what "quiet quitting" really means in a recent-history perspective of "Figuring out how work fits into a life well lived." The Year in Quiet Quitting https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2022-in-review/the-year-in-quiet-quitting
Friday, December 30, 2022
Wednesday, December 28, 2022
For Better Browned Meat and Veggies, Just Add Water
Monday, December 26, 2022
Geology of Snoqualmie pass
A surprisingly interesting discourse on the geology of Snoqualmie Pass, where several unusual geologic events converge.
Plane saved from crashing, despite 2 failures of emergency thrust increase
Easy Trick For The Fluffiest Bread
Ooh, she's good - she explains it so well from the chemistry standpoint. (She was a chemistry major before becoming a chef.)
6:20 a "tangzhong" is used to incorporate more water into the dough. (It binds it into the starch)
Sunday, December 25, 2022
The Art of Design | Es Devlin: Stage Design
27:26 "It's interesting because the word "show" suggests "revelaing" something, it doesn't suggest "finding" something. And because I do what I do every day, I have to make sure the showing of things is in itself the seeking for things."nd because I do what I do every day, I have to make sure the showing of things is in itself the seeking for things.
Uzufly - Google Earth on steroids - helps urban developers get but-in for their plans
(Use the English subtitles)
Saturday, December 24, 2022
Why You Can’t Smell Yourself (and Other Ways Your Senses Lie to You)
5:38 A "just noticeable difference" is the percentage difference in a stimulus, not an absolute difference.
10:48 why our eyes move in small saccadic movements
18:51 what you "sense" is only a fraction of what's out there.
The Best Way To Cook Steak?
Avoiding the "grey band" of overcooked steak beneath the crust.
Pepper, but don't salt it before cooking, which draws out the moisture.
10:46 steak has to rest for 5 minutes, so those internal juices are "in the bite, not on your board."
How lightbulbs are recycled
Extracting mercury from the white powder inside fluorescent bulbs is a complex process of crushing, vacuuming, heating, vacuuming, and condensing.
Cheating With ChatGPT in high school| WSJ
Friday, December 23, 2022
Happy Tibb's Eve
"In jokes and plays four centuries ago, Tib often referred to a girl with loose morals, so there was no Saint Tib and therefore no Tib's Eve. To say something would happen on Tib's Eve was to say it would never happen...The phrase traveled to Newfoundland and Labrador. George Story describes Tibb's Eve as "generally 'neither before nor after Christmas', i.e. never" as an Anglo-Irish term in Newfoundland English dialect." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibb%27s_Eve
Thursday, December 22, 2022
How Manhattan's NYU’s E.R. Favors the Rich
'Major Trustee, Please Prioritize': How NYU's E.R. Favors the Rich https://nyti.ms/3vbMQFi
"Some said medical specialists, often in short supply, were diverted from other cases to attend to mild complaints from high-priority patients."
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
Hidden Brain - how to complain productively
A useful episode making the distinction between (@44:04) "expressive complaining" and "instrumental complaining," the latter of which complains to the root source of the problem.
(@23:43) "as [complaining] went up, their feelings of anger also went up and their feelings of hope went down [hence] forgiveness went down, and as hope goes up, forgiveness goes up...we found that the more that employees talked about unfairness, the less likely they were to forgive the supervisor for any unfair actions."
Complain to someone who emphasizes an internal locus of control - you need to fix this problem, not some outside entity.
(@39:48) "when we are complaining, we are increasing the extent to which we see things with an external locus of control. We are essentially saying, the world happens to me and there's nothing I can do about it. When we talk to somebody who reframes [rather than just commiserating], they're helping us give us that internal locus of control, helping us see that we are an agent, that there are ways to move forward to fix the situation."
A Swarm of Robots Built This Tunnel
Start watching at 3:47 - a swarm of robots injects material into soft rock to harden it before tunneling.
This method must depend on having rock that can sustain small, but not large, tunnels until the hardening material is injected. That is, if the rock is too soft to tunnel through without collapsing, it could collapse on the small robot tunnels also. I assume such conditions are common, though, making this a viable solution for a lot of tunnel construction.
Monday, December 19, 2022
Malcolm Gladwell answers research questions
9:43 "boredom is a plateau you reach when you've just scratched the surface of a problem. Virtually everything is interesting if you dig deep and hard enough"
We collected 300000 pounds of plastic
7:24 you can sponsor a collection barrier at a river for a year for $215 that includes constructing the barrier, removing, and sorting the trash.
Saturday, December 17, 2022
How AI works
Friday, December 16, 2022
Expression "Keep your powder dry"
"The phrase "keep your powder dry" means to "always be prepared to take action yourself if necessary". The allusion is to gunpowder which soldiers had to keep dry in order to be ready to fight when required."
