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It was part of the culture in the 1960's, and only started to change somewhat during the 1970's. Everybody had ash trays, even in non-smoking households, so that you could bring them out for guests. Nobody gave it a second thought. Clay ash trays were common elementary school arts & crafts projects.

One of the things that reminded me of how much a part of the culture it was, is when we visited the Computer History Museum. The SAGE system display had several operator consoles -- each with an ash tray and an automotive-type cigarette lighter in the panel.


Do we know if the pilots are OK? Yes, ejection can save your life, but even in a best-case scenario the forces on the human body are incredibly ugly. I know a former combat-rated RAF pilot that had to eject from a Harrier because of a low-altitude bird strike. After 6 months in the infirmary, he emerged 2cm shorter, combat rating gone forever.


Arms and legs can take a serious beating too. Airplane cockpits are pretty tight spaces, and to be explosively shot out of one with little notice is.. yikes.


Ejection is often a career-ending event, unfortunately. Better than dying though.


You're generally limited to two ejections barring any disqualifying health issues. The military doesn't like to throw away its personnel investments when they've gained some hard won experience.


Needless to say, crashing jets at an air show is not going to help anyone’s career.


To my eye, only the pilot of the rearmost plane is in trouble. The one in front was (more or less) flying straight ahead.

It’ll be interesting to see the official findings.


Agreed. It only takes one of them to have an issue or be out of position. Like you say, it’ll be interesting to see what they come back with after a thorough investigation.

How so, because of the damage to the body?


They impart significant g forces (~15g) in line with the spine. Compression fractures are common, and most people permanently lose height as a result of the event. The goal is to provide a result better than death.


The pilots themselves initiated their ejections.


Admittedly I have nowhere near the flight hours, training, or expertise of these pilots, but having flown airplanes myself I can totally imagine in an off-nominal situation (which I have been in before) conscious focus is fully on flying the airplane even if your rote lizard brain is procedurally going through the motions of pulling the ejection handles or otherwise responding to the emergency. My instructor's words--he was a helicopter pilot (Hueys and Chinooks) in the Vietnam war with some 20k hrs logged in complex aircraft, jets, etc. since so I know for certain he knew wtf he was talking about--going through my head "do not ever stop flying the airplane". In this case, my conscious focus would be to stomp one of those rudder pedals as hard as I could to try to recover from the spin, even if I was also simultaneously yelling "eject" or whatever you're told to into the intercom and pulling the handles. But I haven't ever been trained to eject from an aircraft, or maybe my instinctive predilections would select me out of the training regimen these pilots go through.. who knows


Also, these are aircraft with two crew. Either can initiate the ejection sequence, at which point both crew will be ejected regardless of who initiated if I’m not mistaken.

I’ve never trained to eject, but I have trained in situations with parachutes, and the advice is to deploy early. If the thought crosses your mind, the answer is yes.


Yes, that too


Sufficient training overrides your lizard brain.

But yes, pilots still trying to fix stuff when they should have ejected is a common problem.


I would think that when the two planes struck each other both of the pilots would have realized that something had gone seriously wrong and things were not going to be recoverable with a checklist. But yea, in other situations where it isn’t as clear cut, I can definitely imagine a pilot trying to work the problem all the way into the ground.


I mean, there’s “OK”, and then there’s “not in that flaming heap of exploding shrapnel” OK, so I guess it’s on a spectrum. But I guess they’re “OK-ish”, based on the fact that the seats seemingly cleared the wreck and the parachutes deployed. But yeah, I guess someone definitely could have gotten injured or worse in the tangle. I would imagine that would probably have also resulted in visible damage to the ejection module, though.


> Which CAD program? I'm confused

Clue here: > Our proposed GenCAD architecture...

So, at this point, it seems like this will work with all CAD programs, since they have yet to encounter any systems that they can't work with. More seriously, my guess would be whatever one is available for free in their lab. Kind of standard operating procedure for academic projects -- do a proof of concept, make a video that avoids known bugs, get a grade, push source to git, graduate. Good ideas come out of that... production code... eh... maybe.

