> That's all to say, that I doubt money is as big of an obstacle to getting started in this as you imagine if you prioritized it.
Very much the case! (Well, idk quite what gp imagined, but it's not as expensive as many things.)
When I was learning, around 2020, I budgeted ~$300 / month for glider flying, + ~$600 (I think: they've gone up!) for annual club dues. These days the monthly would be a bit higher, and the dues more like $700-800, I think. Flying as a club member is a lot cheaper than rides; you pay for the tow and for time on the aircraft, but aircraft time is way, way cheaper than power (no fuel to burn, no engine to maintain) and the instructors are volunteers.
NB this is in a club environment. The upside is that it's cheap and the club environment is a really good place to learn by osmosis / watching everybody else / listening to stories / seeing all kinds of different situations. The downside is that it's a huge time commitment. You'll drive 1.5 hrs and hang around all day to get twoish flights, sometimes < 10 min. each. And you have to be willing to commit all of every Saturday (or Sunday) for a year plus: you need to be flying just about every week, and given that some weekends'll be weathered out you have to be ready to take advantage of every flyable weekend. Folks that aren't committed just don't make progress: hang around, season after season, still flying with instructors, until they finally give up or just occasionally grind it out.
(I did the bulk of my training in 2020 and spring/early summer 2021. This was perfect: I was single and newish to the area I was living in, and thanks to Covid I had nothing else going on in my life. Even as things started to reopen in 2021 it was easy to maintain that "saturday? of course I'm at the field" habit.)
This is all harder to do as a Real Adult with responsibilities. Some folks manage to do it, but it's harder. Commercial operations, where you go and get a whole bunch of flying in relatively quickly, are also an option---but I hear there's a wide range of quality, and even the best won't get you the seasoning / airmanship you get from hanging around at the field every weekend for a year, flying in all sorts of conditions and taking advantage of the unofficial ground school from all the other instructor/student pairs there at the same time.
The economics change first once you've got your rating, when you're no longer doing short training flights and the bulk of your flying is (one hopes!) longer soaring flights; and then again when (if) you buy your own glider---but it's still that few thousand bucks / year order of magnitude. Expensive, but doable, especially compared to power.
Gliders themselves range from "surprisingly inexpensive" to "less expensive than a new powered aircraft", more or less. I'd expect to hear something like $5,000 for a Schweizer 1-26 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweizer_SGS_1-26: classic glider, still widely flown by a devoted community, but appreciably lower performance than gliders built after the massive jump that came with the switch to fiberglass); I have a part-share in a Jantar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SZD-41_Jantar_Standard, early fiberglass) that totals $25,000 or a little less, with reasonably nice avionics.
So, all told, yes, flying gliders costs a meaningful amount of money, but isn't terribly terribly expensive. The question to ask yourself is really not whether you've got the money, but whether you've got the time.
You need to keep your nose on the grindstone for years to progress to glider cross country flying. Then you end up as an instructor and have to finagle time in your own glider. There's a bunch of time upgrading and updating flight instruments. You need a viable glider club to have enough people to get you in the air between working on club aircraft, equipment and airfield issues.
These guys had a big oxygen tank.
It's nice to see they were using an Air Glide S and managed to make their goal against the odd 56kt headwind.
Thanks for sharing this detail. I've been interested in taking some form of flight training for a long time and finally have the financial means to do it, but I haven't decided whether to go with glider or powered flight. Your comments makes me realize that the time commitment might be larger than I can manage at this stage (two kids 1 and 5) and so may need to wait until a little later in life.
I want so badly to try and talk you into flying gliders, because it's amazing: way, way more fun (IMO) than the overwhelming majority of the power flying you can do as a civilian. And there are people who make it work! But ... probably this is wise, and better to make thoughtful decision.
It seems like this gets easier as the kids get older; I've seen parents of teenagers make it work. For some folks it's a family affair---several kids & one or both parents learning to fly. These families have been uniformly super fun to have at the field! For others I think it's a matter of the kids being old enough to have some independence, + I'm sure a very supportive partner.
So don't give up on gliders forever! I'm expecting times in my life when I can't get out to the field enough to stay proficient & safe, and I'll have to quit flying for a little---but a dearly hope not forever. It's just that, likewise, now's maybe not the right time for you.
> Folks that aren't committed just don't make progress: hang around, season after season, still flying with instructors, until they finally give up or just occasionally grind it out.
They take more calendar time, but do they take more instruction? Because if they make the same progress per session, I don't see why you would think it inferior to spread it out over several years.
If you don't go often enough you definitely won't make the same progress per session. You'll spend most of each session trying to remaster what you lost from the last one.
For powered flying, one a week is already on the low end... most instructors would recommend 2-3x/week.
Flying skills are very perishable, especially when first learning. This is why there are several different rules about recency of experience before you can do things like carry passengers, recurrent training requirements, etc.
I didn't realize the skills were so perishable, but once you point it out it seems obvious.
Since you also mentioned powered flying, and since I imagine there are a lot of transferable skills, do people commonly learn both?
Pay has gotten better, plus the individual branches all have stronger CyberCorps now.
That said, CyberCom still has issues because it's a unified command and not a branch, which means it has limited say and will always get overshadowed by individual branches and the NSA.
Another interesting change is the rise of private sector players and public-private partnerships to help remediate the pay gap - this is what China and Russia did due to similar issues around renumeration, and most other NATO+ allies like Israel, UAE, Singapore, etc leverage this model.
Anecdotally, outside of the NSA, it appears that most what I'd term "white collar lifers" within branches prefer Intel over Cyber because it's easier to learn due to less STEM, and a significant portion of those who do Cyber will tend to leave for private sector.
That said, Cyber Reserves forces are fairly prominent now and probably the best way to remediate this gap.