Wednesday, December 14, 2022
Religion of Nobel Prize winners
Monday, December 12, 2022
When Honda Civic was introduced in 1973
"the new Civic, at $1973"
"At 139.8 inches...about halfway between the true micro-cars (Honda 600 and Minis) and...standard little cars (Fiat 128, Datsun 1200 and Toyota Corolla)... corresponding light weight (1536 lbs.)"
The Fight to Save Coffee
3:40 the industry has to find ways to support farmers
4:37 coffee is called the goldilocks crop: it has very distinct amounts of rain and hits of daylight to survive
5:10 breeding new varieties is the most immediate change for safeguarding our coffee supply
7:30 a historic specimen was found to have just a few remaining live plants in Sierra Leone, which can thrive at temperature 7 degrees higher than arabica coffee.
A global coffee crisis is coming:
4:29 In fact, a recent study estimates that by 2050, the world's area of land that can produce coffee will decrease by 50%.
Saturday, December 10, 2022
(Behind The Scenes) Taylor Swift - All Too Well: The Short Film
In this bildungsroman (coming-of-age story), Taylor Swift has a very specific vision as she directs her video, and is very involved in its production.
Here's the final video:
Making Plastic From Seaweed
3:07 powdered seaweed extract mixed with sugars and starches makes a film with properties indistinguishable from poly bags
5:10 poly bags are some of the biggest polluters of marine systems6:08 seaweed can be harvested (cut back) without killing it, provides Maritime jobs in overfished areas, and supports biodiversity
7:25 tested in actual composting facilities, it's gone in 48 days
Friday, December 9, 2022
Fresh water on tiny islands
I was wondering, after my trip to Fiji (and watching a surprisingly interesting TV documentary about Richard Branson buying his own private island) how one gets a supply of fresh water.
This webpage suggests that in an underground aquifer, the denser salt water sinks below the fresh. I thought these two would mix readily, but apparently not.
I was surprised by the picture of the Miami shoreline with huge amounts of fresh water displacing the salt water along the beach.
Monday, December 5, 2022
Broker briefing - Bannerman ASX:BMN Uranium Forum - November 2022
11:00 Bannerman is uniquely positioned to meet the upcoming demand.
Namibia is in the top 3 world producers already, with permits and port infrastructure and shipping lines up and running, government compliance regulators and multilateral treaties and obligations in place. They also have their mine closest to the large population which makes them a competitive employer. It's a huge resource with over 200 million pounds. They have demonstrated their ability to recover 92% of the uranium on the ore, and are ready to scale up production when the spot price reaches $65.
This one is a longer version of the presentation:
Sunday, December 4, 2022
Old Refrigerators Warm the Planet and They Must Be Destroyed
5:30 The company Tradewater imports and safely dispose of the refrigerant. How do they do this? "fed continuously to the two-zone plasma reactor. With a reactor temperature of over 1300°C, the steam plasma hydrolysis reaction quickly and efficiently breaks down the waste into carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O). The gas stream is then rapidly quenched to prevent any reformation of dioxins and furans."
Effective Altruism
Sam Bankman-Fried, Effective Altruism, and the Question of Complicity
He was an apostle of "effective altruism" - doing the most good every donated dollar. But...
"the mask of optimized benevolence has slipped to reveal the naked will to power."
Saturday, December 3, 2022
3M and the history of sandpaper
I had no idea that there were so many innovations in abrasives, nor how recently many advances were made. 13:54 Getting modern synthetic hard abrasives to be sharply angulated at the microscopic level, and placing them on a weave to allow extracting dust through the abrasive surface, have made newer materials more competitive.
https://youtu.be/kTiIFzhxhq4
Thursday, December 1, 2022
Six-junction III–V solar cells with 47.1% conversion efficiency under 143 Suns concentration | Nature Energy
I had no idea that solar cell efficiency had come so far. I thought that somewhere near 30% was the maximal theoretical efficiency. Amazing how they've combined layers to absorb different wavelengths.
Wednesday, November 30, 2022
How to replace plastic with avocados, algae, mushrooms
2:14 bioplastics require less fossil fuels to make them, they contain fewer toxic chemicals, and they decompose faster than regular plastics
4:09 Bagasse, the byproduct from sugar cane, amounts to 100 million tons a year in India alone, where is pressed into disposable metal trays
9:17 Lifepack in Colombia makes paper plates from pineapple crowns
17:40 mycocomposite by ecovative is made from mushroom myceliae. 18:53 the final material isa little heavier than styrofoam, but velvety soft to the touch
Relationships 2.0: How To Keep Conflict From Spiraling | Hidden Brain
Naive realism - you feel that your point of view is correct simply because you see it that way.
Hedging: using "perhaps" or "sometimes" or "maybe"
Emphasize agreement: I agree that it's been hard, or we both agree...
