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Ivan Linscott

Senior Research Engineer, Stanford University · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

scientistacademicengineer

Ivan Linscott is a radio astronomer and senior research engineer affiliated with Stanford University. He worked on the Radio Science Experiment (REX) for NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto.

16statements → 16claims → 13claims resolved → 54%fully supported → 4.5/5average certainty → 1.12/5average debate potential →

7 supported 4 partly supported 2 contradicted 3 not yet assessed how the 16 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

16 assertions · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 16 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 13 are resolved, 3 are not yet assessed. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Ivan argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
A JPEG compression delay caused New Horizons' pre-flyby safe mode
“It turned out that six months ago, the picture of the sky was dark. There was nothing but black and a few stars, so the JPEG compression took a whole lot less time. It was done when the flash commands came in. This time, it wasn't.”
Ivan Linscott Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 35:58 a16z Podcast | New Year, New Horizons -- Pluto!

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
New Horizons flew to Pluto with only five unused FPGA gates
“He had five. Five gates left. And that's the way we flew.”
Ivan Linscott Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 24:04 a16z Podcast | New Year, New Horizons -- Pluto!

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
67% certainty 4
71% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

246 words/min while actually speaking · 16.1 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Ivan Linscott: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 8,142 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Ivan Linscott said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Partly supported
A radioactive leak halted DOE plutonium fuel production for New Horizons
“In our case, that process got started. There's a plutonium processing facility that the U.S. Department of Energy maintains, and that there was in about halfway through the process, there was a leak that was discovered in the radioactive leak, and they shut do…”
Ivan Linscott Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 8:39 a16z Podcast | New Year, New Horizons -- Pluto!
Assertion Partly supported
The U.S. bought half of New Horizons' plutonium fuel from Russia
“Glenn, brokering through the U.S. State Department, Got the U.S. To make an offer to the Russians to buy their plutonium for this mission... For the missing piece of it. It wasn't the entire piece, but it was about half.”
Ivan Linscott Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 12:33 a16z Podcast | New Year, New Horizons -- Pluto!
Assertion Partly supported
Pluto's night side is significantly warmer than its day side
“Discovered some really quite surprising things, like the day, the night side is a whole lot warmer than the day side”
Ivan Linscott Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 5:45 a16z Podcast | New Year, New Horizons -- Pluto!
Assertion Contradicted
New Horizons flew to Pluto with only five unused FPGA gates
“He had five. Five gates left. And that's the way we flew.”
Ivan Linscott Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 24:04 a16z Podcast | New Year, New Horizons -- Pluto!
Assertion Supported
A JPEG compression delay caused New Horizons' pre-flyby safe mode
“It turned out that six months ago, the picture of the sky was dark. There was nothing but black and a few stars, so the JPEG compression took a whole lot less time. It was done when the flash commands came in. This time, it wasn't.”
Ivan Linscott Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 35:58 a16z Podcast | New Year, New Horizons -- Pluto!
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
The Stanford Dish used surplus WWII battleship anti-aircraft hydraulic motors
“And the hydraulic motors that were the best, that were best designed for that were the anti-aircraft gun controls on U.S. Battleships. And after World War II, those were being surplused. And so what they did was they got two of them. Well, maybe they got a few…”
Ivan Linscott Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 42:11 a16z Podcast | New Year, New Horizons -- Pluto!
Assertion Not yet assessed · timeframe Jan 2017
The Stanford Dish can detect one-microwatt radio signals 1,000 kilometers away
“The dish has a sufficient aperture and sensitivity to see a millionth of a watt at a thousand kilometers.”
Ivan Linscott Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 48:17 a16z Podcast | New Year, New Horizons -- Pluto!
Assertion Supported
New Horizons conducted the most distant radio occultation and radar experiments
“This is the furthest radius occultation experiment that's ever been done, and the furthest bi-static radar, furthest radar experiment that's been done.”
Ivan Linscott Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 6:10 a16z Podcast | New Year, New Horizons -- Pluto!
Assertion Partly supported
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft runs on 250 watts of plutonium power
“We use a radioactive element called plutonium to generate the heat, and that generates about 250 watts for us of power.”
Ivan Linscott Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:01 a16z Podcast | New Year, New Horizons -- Pluto!
Assertion Supported
A Jupiter gravity assist shortened New Horizons' Pluto transit by years
“We were looking for a gravity assist at Jupiter, which would have boosted the, which did boost the arrival time by about four or five years.”
Ivan Linscott Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 9:06 a16z Podcast | New Year, New Horizons -- Pluto!
Assertion Supported
New Horizons required nuclear licensing in six months instead of years
“The last time that that happened for the Cassini mission, the license itself took like three years, maybe five Pushing four. And we had to have it in under six months.”
Ivan Linscott Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 12:58 a16z Podcast | New Year, New Horizons -- Pluto!
Assertion Supported
NASA mandates a 15% to 25% FPGA gate margin for spaceflight
“NASA guidelines is you need at least, we would like you to have a 25% margin. Minimum number is 15%, which means 50% of a million gates, 150,000 gates just sitting there unused.”
Ivan Linscott Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 17:35 a16z Podcast | New Year, New Horizons -- Pluto!
Assertion Supported
New Horizons achieved a million-to-one signal-to-noise ratio at Pluto
“We've sent 20,000 watts on an aperture that's about 70 meters in diameter, so the instantaneous power in the beam is huge. It's over a million watts per square meter. At Pluto, which is 3.7 billion miles out, in a system that captures this, those wave forms ar…”
Ivan Linscott Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 26:18 a16z Podcast | New Year, New Horizons -- Pluto!
Assertion Contradicted
Key ultra-stable oscillator suppliers went bankrupt before the New Horizons mission
“There was a French company that was making them, and they had gone bankrupt. There was a US company that was making them. They'd gone bankrupt.”
Ivan Linscott Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 30:26 a16z Podcast | New Year, New Horizons -- Pluto!
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Only two of five delivered oscillators met New Horizons specifications
“And so here we are, six months before launch, we have to actually have one of these things to integrate into the payload, and that company delivered five. We tested the five. Two were okay. Two met specs, and they were put on the mission.”
Ivan Linscott Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 30:59 a16z Podcast | New Year, New Horizons -- Pluto!
Assertion Supported
Radio signals between Earth and New Horizons took nine hours round-trip
“Because it's a four and a half hour light travel time. So essentially round trip is nine hours.”
Ivan Linscott Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 33:56 a16z Podcast | New Year, New Horizons -- Pluto!

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | New Year, New Horizons -- Pluto! Jan 2, 2019 40m
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