Nice view up there

Update: Edited the embed because the original video was removed.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip2ZGND1I9Q

 

When commercial space tourism becomes attainable (but not necessarily affordable), I’m going to have to see this for myself.

Continue Reading

If you put an airplane on a treadmill…

Estimate the mass of an Airbus A320 at about 170,000lb, start the accelerometer based dyno tool on the iPod touch, and wait for takeoff!

For the record, the estimation based on a 170000lb aircraft was 28596 hp

60′: 4.71 [email protected] MPH

1/8 mi: 13.89 sec@ 66.5 MPH

1/4 mi: 19.40 [email protected] MPH

A rather poor 1/4 mile time that most modern passenger sedans can outrun but keep in mind that while Mom’s Ford will stop accelerating at around 100MPH, this Airbus will continue accelerating until well past 500MPH.

Continue Reading

Be nice to your servers

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

Yelling at your servers can measurably negatively affect their performance. No joke. Make sure to treat your servers with respect, and keep it quiet in the datacenter!

Perhaps there is a “brown note” for disks (“rust note”?) – some harmonic that destroys their performance; although based on what we think is happening (disk heads being thrown off track), we think this has more to do with shock force than resonance. I’m sure there are disk vendor engineers out there who know all about this (Bryan links to a good reference in his blog entry).

[Source: Sun Microsystems Blog (now Oracle)]

Continue Reading

Fuzzy Dice

You have two standard three-dimensional cubes, each with six sides. On each side, you are allowed to inscribe one number. How do you represent all the ~31 days of the month, if each of two cubes have exactly the same six numbers inscribed on each side?

Edit: if you’re reading this syndicated on facebook, twitter, whatever, please post the answer as a comment on http://andrewpeng.net

Continue Reading