Acknowledgement: re-state counterpart's position
Re-framing to the positive: instead of "I hate it when..." you rephrase it to "I love it when [the opposite]..."
Sunday, November 27, 2022
The tedium of being an influencer
Revealing documentary about the crazy lengths tp which people to find fame on social media. "In one amusing sequence, Bilton takes us behind the scenes of a photo shoot in which Dominique and Wylie are shown partaking in one-per-cent-like activities such as sipping champagne and eating chocolates poolside at the Four Seasons, relaxing blissfully on an international flight, and receiving a luxurious spa treatment. All of this, however, is smoke and mirrors: in the pictures, which are shot in quick succession at a single location, a toilet seat held aloft mimics a plane's window, the champagne is apple juice, the chocolates are pats of butter dipped in cocoa powder, and the rose-petal-infused spa basin is a plastic kiddie pool."
https://youtu.be/lFaZEudkbVY
Saturday, November 26, 2022
Flotsam, Jetsam & Lagan: stuff for the Receiver of Wreck
"Flotsam are those parts of the wreckage of a ship or its cargo found floating on the sea as a result of shipwreck. Jetsam are goods thrown overboard from a vessel and are then left to drift. Lagan are goods and wreckage lying on the bed of the sea which are thrown overboard to lighten ship with the intent to recover them at a later time. Technically these goods should be marked with a buoy or other marker. Derelict refers to a vessel abandoned at sea by its guardian or owner."
How Rescue Swimmers Prepare for Missions - U.S. Coast Guard
7:00 the advanced survival technician or "rescue swimmer" training has a 73% attrition rate - the highest of any military program.
Grocery store music that makes you buy.
"fast or uptempo music means people move quickly. Slow or downtempo movement means that shoppers tend to move more slowly. Depending on the goal of the grocery store, one will be more beneficial than the other. For supermarkets or smaller grocery stores, for example, slowing shoppers down means they'll have more time to look and, subsequently, buy. In fact, in Milliman's study, he discovered that sales volume for grocery stores was, on average 38% higher on days when the stores played slow tempo music."
"2012 study from Norwegian professor, Klemens Knoferle, found that music played in a minor mode at a slow tempo was the ideal mode/tempo mix. Slow music played in major mode was found to be significantly less effective at reducing the pace of shopping and encouraging thoughtful browsing."
Coffee vs caffeine makes you poop
Why does coffee make you poop but caffeine pills don't? "whether the coffee's caffeinated or decaffeinated doesn't seem to matter in all studies, according to other research -- suggesting that, in some cases, coffee compounds besides caffeine might be responsible for sudden bowel movements." https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/04/health/why-does-coffee-make-you-poop-wellness/index.html
Friday, November 25, 2022
Gibraltar Dealer Sells White Toyotas That Save The World
Thursday, November 24, 2022
Tesla’s Using Billions of Miles to Train Neural Networks
"It helps to have vehicles driving billions of miles per year because you can source many examples of rare objects. It stands to reason that, over time, Teslas will become better at recognizing rare objects than Waymo vehicles."
"In imitation learning, a neural network learns to predict what a human driver would do by drawing correlations between what it sees (via the computer vision neural networks) and the actions taken by human drivers...all the information needed is contained within the replay of what happened."
"As Tesla's fleet grows to 1 million vehicles, its monthly mileage will be about 1 billion miles, 1000x more than Waymo's monthly rate of about 1 million miles. What that 1000x difference implies for Tesla is superior detection for rare objects, superior prediction for rare behaviours, and superior path planning/driving policy for rare situations. The self-driving challenge is more about handling the 0.001% of miles that contain rare edge cases than the 99.999% of miles that are unremarkable."
[The embedded videos on this page are extremely helpful]
Wednesday, November 23, 2022
Houses people notice
"I'd rather build a house people don't like, than a house people don't notice" -Guy Petersen, Sarasota architect
(The World's Most Extraordinary Homes, season 2 episode 4)
Monday, November 21, 2022
Standard Reference Materials
Providing a reference in Wikipedia
You'll appreciate this rabbit hole - was reading about volcanoes because I'm in Fiji, and because I watched this YouTube about an imminent eruption in Alaska this week.
They mentioned "phreatic" (steam-blast) eruptions like Mount St. Helen's, so I read about them which led me to "Plinian" eruptions which should really be called "Vesuvian," except that is in honor of an actual play-by-play description of the Vesuvian eruption written by the nephew of Pliny, who died in Pompeii from it.
Then they mention that only specific types of lava cause these explosions, while the common basalt lava only rarely has the right conditions. I was curious what those conditions were, and thought there must be a reference for such a specific fact.
I found the reference, but found out that the process of adding a journal reference to Wikipedia is so painstaking and tediously precise (below), in that every single character has to be perfect, that it's a wonder anyone ever adds references to Wikipedia.
