Ulf S.C. Olsson

Observations in the future past.

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

Surely it's time for the men in white coats, isn't it ?

[Eric Berger @SciGuySpace]

It’s interesting to read critiques of the Moon base proposal, which seems like the smart path forward and could fit within NASA’s budget. The gist I’m hearing from critics is that this Isaacman priority is happy talk, will all fade away, and not happen. Then you realize these were the same people who:

- Said Isaacman wouldn’t be renominated
- Said he would was a political amateur
- Said he couldn’t build a coalition to cancel EUS and put SLS on a path toward sunset
-Said he was an Elon puppet (who has subsequently prioritized getting Blue Origin moving on HLS due to Starship delays)
- Said he would never get Congress, which called it a “national priority,” to go along with canceling Gateway
- Said he would never actually cancel Gateway

These people are now saying Isaacman can’t get NASA and its contractors to execute on a plan that has administration and Congressional support. The reality is, from a policy and political standpoint, NASA is in a better place now than it has been for years. If the Moon Base fails that’s on NASA and private industry, not stupid policy. And believe me, I’ve seen a lot of terrible, pie-in-the-sky space policy over the decades. #JourneyToMars

It’s a new era. I’m not sure everyone realizes this, but Isaacman and his team have eyes wide open to a lot of the major challenges facing NASA and they’re trying to fix them. They’re working long days. Weekends. It’s inspiring to see our government work like this, especially in an era when so much seems broken. I don’t know what will happen. Maybe this Moon base all will fade away. But I do know that NASA’s chance for success in the next couple of decades is a lot higher today than it has been for a long, long time. What we were doing was decidedly not working. This has a chance.

[Ulf S.C. Olsson @geodesicer]

@RoryStewartUK I cannot understand how Trump thinks, and Alistair and you have tried to dissect and analyze what I believe is mostly irrational and emotional outbursts - and nothing related to logic, empathy or moral.

Your guest Michael Wolff said as much.

The Iran war is a terrible mistake.

[Ulf S.C. Olsson @geodesicer]

@DonnyWals Yeah, definitely the case. Got local usage of LLM’s working last night (128 GB MacBook) and it was cool to see code being generated and tested totally unplugged.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.

[Ulf S.C. Olsson @geodesicer]

@skdh In Neal Stephensons Quicksilver, first volume of The Baroque Cycle, Newton and Leibniz is called ”Natural Philosophers”.

The term fits much better to what physics and science is really about - to observe, reflect on those observations and create an understandable structure.

[Teslaconomics @Teslaconomics]

“Never. I don’t ever give up. I’d have to be dead or incapacitated.” - Elon Musk

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

An incredible chance encounter with a family of wild Mountain Gorillas in Uganda. Note how the adult gorilla tells the curious young to be gentle against thw wildlife photographer

[📹 aleutiandream: https://t.co/m7t7MxuHVi]

[Ulf S.C. Olsson @geodesicer]

Trying to focus on solutions is hard when the problems are so many, so big and perhaps even easy to see. True then and even more so today.

[Ulf S.C. Olsson @geodesicer]

Visited Cape Canaveral last year, and again I was convinced that the Apollo project is the most impressive achievement humankind have done so far. Planning on visiting Boca Chica in august/september, and hopefully Starship will be ready for testing then. Time for the next step …

[Steve Jurvetson @FutureJurvetson]

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐍𝐞𝐢𝐥 𝐀𝐫𝐦𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐠’𝐬 𝐧𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐬
On July 21, 1969, two butterfly valves opened in Eagle's Valve Package Assembly (as seen here in my test unit), feeding propellant into the ascent stage engine, and Apollo 11 lifted off the moon. Neil Armstrong told me a fascinating story about it.

I asked him, of all of the systems and stages of humanity's first steps on another world, which did he worry about the most? He had spoken earlier that day about the frequently failing autopilot... the reliance on a global network of astronomers to spot solar flares in time to get the warning out... the onboard computers being less powerful than a Furby...

No, none of those. He dove into a detailed description of the hypergolic fuel mixing system for the lunar module. Rather than an ignition system, they had two substances that would ignite upon contact. Instead of electric solenoid actuators, he wished he had a big simple mechanical lever to open the valves. He kept using his hands to show how easy a big lever could be; “just give me a lever to pull” he told NASA.

That seemed a bit odd to me at first. So, I asked if he gave that answer because it really was the most likely point of failure, or because it symbolizes a vivid nightmare – having completed the moon mission, pushing the button... and the engines just won’t start.

He responded “yes, I had nightmares about that for two years prior to the launch.”

It’s a setup for a sequence of tough decisions. What would you do? Spend your remaining moments on the radio with loved ones? Try to hotwire it? Go for a long walk?

