19:32 the "Aha moment," when he realizes how it maneuvers sideways
Friday, April 29, 2022
U.S. Coast Guard's Jet Boats are AWESOME - Smarter Every Day 272
Thursday, April 28, 2022
Burtynsky mining photos
Here's a NYT article about Burtynsky's phenomenal photographs.
"Stupefied giddiness, disbelief: these seem to be universal responses to open-pit mines."
"engineered landscapes that demonstrate, in visceral ways, our species's awesome capacity for problem-solving and how far we've come."
"Open-pit mines are wounds we've inflicted, and the wonderment they excite easily becomes tinged with pangs of remorse or dread."
"engineered landscapes that demonstrate, in visceral ways, our species's awesome capacity for problem-solving and how far we've come."
Monday, April 25, 2022
Teens Are In Mental Health Crisis. Here’s Why. | NYT
Kids are maturing 4 years sooner than they used to a century ago. In particular,
4:04 the limbic system (which registers emotions, rewards and threats) is maturing before the prefrontal cortex (which regulates self control) so it's like pressing the accelerator when there are no brakes. Rooftop Solar shingles you can walk on
Designed to be walked on - easier to install than raised panels.
Sunday, April 24, 2022
NYTimes: What You Don’t Know About Amazon
"If new rules are put in place without clear avenues for appeal, they will motivate sellers to seek workarounds that undermine the marketplace integrity that the bill strives to create."
Saturday, April 23, 2022
Agrivoltaics (combined solar farms and crops) Explained
Interesting case for combining these two land uses for mutual benefits - wide acceptance comes down to who owns the solar farm and what compromises are acceptable.
Hence, 5:01, in particularly hot years, yields in agrivoltaic fields can exceed reference fields.
5:15 Crops such as lettuce, tomatoes, spinach and potatoes are shade-tolerant and do well in agrivoltaic applications.
7:30 irrigation under solar panels was reduced by 50% compared to the (adjacent) reference field. And, evaporation from the plants helped keep the solar panels cool, closer to their optimum running temperature.
9:25 suggested rules for deploying agrivoltaics: deploy them where synergistic effects can be achieved, like reducing irrigation requirements, and 2. have the farmer, or some local cooperative, own the solar panels.
Also, solar grazing uses animals to keep growth trimmed under solar cells, instead of an expensive lawn-cutting team. https://youtu.be/T6PEk_OZUmI
Friday, April 22, 2022
AI Glasses Describe the World Around You
Rumble Strip - 99% Invisible
"I have found that I have a hard time talking to people in my normal life, and so I created a job that would force me to talk to people.
Erica Heilman: You're an extroverted introvert...
Roman: But you ask really intimate questions. I mean, you really get into people's lives. How do you overcome that?r
Erica Heilman: Well, I think that you just fall into someone...you just sweat it out until you get everything set up, right? But then you fall in. I think Ira Glass said ..."I've ever not fallen in love with the person that I'm interviewing."
" I think that when you get to a place in an interview where you've asked a question that you're both kind of stumped by...you're in that third place together that… like its own country. And I don't think there's anything more exciting than that.
A Conspiracy of Silence | Hidden Brain Media
"actively pretending that you have a preference that is quite different from the preference you privately have"
"In China, the people who had supported the Cultural Revolution wholeheartedly denied that they did that after the regime fell."
"Humor is used in repressive societies and in contexts where people feel constrained in what they can say, or to signal that one is aware of certain contradictions without taking ownership of the preferences being expressed or the facts being pointed to. In laughing, they signal that they understand what is being communicated, but don't have to take ownership for it...So it's almost like the court jester role in sort of ancient times. I mean, the one person who could speak truth to the king was the court jester"
Monday, April 18, 2022
Remastered Original Classic Cars
10:05 reimagined Mini with more horsepower, better soundproofing and structural integrity, leather interior, and A/C.
Sunday, April 17, 2022
Thorium breeder reactors
Think nuclear power: limitless green thorium is coming
9:54 thorium is more stable than uranium10:34 mining it is safer and more efficient: needs less enrichment to yield fissile material 11:14 needs to be subjected to a breeder reactor, where a neutron source augments thorium to uranium 233 (vs uranium 235) 12:23 which produces far less plutonium-239 (long-term radioactive, has military potential as weapons-grade material) 13:00 it's not perfect - some thorium turns into U-232 which emits gamma rays
13:39 Why aren't there more thorium reactors? Building any reactor is expensive. 14:14 Development funds went into uranium reactors because at the time generating weapons of mass destruction was also important.
