Marketing. Trust me... it's not that cool. They hire artists to design this stuff. Not kidding. The exterior is made by an industrial designer more so then an actual engineer. I would know, I worked at the company previously.
Umm... this product was acquired into the company via Blue Force. It was pretty much fully designed prior to Anduril getting its hands on it. It sounds like you don't know what you're talking about despite having "worked at the company," which could mean anything.
I left before this was “acquired”. So I won’t know specifically for this product.
I do know that Anduril has done this for many of their products including the single rotor drone. Additionally it has all the hallmarks of industrial design. That shell looks way too over the top with those lines.
So I was exaggerating a bit. My mistake. I should say “very incredibly likely an industrial designer was involved to the point of obviousness due to my previous experience with the company”
It's more about budget and eye, though. A skilled CG industry veteran with no time or $$$ budget and a deep immersion in in say r/combatfootage and physics could probably make something that would pass for real. It's just that all of those talents and circumstances don't really come together. Hmmm.
the article is discussing an SE. The author specifically complains that it's not big enough. And anyway, that's not a good reason to waste so much space. Maybe it can be argued that it makes the overall UI of ios appear neater and more uniform, but i'm not going to state that case.
It’s not space junk. When they’re ready to be decommissioned or they fail, the thrusters turn off and the whole thing descends into the atmosphere and burns up.
I wonder how much rare earth material will get incinerated over the next few decades with thousands of these things burning up annually. Hope we figure out space mining quick.
Rare earth elements actually aren't that rare. For example, neodymium makes up over 30 ppm of Earth's crust. That's more common than lead, cobalt, tin, thorium, tungsten, molybdenum, and quite a few other elements with large-scale industrial applications.
The difficult part of producing rare-earth elements is separating them from everything else. Tiny pieces of spacecraft dust scattered over a large area don't make very high grade ore...
Rare earth elements are so named because their earths are rare: there aren't many places on the crust where their concentration is significantly above the average. Mining depends on the existence of mineral earths.
But all the components of an iPhone can technically be recycled to one degree or another (even if they aren't at present). Once a satellite has been incinerated, that's it. And there will be thousands of these, and several providers. That's thousands and thousands of pounds of material disappearing for good, every year.
1. very little rare earth materials are actually used. 80%+ are in magnets / motors, a good chunk in screens and sensors
2. solar panels might have cadmium/silver which despite the name are not rare at all
440g is the average amount used in a modern car. Let’s extrapolate to 1Kg for a satellite. Earth has an estimated 120 million metric tons of rare earth deposits. If you start burning ten thousand of those satellites every year, it will take twelve million years to go through the stock.
Not really. You know what happens when a satellite burns up in the atmosphere? Hint: It's not a nuclear reaction. All the components end up back on earth (just vaporized and oxidized).
I think terminology can mean different things to different people. Typically space junk refers to decommissioned or otherwise useless satellites. But if you’re a ground-based astronomer taking long exposure photographs, the trails of reflective satellites are of no use to you.
Over my years running varsity XC & track in HS, myself and others on my team took a lot of splits during workouts and races. It was always such a hassle to take splits without a convenient way to save, search, and share them with each other besides taking pictures or writing them out on paper. To solve this problem, I worked with my team as well as local athletes and coaches to develop Synchro: a free pro stopwatch app for people who take splits. Synchro Pro removes the ads and enables you to have an unlimited number of simultaneously running stopwatches (free limit is 2) and saved stopwatches in the "Archive" tab (free limit is 5).
It launched yesterday on the App Store, and I'd love for you to try it and let me know what you think!
At least for me, "wasted" is a matter of perspective. Personal interactions and experiencing the surrounding world can be valuable — time is what you make of it.
Standing-room-only public transit vehicles are far and away the worst interactions and experiences I encounter on a day-to-day basis.
They were valuable in that they motivated to bike most of the way, and eventually to get promoted to a point where I could move into the city and stop relying on transit. But aversion is probably not what you had in mind.
Me too. I actually enjoy "wasting" time on public transportation some times because I like listening to music and it gives you a lot of time to think uninterrupted. Plus you could always just tell your uber driver that you want to talk but really need to get some work done, they'll understand.
