineering grad school because you like space and now you're trying to avoid being funded by a subsidiary of Raytheon-Shell-Blackwater Ltd. to build a second Death Star, which your advisor tells you will be a "chance to explore your interests"
Thinking about the time my Uber driver asked what I did for a living and I told him I was getting a PhD in aerospace engineering
and then I just sat there in silence as he muttered "PHG in Eric-space...?" under his breath for the rest of the ride
I'm training a neural network to invent new hats (yes) and it keeps putting lobster icons on them. None of my training images have crustaceans... Is this nature evolving the crab again?? Did I just create the singularity in my living room
me as instructor: I am going to make lecture ENGAGING and participatory
me as student: if I have to speak at any point whatsoever in this class I will launch myself into the sun
Lots of Julia developers following me these days so i'd just like to clarify that I am the person and not the programming language, hope that helps
(however I can also run fast and am 1-indexed)
My advisor in our research meeting: did you find out anything interesting this week?
Me: Yes, we are closer in time to Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the people who built the pyramids
My advisor: ? I meant about your research
Me: ...... in that case, no
Voice reveal... I'm an extremely late adopter of technology but I've finally decided to get on tiktok to also post about space, let's be friends over there (@ yulia_milton)
Sometimes I get mad that all the supercomputers are busy modeling nuclear explosions and not available for my personal hobby, which is to render photorealistic, scale models of ~forbidden swimming pools~