The engineering analogue to Fermi estimation (quick and dirty science) should be called Dyson fabrication, after Freeman Dyson. His ideas like the nuclear rocket had such overpowering leverage in a few elements, they could be sloppy and unoptimized everywhere else.
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A good Dyson fabrication allows you to go to extremes in m variables of n-dimensional design space so that you can waste (n-m) variables
For example, a sledgehammer doesn’t really need a smooth face
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Could use other examples
I think Starship might be a Dyson fabrication
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Engineers sometimes get nerdsniped by featuritis too much. They don’t think enough like physicists — get the big things so right, all other features can be left to taste
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Speaking of starships, Ken Brouwer’s The Starship and the Canoe is probably the best book I’ve read in the last 3 years. Set my true north early in the pandemic and probably helped preserve my sanity.
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Next up in my twitter live reads: The Starship and the Canoe by Kenneth Brower, on physicist Freeman Dyson and his historian son George Dyson (ht @andersen for reco) amzn.to/2TfcNBv
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A good Dysonian design is not elegantly balanced. It’s ridiculously overdesigned along a few strategic dimensions. Like iPhone is probably camera performance and build robustness.
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Relevant quote
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“Orion in its enormous power could haul such excesses of freight that no cleverness was necessary in planning staterooms and storage”
There’s the buckyfullerish expansive abundance thinking. Strategery is for the delta-vee poors.
We kinda got there with wasting transistors.
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