Given that price tag, what would be the political backlash against NASA if the JWST fails? Would that be enough to cancel other projects for good?

I sure hope not.

The price tag, ~$6 billion over 15 years and and expected life of 10 years, it's really not that much money in the grand scheme of government expenses.

We dump $700 billion every year into tanks and planes the military doesn't even want. A one time investment in potentially getting a glimpse into the origins of the universe seems so minuscule in comparison.

Given the R+D investment, could they just build and launch another one?

The JWST won't be "in orbit". The L2 Lagrange point technically orbits the sun and is far out of reach even for starship. There's currently no way to service the thing if something goes wrong.

I thought Starship was meant to be able to go anywhere in the solar system?

Those _awesome_ pages are getting ridiculously specific

In this case, there's a great practical need, namely the 10-100x speed increase given by esbuild and swc, written in Go and Rust respectively.

> go ./... magic custom (that means this and all recursive subdirectories).

There. I did just learn it without following a tutorial or somethin. It's so simple, easy to remember. It's even faster to write that -R or -r.

The speed of light puts a hard constraint in the simultaneity of data availability in a network. You can't have data replicated faster than c no matter how fast is your hardware.

Can you imagine what internet distraction would do to the release schedule of GRR Martin? Hmmm

If I understand correctly, what that image is saying it doesn't matter what type of car you use still they're all space inefficient?

Yes. Similar images have been published over the years, all attempting to show how space inefficient cars are compared to other transit options. This particular one takes it a step further by calling out EVs as no better than ICEVs with regard to space consumption.

The solution is for most people to drive Miatas or Smart4Twos. I'm only half joking.

When I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, the family vehicle of choice for most of my friends and I was the "generic midsized family sedan" - Honda Accord, Toyota Camry, etc. Plus the Accords and Camrys of the late 80s and 90s was closer in size to a 2021 Civic than a 2021 Accord. I think we managed just fine, including taking extended multiday family road trips.

I don't have kids, but talking to my friends who do, it sounds like nowadays the minimum acceptable size to shuttle around a single child is a Honda Pilot or Toyota Highlander (or the current fad - Kia Telluride). I'm only half-joking.

Totally agree.

Part of the upsize, at least for families, is child car seats. They're enormous now, and children seem to stay in them longer (boosters and things). A co-worker had a mid-2000s Passat and you couldn't fit a baby seat in the back without forcing the passenger into an awkward upright seatback. I'm not sure what you do about that.

I'm in a relatively dense suburb outside DC and I just wish they'd spend a little more time/money on mixed transit options. We're like 80% there, but corners get cut and so bike lanes that dead-end, or sidewalks but not crosswalks, stuff like that.

I got it: "don't be evil"

> I can't help but suspect that a lot of the genome is a part of the boot sequence that helps you go from one cell up to all the differentiated organs and tissues and systems.

Boot sequence. Amazing. I've always been interested in how the DNA transcription looks like a Turing machine with the RNAP being the head and the one DNA strand being the tape. Is there any research in that kind of computational analogy or is it just a coincidence?

I mean, it could be except that the tape in this case has 3D structure and can change shape (and thereby expression) depending on histone modification. So its close to a good analogy, but in some ways DNA is more interesting and complex than a reel to reel tape.

Turing did actually make a significant contribution to biology, but unfortunately he died right around the time the structure of DNA was discovered. Can you imagine what might have been?

https://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing...

There are many similarities between information processing in biology and information processing in computing, but the analogies only stretch so far. It's worth reading the basic textbooks in this area to get an idea of what mainstream science currently thinks; speculating too far outside the mainstream is a guarantee you will never be successful.