Re:Boeing 737 Max Aircraft: Preliminary Investigative Findin...
by redis_mlc on Sunday March 08, 2020 @01:27AM
(#22516638)
I worked for the "Canadian JPL" back in the previous "climate change" panic, "the ozone hole."
Even though it was a government agency, working at a national lab felt even more productive than the private sector.
The reasons are that the departmental leadership is 100% done by research scientists who are ruthlessly efficient at doing science and writing papers about them.
My department had approx. 4 senior scientists, a computer hardware engineer, a payload engineer, a CNC technician, a sysadmin, 2 technical consultants, and one administrative staff.
We did custom payloads for the Shuttle, balloons and rockets which did atmospheric measurements. The software was primarily custom in C for telemetry and HP Basic/etc. for plotting.
I highly recommend working for a national lab for a couple of years. Besides an unlimited budget, it's great having a sense of mission.
Factoid 1: We used Fidonet to copy data from launch sites to the lab for quick turnaround and to ensure the instruments were functioning and calibrated properly.
Factoid 2: Since this we pre-WWW, sample source code was often hard to obtain. So we had the world's shareware on a single optical disk with an index file so people could find sample code.
Factoid 3: But since it was a national lab, if we needed, we had access to SOTA civil and military systems that came with source code. I was familiar with those systems, but we never needed them while I was involved.
What was more tractable about studying the ozone hole than climate change was that we could make direct observations and reducing CFCs had a fairly immediate effect. There wasn't an issue with "ozone hole deniers."
To see the lab's papers, do a scientific search for Dr. Hans Fast and his co-authors.
Re:Boeing 737 Max Aircraft: Preliminary Investigative Findin...
by bumby on Sunday March 08, 2020 @09:12AM
(#22517836)
Thank you so much for this. I’ve been looking into applying to a few national labs and what you’ve started about the “mission first” culture is exactly what I’m looking for
Even though it was a government agency, working at a national lab felt even more productive than the private sector.
The reasons are that the departmental leadership is 100% done by research scientists who are ruthlessly efficient at doing science and writing papers about them.
My department had approx. 4 senior scientists, a computer hardware engineer, a payload engineer, a CNC technician, a sysadmin, 2 technical consultants, and one administrative staff.
We did custom payloads for the Shuttle, balloons and rockets which did atmospheric measurements. The software was primarily custom in C for telemetry and HP Basic/etc. for plotting.
I highly recommend working for a national lab for a couple of years. Besides an unlimited budget, it's great having a sense of mission.
Factoid 1: We used Fidonet to copy data from launch sites to the lab for quick turnaround and to ensure the instruments were functioning and calibrated properly.
Factoid 2: Since this we pre-WWW, sample source code was often hard to obtain. So we had the world's shareware on a single optical disk with an index file so people could find sample code.
Factoid 3: But since it was a national lab, if we needed, we had access to SOTA civil and military systems that came with source code. I was familiar with those systems, but we never needed them while I was involved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion
What was more tractable about studying the ozone hole than climate change was that we could make direct observations and reducing CFCs had a fairly immediate effect. There wasn't an issue with "ozone hole deniers."
To see the lab's papers, do a scientific search for Dr. Hans Fast and his co-authors.