My VPA is a test unit from 1965. It's a visually complex design compared to all of the other hypergolic bipropellant motors I have from Apollo (R-4D, SE-8, LMDE) and Gemini (SE-6) where a couple solenoids flip a couple butterfly valves.. The VPA was a mission critical assembly; had the solenoid valves failed to open and supply propellant to the Ascent Engine, there was no getting home.

And then, during the Apollo 11 mission, guess what happened? The switch to activate this valve assembly broke off!

Buzz Aldrin later wrote: "A few hours earlier, after we returned to the LM interior once completing the first lunar moon walk, I noticed that the ascent engine arming breaker push/pull switch was broken. Apparently during movement wearing our large space suit 'backpacks,' either Neil or I bumped into this panel and broke off that particular switch. This switch was the direct means of arming our Ascent Stage engine which would allow us to leave the lunar surface. Mission Control verified that the switch was open, meaning that the engine was currently unarmed. If we could not get the engine armed, we would be stranded on the Moon. They advised us to leave the switch in the open position until the timeline called for it to be engaged. I started to think of ways to activate the switch if pushing it by hand failed. As it turned out, the very pen I used to record these notes was the perfect tool to engage this circuit breaker."

It wasn’t just Neil. I read this interesting passage in the book Apollo (p.359): “For Mike Collins, circling the moon alone, the lunar liftoff was the most nerve-wracking moment of his long flying career: During the six months since he had been selected to be the command module pilot, his secret terror had been that he might have to come back to Earth alone.”

And finally, a revelation from one Neil Armstrong's last, and rare interviews that I discovered while researching the handwritten engineering notes I have for the Eagle construction log: prior to launch, Neil thought there was only a 50% chance of successfully landing on the moon, but that they should go for it.

[Ulf S.C. Olsson @geodesicer]

We in Europe have conveniently forgotten how repressive we were just a hundred years ago towards women, and in Switzerland and Portugal full voting rights for women was gained as late as in the 1970’s.

Events in 21’st century shows how these rights still needs defending.

[Omid Djalili @omid9]

Incredible video. Afghan dad jokingly says school is only for boys. Watch his remarkable daughter - who can’t be more than 5 or 6 years old - respond with these arguments.

Afghan girls have been denied access to schools and universities. This little girl's courage represents the collective voice of countless Afghan girls who yearn for equal educational opportunities.

As an advocate for girls' education the father's teasing is simply to highlight an important message: that the Taliban - another backward regime - are harming the people of his country.

It’s time the world is done with them.

Ditto the “Islamic” Republic in Iran #regime

[Tom Mueller @lrocket]

The SpaceX dream has become the Ariane Space nightmare

[Ulf S.C. Olsson @geodesicer]

@yarotrof One plan makes todays events logical:

1. Replace Lukashenko with Prigozhin.
2. Prigozhin uses Belarus nuclear weapons recently received, and/or blows the Zapo nuclear power station.
3. Russia’s hands are clean.

Executed by a non-state ”mercenary” actor that Putin can disavow.

[Ulf S.C. Olsson @geodesicer]

One plan makes todays events logical:

1. Replace Lukashenko with Prigozhin.
2. Prigozhin uses Belarus nuclear weapons recently received, and/or blows the Zapo nuclear power station.
3. Russia’s hands are clean.

Executed by a non-state ”mercenary” actor that Putin can disavow.

[Sir William Browder KCMG @Billbrowder]

Whenever something doesn’t make sense on the surface, it means we just don’t have all the information

[Ulf S.C. Olsson @geodesicer]

@Michael_For14 @wartranslated Its the nuclear weapons given to Belarus he will use, and he will be responsible for blowing up the nuclear plant. All russian hands clean.

[Ulf S.C. Olsson @geodesicer]

@wadeisold @Kasparov63 But it will be executed by a non-state ”mercenary” actor that Putin can distance himself from.

Will NATO go to war against a ”rogue” actor, not part of Belarus and outside Russia?

Thats why it is sinister, and why people have to prepare.

[Ulf S.C. Olsson @geodesicer]

@AnnaBrancaleon @wartranslated But it will be executed by a non-state ”mercenary” actor that Putin can distance himself from.

Difficult to see how NATO will react, thats why I see the plan as sinister and that people have to see behind todays activities and be prepared.

[Ulf S.C. Olsson @geodesicer]

@Kasparov63 One sinister plan I can see, and which makes todays events logical, is:

1. Replace Lukashenko with Prigozhin.
2. Prigozhin uses the nuclear weapons recently received, and/or blows the Zapo nuclear power station.
3. Russia is not involved.
4. Ukraine counter-offensive is stymied.

[Ulf S.C. Olsson @geodesicer]

@Billbrowder One sinister plan I can see, and which makes todays events logical, is:

1. Replace Lukashenko with Prigozhin.
2. Prigozhin uses the nuclear weapons recently received, and/or blows the Zapo nuclear power station.
3. Russia is not involved.
4. Ukraine counter-offensive is stymied.