Anyway, you can see in the attached screenshot where the journal citation has been added.
<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Bamber |first1=Emily |last2=Arzilli |first2=Fabio |date=2020 |title=Pre- and syn-eruptive conditions of a basaltic Plinian eruption at Masaya Volcano, Nicaragua: The Masaya Triple Layer |url=https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377027319303257 |journal=Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research |volume=392 |issue=15 February 2020 |pages=106761 |doi=10.1016/j.jvolgeores.2019.106761 |access-date=22 November 2022}}</ref>;
Incidentally, why wouldn't the title of the paper just be "Precursor and eruptive conditions of..." rather than the cumbersome "Pre- and syn-eruptive conditions..."
other than to circumvent eschewing obfuscation. Sunday, November 20, 2022
Medicare vs Medicare Advantage - sounds similar but it's not
Sounds like plain old Medicare is better - it's accepted when you're out of state, accepted by more doctors and hospitals, and doesn't require as much pre-approval process. Note that one needs separate "part D" coverage for drugs, and one can get medigap insurance to cover the 20% copay.
Note that if you leave Medicare to try one of the other "Advantage"-type plans, you might not be able to go back to your medigap coverage due to pre-existing conditions.
The crackling sound of the coral reef.
https://youtu.be/eXR--I99S60
https://youtu.be/1wBYPjkGRdo
"The underwater sounds are reminiscent of static on a poorly-tuned radio, or the tantalizing hiss of eggs and bacon frying in the pan."
"The characteristic sounds come from many sources, including the rasp of urchin and starfish teeth as they graze against the hard surfaces, shrimps that stun their prey with loud bubbles produced by their pincers, and fish that pluck off bits of coral."
Friday, November 18, 2022
How Billionaire Mark Cuban's Online Pharmacy works
Superhuman farming: Sniper agri-robots precision-treat 500,000 plants per hour with 85% less chemicals
1:16 the real value is in the robots that make strategic growing decisions that result in bigger, healthier food
1:48 decides whether to fertilize or kill each plant it sees, recognizes crop vs weed and with sub-cm precision either fertilizes or applies weed killer
2:09 the system saves a digital record of every single crop plant on the field, geo-locating each plant, [allowing it to optimize controllable factors according to individual crop-plant outcome]
6:00 farmers are "pulling engineers by the nose" to lead them to a future of "nutrition per acre" instead of just "yield per acre."
The Town that was Burned for Science.
How fires spread to adjacent buildings: 2:30 The assumption prior to these studies was that convection was the biggest way that fire spread, but it turns out that radiant heat was more likely the culprit. A combustible wood frame house could cause another house 40 feet away to ignite.
Tuesday, November 15, 2022
Hajimemashite
Did you know the Japanese greeting (only used when meeting someone the first time) "Hajimemashte" means "new beginnings?" You can use it to mean "I started learning to play the piano." So, it's a way of saying "Nice to meet you - this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." https://hinative.com/questions/324259
Monday, November 14, 2022
Indian indenture system - Wikipedia
Here's what progressive human rights looked like in the 1870's - "Trinidad adopted an ordinance in 1870 by which new immigrants were not allotted to plantations where the death rate exceeded 7 percent."
So, if 5% of your indentured workers (slaves) died, you were doing ok and could bring in more labor.
Sunday, November 13, 2022
Recycling lithium batteries
A tsunami of used batteries for recycling is coming. This company has a way to recover much more than the usual amount of metal from it.
This former Tesla engineer is working on a solution also, and is receiving truckloads of batteries every day.
A simple non-drug recipe for Dealing With Jet Lag
Drink a pint of water every hour while flying.
Don't sleep during the flight until a 1-2 hour nap that ends 4 hours before arriving.
Take a bath, as hot as you can stand, for 5 minutes for every hour of time change. Cool down for the same time period as the bath.
Sleep an hour if it's daytime at the destination, then get up.
If it's evening when you arrive, sleep through the night.
Have 2 cups of coffee when you wake up.
Why Cities are Banning Cars around the World
Opposition to removing space devoted to vehicles is 11:50 lack of consumer traffic, delivery-trustee issues, and emergency vehicle access.
Thursday, November 10, 2022
America's deadliest crosswalk
Decades of "car-centric" urban planning have fostered multiple lanes of very fast traffic with drivers not expecting any pedestrians. Although arterial roads are a small proportion of total roadworks, they account for a majority of pedestrian fatalities. Long distances between crosswalks encourage people to jaywalk. Sadly, this confluence of factors is more prevalent in poorer neighborhoods.
Tuesday, November 8, 2022
image generated by AI
Interesting how the AI got all of the concepts except "valley" - try it yorself at https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion
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