https://amongst-other-things.com/ Marginalia, read aloud. Short, deeply-researched audio histories — aviation and the crashes that rewrote design, the engineering behind flight and spaceflight, and the early American West — told as stories, not summaries. en-us Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Amongst Other Things Marginalia, read aloud. Short, deeply-researched audio histories — aviation and the crashes that rewrote design, the engineering behind flight and spaceflight, and the early American West — told as stories, not summaries. episodic false Amongst Other Things REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_EMAIL@example.com For five episodes this cluster has been quietly running away from one problem. Immersed finite elements skip the mesh and dunk the geometry in a dumb background grid. XFEM grows a crack on a fixed mesh because remeshing as it advances was called computationally fatal. The mesh-quality episode told you what a good element looks like. Every one of those is a clever way to not do the thing this episode is finally about — turning a dirty CAD solid into a hundred million well-shaped elements that fill it, conform to its boundary, and don't crash the solver. This is the prequel the whole cluster kept deferring to. Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 technology/concepts/019-mesh-generation 5920 false Everyone who has ever run a finite element solve knows the rule: skinny triangles are bad, keep your aspect ratios near one. That rule is folklore, and the folklore is wrong about which angle to fear. This episode tears the phrase "bad element" in half. A bad element hurts you in two completely different ways — it can wreck how accurately you interpolate the answer, and it can wreck how solvable the linear system is — and the two failure modes are triggered by opposite geometric features. We follow the reversal across forty years, from a nineteen fifty-seven book about hypercircles to a UC Berkeley meshing paper that finally said out loud that there is no single number called element quality. Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 technology/concepts/018-mesh-quality 2513 false In the fall of 2012, a graduate student in Toronto trained a neural network on two gaming graphics cards in his bedroom — and won a contest by a margin nobody had ever seen. That was the starting gun. This episode walks the fourteen years that followed, from a Go board in Seoul to a database of every protein known to science to a video call where everyone but the victim was a deepfake. Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 technology/concepts/003-ai-impacts-on-our-world 2197 false On the eighteenth of March, twenty twenty-six, the FDA approved icotrokinra — brand name ICOTYDE — the first oral peptide that blocks the IL-twenty-three receptor. By every rule of pharmacology, a nineteen-hundred-dalton macrocycle with a fraction of a percent oral bioavailability should be useless as a pill. It clears skin like an injectable. We use that paradox as the lens onto the entire psoriasis and psoriatic-arthritis market — the IL-twenty-three injectables, the IL-seventeen leaders, the oral TYK-two incumbent it was built to beat, and the biosimilar gravity every new launch now falls into. Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 health/landscape/001-icotyde-pso-psa-landscape 2377 false Topology optimization spends almost all its wall-clock inside one operation it repeats hundreds of times — assemble the stiffness matrix, solve for displacement. And a sixty-year-old aerospace technology exists for exactly that bottleneck: superelements, which condense a whole region down to its boundary and never look at the interior again. The two ideas have barely been married. This episode works through why, and where condensation could plug into the optimization loop next. Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 technology/concepts/017-superelements-topology-optimization 3001 false In nineteen oh four, an Australian engineer named Anthony Michell published an eight-page paper describing the lightest structure that can possibly exist — the mathematical floor no material at any budget can beat. Then the world ignored it for fifty years. The same man, the very next year, patented a bearing the size of a dinner plate that changed shipbuilding inside a decade. Two claims to immortality, same person, opposite fates. Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 technology/concepts/016-michell-structures 950 false Every finite element computation you have ever run reduces, in its innermost loop, to the same two-hundred-year-old trick: replace an integral you can't do with a weighted sum of the integrand at a handful of cleverly chosen points. This episode opens the box that everyone treats as sealed — where the weight w and the Gauss point location in your assembly loop actually come from, why with n points you integrate polynomials of degree 2n minus 1 exactly, and what happens when a curved boundary or a sliver refuses to cooperate with the textbook rule. Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 technology/concepts/015-quadrature 3135 false Last episode ended on a confession. Topology optimization hands you a gray density field — every cell scored somewhere between solid and void — and then asks you to draw the boundary by hand. Pick a threshold, call everything above it solid, and live with the fact that the part you certify is provably not the part the optimizer found. Whose part is it, then? This episode resolves that gray-boundary problem by changing the one thing nobody questioned: instead of asking how dense each cell is, make the location of the edge itself the design variable. Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 technology/concepts/013-level-set-xfem 7200 false For most of human history, finding your way meant looking outside — at stars, a coastline, a compass needle pulled north. This is the story of the eighty-year quest to do it sealed in a box, in the dark, with no window at all: a machine that knows where it is purely by remembering every push it has ever felt. From a gyroscopic gunsight on a rocking battleship to a German vacuum-tube computer riding the first rocket into space, from a washing-machine-sized box that flew a B-29 across America untouched to the alarm nobody had seen that nearly aborted the first Moon landing. Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/concepts/guidance-navigation-control 3960 false A computer was handed nothing but the outer skin of a Boeing triple-seven-class wing and told to fill the inside however it liked. It came back with curved spars, diagonal ribs, and intricate internal trusses that no human draws by hand — and when someone held up a cross-section of a hornbill's beak, it looked the same. This is topology optimization, the method that discovers structural geometry from physics alone, and this is the full two-hour, method-level walk through how it actually works. Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 technology/concepts/012-topology-optimization 6958 false CUDA and MPI are both SPMD — you write one program and launch many copies. So why do they feel like they come from different planets? This episode walks two working developers through the mental models, line by line, kernel by message, until the split clicks. We name the index incantation, the warp, the rank, the deadlock, the race condition, and the one inversion that explains all of it: in CUDA communication is free and synchronization is the danger, while in MPI communication is the thing you write by hand and where every bug lives. Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 technology/concepts/011-cuda-vs-mpi-programming-models 2918 false Almost everything sold as "closed-loop melt-pool control" in metal 3D printing isn't really control at all. It's monitoring with good marketing. In this full two-hour technical deep dive, Chris and Alex work through why — starting from the counter-intuitive fact that the laser isn't melting powder, it's drilling a hole into the metal, and ending at the wall the whole industry keeps running into: the physics is faster than any feedback loop you can build. Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 technology/concepts/010-closed-loop-melt-pool-control 5869 false In nineteen forty-six an astronomer named Fred Whipple noticed something backward: a thin, spaced layer of material protects a spacecraft better than a thick solid wall. Eighty years later, that idea has a room made of woven fabric bolted to the International Space Station — a balloon you'd trust your life to, tougher against space debris than three inches of solid aluminum. This is the story of how it got there. Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 technology/concepts/009-inflatable-space-habitat 2681 false In nineteen ninety, the most expensive science instrument ever built opened its eye for the first time — and the stars came back as smears. Hubble's main mirror had been polished to one of the smoothest surfaces in human history, and ground to exactly the wrong shape. This is the story of how that happened: a single test device trusted absolutely, two backup tests that flagged the error and were overruled, a correctly-figured mirror sitting unused in a warehouse, and a flake of black paint smaller than a grain of rice. Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 technology/concepts/008-telescope-that-couldnt-see 3137 false For sixty years, the hardest problem in spaceflight has been getting a vehicle back down through its own atmosphere without burning up. There are only three ways to do it — let the shield burn away, insulate against the heat, or pump fluid through the skin to carry it off — and every generation of engineers has had to bet on one. This is the history of that bet, told through the people who made it: John Glenn flying a fireball by hand, the Avco technicians who filled three hundred seventy thousand honeycomb cells one at a time, the NASA scientist who crossed into SpaceX to cut his own material's cost tenfold, and the astronaut who once dangled beneath a Space Shuttle to fix it with his bare hands. Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 technology/concepts/007-heat-shield-tiles-sweating-steel 3926 false In June of twenty twenty-four, two astronauts launched on an eight-day test flight of Boeing's Starliner and didn't come home for two hundred and eighty-six days — and when they did, they rode a competitor's capsule. This is the technical story of how it happened: not one catastrophic flaw, but the same chemistry biting the same spacecraft three different ways across five years, and an organization that kept reading each bite as a one-off. Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 engineering-failures/disasters/002-starliner-what-went-wrong 3403 false A working SR-71 Blackbird leaked fuel onto the runway every time it taxied — by design. So did every other Blackbird. So would yours, if you were running an airframe at Mach three. This is an hour-long tour of the strangest engineering decisions in aerospace history, told as a chain of surprises: the materials people invented by accident, the failure modes nobody had words for yet, and the crashes that taught the rest of us how airplanes really break. Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/concepts/aerospace-structural-engineering#fullhour-2026-06-08 3427 false The most powerful rocket ever flown is built out of the same material as a beer keg and a kitchen sink. SpaceX scrapped an entire carbon-fiber factory to make that choice — and it wasn't a quirk. It was the first of six interconnected engineering bets, each one counterintuitive on its own, each one only making sense in the context of the others. This episode walks through all six: the steel reversal, the methane fuel that's secretly a Mars plan, the engine the propulsion community had written off as impossible, the booster that gets caught by a tower instead of landing on legs, the "blow up and learn" iteration culture, and the one bet that still hasn't paid off. Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 technology/concepts/006-starship 2754 false For more than twenty-five years, there has not been a single moment when every human being was on Earth. The International Space Station — the most expensive object ever built — began as a Cold War boast, became a peace treaty disguised as plumbing, and turned into a place where the most ordinary morning is one clogged filter away from death. This is the story of how two space programs born as rivals ended up sharing a home above our heads, and what it means that we plan to deliberately destroy it. Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 technology/concepts/005-international-space-station 3074 false In the early nineteen eighties, an Australian spy plane dropped to mast height over the Indian Ocean and photographed a small winged spacecraft the West wasn't supposed to know existed. This is the sixty-year story of that shape, and how a Soviet sketch became an American spaceplane named Tenacity. Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/frontiers/001-dream-chaser-space-plane 3600 false Twice, NASA destroyed a space shuttle and killed its crew. Twice, the engineers saw it coming. In nineteen eighty-six it was a rubber O-ring that went stiff in the cold; in two thousand three it was a chunk of foam that punched a hole in a wing. Different hardware, same story — a known danger that the institution had quietly decided to call normal. This episode makes the machine legible — what a solid rocket field joint is, what reentry does to a wing — and then walks the human decisions that turned warnings into wreckage. Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 technology/concepts/004-challenger-columbia-engineering 3194 false On January twenty-seventh, nineteen sixty-seven, three astronauts died in seventeen seconds on a launch pad in Florida. The rocket wasn't even fueled — the test was officially non-hazardous. The men were sealed inside a pure-oxygen cabin lined with seventy pounds of flammable material, behind a hatch that couldn't open against internal pressure. We trace the chain of engineering decisions that made the fire inevitable, and the chain of human moments — Gus Grissom hanging a lemon on the simulator, a prayer-portrait given to a program manager, Wally Schirra warning his friend the night before — that almost stopped it. Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/disasters/apollo-1 1377 false Between January twenty twenty-four and the spring of twenty twenty-six, the United States started building data centers at a scale with no real precedent in industrial history. This is what's actually happening — the announcements, the grid that's already breaking under the weight of them, the tax code that just chose gas and nuclear, the small Black neighborhood in Memphis where unpermitted turbines were photographed from the air, and the six-hundred-billion-dollar question that even Sequoia Capital can't answer. Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 technology/concepts/002-gigawatt-buildout 3600 false On a July morning in nineteen eighty-two, a trash truck driver in Rocky Mountain National Park became the only working warning system for a dam that had been failing in slow motion for seventy-nine years. This is the story of how Lawn Lake came apart, how three people died who didn't have to, and how the disaster came down to a patch of soft lead the size of a pencil eraser and a broken axle the day before. Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 engineering-failures/disasters/001-lawn-lake-dam 900 false Before there was a discipline called aerospace structures, there were two brothers, a bicycle shop in Ohio, and a hand-built wooden airplane covered in fabric meant for women's underwear. This is the story of the 1903 Wright Flyer — how it was made, what it was made of, and what made it so different from every airplane that came after. Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/pioneers/wright-flyer 947 false In nineteen twenty-seven, a young California designer named Jack Northrop laminated plywood inside a concrete mold, glued the halves together, and produced an airplane that looked like a teardrop with a propeller. The Lockheed Vega became the airplane Amelia Earhart flew solo across the Atlantic — and the proof of concept that turned every airliner that came after it into a smooth metal egg. Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/pioneers/vega-dc3 781 false In Southampton in nineteen thirty-four, an aircraft designer named Reginald Mitchell had a problem he had to solve: he had to fit eight machine guns inside a wing without making the wing thick enough to slow the airplane down. His Canadian aerodynamicist proposed an ellipse. The result was the Supermarine Spitfire — the wing that kept Britain out of German hands four years later, designed by a man who never knew it had. Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/pioneers/spitfire 830 false In nineteen fifteen, while Europe was killing itself in the trenches, a fifty-six-year-old German professor decided he was tired of waiting for the rest of the world to catch up to metal. He built an airplane out of sheet steel — because he couldn't get the aluminum alloy he wanted — and flew it. The German Army called it the Tin Donkey. It was slow. It was ugly. And it didn't care if you shot it. Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/pioneers/junkers 802 false In nineteen forty-four, Boeing built an airplane that had to fly higher than any combat aircraft had ever flown. The crews needed pressurized cabins because at thirty thousand feet, the air is unbreathable and the temperature is forty below. The structural problem was that the fuselage had to be a pressure vessel — a balloon with a tunnel running through it — and that pressure vessel had to survive thousands of cycles. Nobody had built one before. The B-29 was the first. Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/pioneers/b29 718 false At Mach two cruise, the Concorde's aluminum airframe stretched by six to twelve inches. Pilots used the gap. They wedged their hats into a particular slot on the flight deck during cruise, and on descent, as the airplane cooled and contracted, the gap closed. The hat got stuck. Forever. Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/frontiers/xb70-concorde 899 false In late two thousand eighteen, Elon Musk announced that SpaceX's next-generation rocket — the one supposed to fly to Mars — would be built out of stainless steel. The internet collectively assumed he had lost his mind. The math turned out to be defensible. The bet was that iteration speed mattered more than mass efficiency. The first decade of Starship results suggests the bet might be right. Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/frontiers/starship 963 false The fastest airplane the United States ever built. Made out of titanium it had to buy from the Soviet Union, through CIA shell companies, while the cover story said the metal was for pizza ovens. Designed by a man who decided that if you can't make a fuel tank that doesn't leak, you shouldn't try — you should make a fuel tank that only seals itself once the airframe gets hot enough. Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/frontiers/sr71-blackbird 1050 false In June of two thousand three, NASA's solar-powered Helios prototype — two hundred and forty-seven feet of wingspan, lighter than a small car — flexed into a permanent U-shape after hitting mild turbulence off Kauai. Within two minutes, it had torn itself to pieces in the air. The investigation didn't blame the structure exactly. It blamed something subtler: the math we use to design rigid airplanes does not work for very flexible ones, and we haven't finished writing the new math yet. Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/frontiers/helios 963 false In nineteen sixty-nine, NASA landed a spacecraft on the moon whose pressurized hull was twelve thousandths of an inch thick. Three-tenths of a millimeter. Three sheets of household aluminum foil. Engineers genuinely worried that a dropped tool inside the cabin could puncture it. It worked twelve times. Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/frontiers/apollo-lm 885 false The Boeing seven-eighty-seven was the first airliner with a fuselage built in single continuous carbon-fiber barrels, laid up layer by layer on a giant rotating mandrel and cured in an autoclave the size of a building. Half the airplane, by weight, is composite. It burns twenty percent less fuel than its predecessor. And it represents a structural bet — that composites can replace aluminum for primary aircraft structure — whose long-term consequences we will not fully understand for another fifty years. Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/frontiers/787 1018 false In the fall of nineteen fifty-nine and the spring of nineteen sixty, two brand-new Lockheed Electra turboprops broke up at altitude over Texas and Indiana. Ninety-seven people were killed. The chief test pilot flew the same conditions and could not reproduce the failure. The investigation took most of a year and turned on a phenomenon that didn't have a name yet — and that, today, every aerospace engineering student learns as a fundamental lesson in structural dynamics. Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/disasters/electra-flutter 887 false In nineteen seventy-two, an American Airlines DC-10 over Windsor, Ontario, lost a cargo door at altitude. The floor collapsed. The captain saved everyone aboard. The fix was known, cheap, and not made mandatory. Twenty-one months later, the same exact failure killed three hundred forty-six people outside Paris. The fix was the same fix. The price of waiting to make it mandatory was the largest single-airplane disaster in aviation history up to that point. Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/disasters/dc10-door 913 false The world's first commercial jet airliner. Two fatal in-flight breakups in three months. The Royal Navy lifting wreckage off the floor of the Mediterranean. A British prime minister handing the engineers a blank check. An airliner drowned in a giant water tank until it finally split open. And, sixty years later, a textbook story that still gets the cause wrong. Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/disasters/comet 1538 false At twenty-four thousand feet, halfway between Hilo and Honolulu, the entire upper section of a Boeing seven-thirty-seven peeled off in one explosive failure. Eighteen feet of skin. Gone. A flight attendant was sucked out. The captain brought the airplane down to Maui with no roof and one fatality out of ninety-five souls. The cause was a kind of structural decay nobody had named yet — and the regulations that followed changed how every airliner in the world is maintained. Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/disasters/aloha-243 1067 false By nineteen thirty, the global aviation industry was building stressed-skin metal airliners. There was just one problem. The math everyone was using said the airplanes shouldn't have been flying. Real thin metal sheets buckled at a fraction of the load the textbook equations predicted, and nobody could explain why. A Hungarian named Theodore von Kármán arrived at Caltech and spent twenty years figuring it out. Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/concepts/von-karman 1011 false In nineteen sixty-six, NASA contracted a small California company to build a single piece of structural analysis software that the whole agency could use. The project was called NASTRAN. It became the most influential aerospace software ever written, was released to the public, and saved an estimated seven hundred million dollars in non-aerospace industries — bridges, cars, buildings — in its first thirteen years. Most engineers today have never heard the name. Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/concepts/nastran 773 false In late September of nineteen oh six, a German metallurgist named Alfred Wilm finished a sample of aluminum alloy on a Saturday afternoon, didn't have time to test it before going home, and left it sitting on a shelf for the weekend. On Monday morning, he ran the hardness test, and the metal had gotten harder by itself. Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 aviation/concepts/duralumin 764 false