More likely someone ends up in the situation that my kid did, previous graduate student's git repo is stale by 2 versions of C++, and 4 versions of ROS, and neither of the two unit tests still work after porting.


It seems to me there is a broad range of "normal", as in well within the standard spec sheet tolerances for humans. It is more about what is average or median.


Who else tried with both eyes? A few years ago I had an implant to treat cataracts. It was notable at the time that the "new" eye was less yellow-tinted than the aged-in-place eye. I was told that the lens does yellow with age. Over time, my brain mostly adjusted, but on this test I did notice a subtle hue difference between eyes. Did anyone else try that experiment?


Can you accommodate with the implant?


No. I got it set for distance vision. There are modern implants that are "multi-focal". But they work by spreading out the light, so everything is less bright at any distance. My two pieces of anecdata are: 1. A friend with multi-focal implants says that he needs a very bright light for reading now. Which is one of the reasons I avoided multi-focal. 2. My optometrist got multi-focal, and he noted that it required retraining his brain somewhat, because now instead of accommodation providing focus, focus requires mental attention to the subject of interest.

Cataract implant technology is moving very fast, and my data is about 5 years old, so YMMV.


> Rarely(never?) have I found new knowledge on youtube, however its a great source of joy/emotions/slop.

I suspect you are not looking very hard. I have learned a tremendous amount about everything from stone cutting to metalworking to welding to Kalman filters to linear algebra. There is a lot out there. The main annoyance I have is keeping AI slop out of my feed so that I can instead learn from genuine experts. There is a huge amount out there.


Appending 'before:2024' to your search term works on YouTube and gives results from the pre-slopocine era.


The burning question is whether or not it qualifies as a new DXCC entity.


? No, you need to educate yourself.

The gestation period of a cow is approximately 9 months, similar to humans, by coincidence. Only a cow that has given birth to a calf will produce milk. The normal lactation period is 305 days before the cow is "dried up" before giving birth again. 10,000 pounds of milk is considered a good lactation total. Typically, cows are bred to calve once per year. Typically going through 10 lactations before that one way trip to MacDonald's.

Dairy bulls are notoriously nasty creatures, so artificial insemination is almost universal in the dairy industry. The "tract" that you speak of is the cow's colon. The technician is careful to guide the pipette so as not to injure the animal, and the colon provides convenient access to feel what is going on inside.

If you are squeamish about such things as cow's colons, then vet school is not for you.


I was speaking from the perspective of the people in my opening sentence. How commonly known would you suspect those facts are in your comment?

e.g. "[They might assume] cows simply produce milk like chickens lay eggs."

It's normal to never really think about it -- our society is set up so that you never have to. The secretion comes in a jug, the meat comes in cellophane, and that's it.


> e.g. "[They might assume] cows simply produce milk like chickens lay eggs."

You may have a point that many have no idea how chickens work. Egg laying being like giving birth isn't an unreasonable explanation if you had to come up with one on the spot while completely in the dark. But most understand how milk is produced because even if they've never seen a cattlebeast, they deal with milk-producing humans daily.


That will vary by person. My father-in-law bred and milked pedigreed Holsteins. They had a 1 gallon pasteurizer and would just dip a gallon out of the bulk tank for household use when needed. So, most of the time they had pasteurized, non-homogenized. On occasion, the pasteurizer would break, so for a while they would drink raw milk. But of course understood the risk, and also knew darn well where the milk had come from and how clean the milking facility was.


The thing about LR parsers is that since it is parsing bottom-up, you have no idea what larger syntactic structure is being built, so error recovery is ugly, and giving the user a sensible error message is a fool’s errand.

In the end, all the hard work in a compiler is in the back-end optimization phases. Put your mental energy there.


I have worked on compilers (mostly) for high-performance computing for over 40 years, writing every part of a production compiler twice or more. Optimization and code generation and register allocation/scheduling are definitely the most fun -- but the hardest work is in parsing and semantics, where "hardest" means it takes the most work to get things right for the language and to deal with user errors in the most graceful and informative manner. This is especially true for badly specified legacy languages like Fortran.


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