#TIL that there are wild, reintroduced beavers living just 30 minutes from me...and I haven't been to see them yet!! https://theealingbeaverproject.com/
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5 results for “xophmeister”
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Apparently, the latest line-up in “Strictly Come Dancing” rather stretches the definition of _celebrity_. I wonder if this will happen to #CelebrityTraitors? Maybe in a few years, it won’t be Tom Hiddleston and Zendaya swanning about the Scottish Highlands, but rather the Pepto Bismol diarrhoea guy trying to persuade everyone he’s a faithful. (He’s totally a traitor 🕵️♂️)
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CW: Researched answer
The flight code is on GitHub: https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11
It’s about 130kloc and, contrary to my expectations, quite liberally commented. A quick search suggests that a good typist, even when typing assembly, can muster around 200 characters per minute.
So that puts the answer closer to 10 weeks.
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A ream of fresh paper is around 5cm deep. I think it could easily be twice that once printed, even accounting for compression as you get closer to the bottom of the stack. In the photo, the sections appear to be bound: I count 17 sections, so with two sides each, let’s call that about 10cm. Margret looks quite short, so I’m going to say that stack is around 150cm tall. So removing the binders gives around 7,000 pages.
I would guess that the flight code is written in raw assembly, given it was the 1960s. Assembly is rather minimal and, I suspect, the hardware constraints of the time wouldn’t have allowed for much code commenting (presuming it wasn’t overlayed out-of-band). Therefore each page won’t actually contain much information; maybe 40 lines of code, no more than 15 characters long (including spaces). That would fit reasonably comfortably on to the page without being too small to read.
At most, then, that’s 4.2 million characters; let’s call it 4 million to allow for spacing and what not. A good typist can churn out around 80 characters per minute, so…
About 20 weeks.
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#FermiFriday 8: #MargaretHamilton, who led the team that wrote the on-board flight software for Apollo, has died aged 90. In the best-known photograph of her, taken at MIT in 1969, she stands beside a stack of printed program listings about as tall as she is. If one competent typist set out to retype every page in that stack by hand, working eight hours a day, five days a week, how many weeks would the job take? Assume the listings are printed on one side of paper of ordinary thickness.
Rules: Estimate the answer using only what you know and can calculate by hand; no looking up, don't check the other answers and try not to use a calculator. Reply with your answer and method to this post.