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A guy in a Tesla told me my slide rule math was lazy, he had a point
Was sketching out some trajectory stuff for a homemade weather balloon at a coffee shop in Tucson, doing rough numbers on my phone. This older fella in a Tesla hat walks by, glances at my notes, and says 'you're estimating the drag, not calculating it, that's lazy.' I laughed it off but then I actually checked my math against a proper calculator app and I was off by 18% on the descent rate. Ended up redoing the whole launch plan with real equations, and the balloon actually landed within 2 miles of my target instead of the 9 I predicted. Now I question every shortcut I take with orbital mechanics or climate models, even the 'good enough' ones. Has anyone else had a stranger's throwaway comment mess with how they approach their own wild theories?
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faith_shah881mo ago
Random strangers have a weird way of being brutally honest without caring about your feelings. That Tesla guy basically did you a favor by calling out the shortcut before you launched something into the sky. Once you see the difference between "good enough" and actually right, it's hard to unsee it. Now every quick calculation I do for my own projects gets a second look, even the ones that seem fine at first.
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