I'm biased, but imo, the US needs to adopt the Israeli model of public-private offensive security capabilities plus a strong reserves component, because the pay gap and the respect gap just won't be fixed due to internal intertia in the services.
In relatively recent versions of Anki, you can create nested Cloze deletions: "{{c3::{{c1::foo}}{{c2::bar}}}}" will show you cards "[...]bar", "foo[...]", and "[...]", in that order, all with answers "foobar".
As for multiple choice and q&a---my practice is to make both Cloze and basic cards for, well, most things---Cloze are good for the early steps and for seeing how different pieces fit together, but basic cards are more demanding, and without them I don't quite feel like I've learned a thing.
(FWIW my primary use is physics & the mathematics behind it, not language learning.)
I think that's customary at LessWrong, more or less---if folks write something that's of interest to the community, they'll double-post, blog and forum. Likewise things get cross-posted to the EA forum and maybe other places.
Yes! My last year in grad school, this is part of how I kept my sanity: random little side-projects on which I could make concrete progress in a couple of evenings.
Well, to be fair, you actually also have to put in some numbers, too: masses, mixing angles, coupling constants, and the Higgs vacuum expectation value. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model#Construction_of... .) But, yeah, that symmetry description is incredibly powerful.
I'm curious about his use of Runge-Kutta. IANA numerical methods expert, but it seems like this is exactly what symplectic integrators (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symplectic_integrator) are for. Looks like he gets very good results, but how trustworthy is Runge-Kutta?
From his perspective, of course, using Runge-Kutta makes perfect sense. This is "Huh: I have this tool, and applying it to this problem wouldn't be too hard; would the tool work?", not "I should create a new tool."
I agree in general, and it would have been nice to see some plots of some of quantities that should be conserved, e.g. how well does his simulation preserve the initial energy and angular momentum?
Having said that, it is an adaptive RK scheme, and it seems to work pretty well, the article shows that the results match some reference data quite well, and it even captures some quite subtle effects, most notably the influence of the moon.
He mentions a 10% error in energy conservation, so not too great.
Probably he should have done research before he started, he would have found one of the several lecture notes that tell you how to integrate orbits. They tell you that symplectic methods are great for time reversible problems.
Or he would have found one of the public codes for integrating the solar system very far into the future.
That was precisely my logic. Maybe I'll build a symplectic integrator in future, but this was a case of "Hey, I've got this hammer, maybe I can drive this screw with it!"
It's not clear to me how these warrants are "automatic". FTAmendments:
"a magistrate judge [...] has authority to issue a warrant to use remote access to search electronic storage media [...]" (emphasis mine)
IANAL, though; could someone who knows more explain what's going on? How will the procedure and requirements for obtaining a warrant for such "remote access" differ from those for searching, say, a house?
Edit: as I typed, slapshot posted some helpful explanation.
Seconded. I'd note that while Johnson's memoir (/Kelly/) is more inspiring, I recall there being more meat in Rich's memoir (/Skunk Works/)---more discussion of the technology, organizational dynamics, and interpersonal politics. Both are, as you say, very much worth reading.
Very much the case! (Well, idk quite what gp imagined, but it's not as expensive as many things.)
When I was learning, around 2020, I budgeted ~$300 / month for glider flying, + ~$600 (I think: they've gone up!) for annual club dues. These days the monthly would be a bit higher, and the dues more like $700-800, I think. Flying as a club member is a lot cheaper than rides; you pay for the tow and for time on the aircraft, but aircraft time is way, way cheaper than power (no fuel to burn, no engine to maintain) and the instructors are volunteers.
NB this is in a club environment. The upside is that it's cheap and the club environment is a really good place to learn by osmosis / watching everybody else / listening to stories / seeing all kinds of different situations. The downside is that it's a huge time commitment. You'll drive 1.5 hrs and hang around all day to get twoish flights, sometimes < 10 min. each. And you have to be willing to commit all of every Saturday (or Sunday) for a year plus: you need to be flying just about every week, and given that some weekends'll be weathered out you have to be ready to take advantage of every flyable weekend. Folks that aren't committed just don't make progress: hang around, season after season, still flying with instructors, until they finally give up or just occasionally grind it out.
(I did the bulk of my training in 2020 and spring/early summer 2021. This was perfect: I was single and newish to the area I was living in, and thanks to Covid I had nothing else going on in my life. Even as things started to reopen in 2021 it was easy to maintain that "saturday? of course I'm at the field" habit.)
This is all harder to do as a Real Adult with responsibilities. Some folks manage to do it, but it's harder. Commercial operations, where you go and get a whole bunch of flying in relatively quickly, are also an option---but I hear there's a wide range of quality, and even the best won't get you the seasoning / airmanship you get from hanging around at the field every weekend for a year, flying in all sorts of conditions and taking advantage of the unofficial ground school from all the other instructor/student pairs there at the same time.
The economics change first once you've got your rating, when you're no longer doing short training flights and the bulk of your flying is (one hopes!) longer soaring flights; and then again when (if) you buy your own glider---but it's still that few thousand bucks / year order of magnitude. Expensive, but doable, especially compared to power.
Gliders themselves range from "surprisingly inexpensive" to "less expensive than a new powered aircraft", more or less. I'd expect to hear something like $5,000 for a Schweizer 1-26 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweizer_SGS_1-26: classic glider, still widely flown by a devoted community, but appreciably lower performance than gliders built after the massive jump that came with the switch to fiberglass); I have a part-share in a Jantar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SZD-41_Jantar_Standard, early fiberglass) that totals $25,000 or a little less, with reasonably nice avionics.
So, all told, yes, flying gliders costs a meaningful amount of money, but isn't terribly terribly expensive. The question to ask yourself is really not whether you've got the money, but whether you've got the time.
reply