All posts by Rand Simberg

Space

Increasing Lunar Mission Frequencies

6 Comments

Jon Goff has a proposal for doing lunar missions with a bi-elliptic transfer. It makes a lot of sense, actually, for Low Lunar Orbit, or deep space, though I’m not sure there’s any benefit for a Lagrange point, because the plane change out at that distance doesn’t cost much anyway (one of the many reasons that I find Lagrange points preferable to LLO).

The basic idea is to do the plane change at a very high altitude. In fact, this is a technique that can make sense even for LEO plane changes, if they’re big enough. I forget where the crossover is, but there is a certain amount of plane change where it is actually cheaper to go out to GEO (or higher) and back than to do it with a single burn in LEO. We looked at it a lot back in the eighties when we were doing tug studies.

General, Mathematics

OK, Now An Open Office Problem

8 Comments

So, I’m trying to import my Perl-generated file as a CSV into Open Office. Apparently, if the data coming into a cell is of the form “D.D.D” where “Ds” are digits, it obviously and absolutely must be a date, and it converts the incoming cell to that format.

Well, no. I wanted it to be (for example) literally “1.3.5.” Really. No kidding. It’s not 01/03/05. But it won’t let me do it.

I don’t want to have to manually go in and change the format for each cell where this happens, and even if I did, there’s no obvious way to do it and retain the original info without manually retyping the number with a single quote in front. Is there an Open Office guru out there?

BTW, I really appreciate the help with the Perl problem. It was invaluable (which means, it was very useful, but I don’t know how to pay for it, or what it was worth to those providing it).

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

What Do You Think?

26 Comments

OK, so we have a bill that has passed both the House and the Senate, both of which are controlled by the Democrats. In both houses, they were rushed through with little debate, and in the House, it was almost entirely crafted by the Democratic leadership, without even significant input from the Blue Dogs, let alone the Republicans. It is hundreds of pages, and totals close to a trillion dollars (a mind-numbing number that may necessitate updating the old Dirksen quote) in new spending, paid for with money that the nation doesn’t have. It has many items in it that are not obviously aimed at stimulating the economy, but rather in advancing various social and political goals, but it’s hard to be sure because few have had the opportunity to even read, let alone comprehend the whole thing.

Now which is the more likely scenario?

A. It is the output of a sober, long-debated process that was totally focused on improving the American economy, carefully considering the potential unintended consequences of every item in the bill, with associated committee hearings and qualified witnesses, or

B. It is an overnight cut’n’paste concatenation of every item on pent-up Democrats’ wish lists going back to 1994, when they lost control of the Congress, because everyone wants to get a ride on the late-Christmas tree that is sure to go through via fearmongering by a popular new president.

Come on, folks. William of Ockham had just the tool for this conundrum.

I know where my money is.

General, Mathematics

Perl Problem

28 Comments

I’m going crazy with a script. Here’s the code:

$parent = @line_elements[8];
$lower_req = @line_elements[1];
print DEBUG “BEGIN \$lower_req is $lower_req, \$parent is $parent, \$req_num is $req_num.\n”;
if ($req_num eq $parent) {
print DEBUG “\$req_num is $req_num, \$parent is $parent, got a match!\n”;
}

And here’s the output:

BEGIN $lower_req is “2.1.1”, $parent is “1.1”
, $req_num is “1.1”.
BEGIN $lower_req is “2.1.2”, $parent is “1.1”
, $req_num is “1.1”.
BEGIN $lower_req is “2.1.3”, $parent is “1.1”
, $req_num is “1.1”.
BEGIN $lower_req is “2.1.4”, $parent is “1.1”
, $req_num is “1.1”.
BEGIN $lower_req is “2.1.5”, $parent is “1.1”
, $req_num is “1.1”.

Note that in each case, that $req_num is equal to $parent, and the line should be repeated with the statement that a match was found. Can another pair of eyes tell me why it’s not?