What Interest Me This Week

Skyhooks

After looking into the science of space-elevators, it turns out that skyhook is a much more feasible solution as an orbital infrastructure bootstrap.

I've never done the costing but I wanna imagine it can be bulit at the cost of one high-end Netflix movie.

Surely this is not media business scalable by the billions, business model here resemble a bridge more than a social network.

If revenue can cover the cost within a decade, I'd say it's a decent deal.

I do think though business model is the least of concerns for future orbital bus stations. Anyone that runs infra in the orbit will have to deal with legality grey zones, hazardous space junk and gun fires from China/Russia/America.

This is early colonial exploration all over again. Anyone who attempts this has better study the history of East India Company carefully.

The art of yak-shaving

To the uninitiated, yak-shaving is are the pre-requisite things have to do just so you can even get started with achieving your primary objective. Some use the term bikeshedding.

For instance, downloading & installing Java virtual machine, setting the path names before you learn to code in Java.

In software development it's common for yak-shaving to go several layers deep. On any given problem there are yak-shaves that are expected, and then there are those you don't see coming.

Those that are foreseen can be managed. It's the unexpected yak-shavings that are most costly and spiritually hazardous.

It's conceivable for Sisyphus to learn to love his boulder by the eleventh time he pushed it up the hill. But it's a different matter if there's a fresh and random obstacle that trips him up each time.

A good problem solver knows how to love these yak-shavings. It's almost the resolvement of a problem is simply a side effect of his journey.

That's easy to say but I can't name one mental framework that allows me to enter that mode in an instant.

Meantime do zoom out every now and then. You'd find that your entire life is one big act of yak-shaving.