Hey Jeff, Afiq here. Loved this post!
What was the rationale behind cleaning the air above people's heads - was eye safety the main concern for you? Did you also do any prior modelling of the space before the setup? 

I would just spend more time emailing potential supervisors, with a higher frequency. There doesn't really seem to be a minimum threshold level that I needed to hit, other than finishing my master's 

Did you email supervisors in the areas you were publishing in? 

No. But even if I did, my one publication that I somehow managed to do on my own was trash. So I wouldn't put much weight on that. 

How often did you email them?

I probably tried to email a new person every couple of weeks. The first person that seriously responded is the person I am working with now!

Why'd it take so long for them to accept free high-skilled labour?

I think taking on part time students is really time consuming. A lot of institutions flat out don't do it. And providing them with resources (like compute time on a HPC in my case) is expensive and bureaucratic. I also included my day job in my CV, so they could've just flat-out not have believed that I'd commit, and be wasting their time. 

I love this post. 

text-davinci-002, updated with a link to github 

text-davinci-002

Sorry, I might be missing something here but

• Isn't price of energy typically measured in kW hours. Energy = Power x Time. 
• If a space solar system can output more energy since it stays on for longer, wouldn't this mean that the cost per watt hour would naturally decrease? This would be because the price of a watt hour I imagine would be Energy / price. So, if our launch cost is a fixed cost, then we would find that E / price decreases. 

Should the role of a distiller include spotting mistakes? I assume that you'd only want distillers to get to work once you have some confidence that the original claims are correct. 

Thanks Derek. I'm writing a blog post on results from small samples - may I cite your answer?