Friday, April 15, 2022
Building a GT40 from scratch
Beautiful time lapse of 4000 hours building a tube frame, made-from-scratch , independent suspension, rebuilt engine GT 40. Amazing.
Thursday, April 14, 2022
A Brief History of Obesity: Truths and Illusions
Playing Scrabble, I encountered the Scottish word "sonsy,"* meaning plump and buxom, which comes from the Gaelic for "good fortune."
That triggered me to look up the history of obesity, formerly associated with opulence and success in the middle ages, yet now more shameful. It turns out that obesity has undergone vicissitudes from aspiration to derision. Even Hippocrates knew that exercise was the antidote to the ills of obesity. Here are some excerpts from an article:
"The history of obesity includes a variety of tribal customs, such as fattening up young girls and women to make them more desirable...."
"figurines, dated to about 25,000 B.C....Some have theorized that it represented a fertility symbol, an idolization of beauty or desirability, an object of worship or a totem for good fortune."
"However, the Old Testament, the New Testament, early Christian writings and the Talmud regard obesity negatively... Proverbs 23:20: "Be not among drunkards or among gluttonous eaters of meat.""
"The recognition that obesity was an impediment to good health and longevity is documented in the writings of ancient Greece, Egypt and India."
"It is very injurious to health to take in more food than the constitution will bear when, at the same time one uses no exercise to carry off this excess. ..."(Hippocratic Corpus)."
"Hindu physicians... noted in the second century B.C. that black ants were attracted to "honey urine." [presumably diabetes] Hippocrates stated: "Corpulency is not only a disease, but the harbinger of others. Those who are constitutionally very fat are more apt to die quickly than those who are thin""
"After the fall of Rome...scholarship [was] confined to monk archivists...medicine lagged behind, and the conceptualization that obesity was in essence a malignancy ceased to be recognized. In certain societies, obesity was often considered a privilege of the upper classes. In fact, it was obviously considered beautiful, as the Rubenesque obese female nudes demonstrated."
*The Scrabble word was actually "sonsier," since in Scrabble you're often trying to use up the letter "i."
Wednesday, April 13, 2022
Emotional ambivalence spurs creativity
Although being ambivalent has been shown to diminish people's perception of your character, experiments have shown that:
24:50 "when we shut down ambivalence, we start to prioritize decisiveness over accuracy"
Tuesday, April 12, 2022
Committee that approves emojis - LA Times
"the Unicode Consortium, which is largely a volunteer effort..."
"Our main focus is supporting the languages of the world, such as Chinese characters, Japanese characters, Cyrillic letters and others. We have roughly 7,000 characters slated for release this year, and roughly 70 are emoji."
"We look at the expected frequency that the emoji is going to be used. That's a very strong factor. We also look at whether it's needed to flesh out an existing set."Woodturning Coffee Spoons
I didn't know you could turn resin on a lathe with something embedded inside. A remarkable result.
AI Makes DeepFakes better
Deep Dive Inside Gigafactory Texas
This self-congratulatory peacocking video is a little much...but makes some interesting points and incredible claims.
Elon compares his factory to a computer chip - achieving better efficiency by putting all functions on one "chip"
9:47 "half a million units per year in a single factory is the biggest of anything in the world."
Thursday, April 7, 2022
Inheritance | Radiolab | WNYC Studios
Act 3 is a really thought-provoking look at a program to pay drug-addicted mothers to be sterilized. It's a really polarized debate. Some people think it's good to prevent pregnancies that are unwanted and babies that start life in drug withdrawal. Others feel it borders on Nazism to control reproduction when there are some drug-addicted mothers who later become great mothers of good kids.
Wednesday, April 6, 2022
Dealing with grief
The Kubler- Ross "stages of grief" don't help the grieving person, and aren't actually substantiated by science. What matters more is how you deal effectively with grief and get beyond it.
Ask yourself continually "Will this thought or activity actually help out hinder my healing to move on with my life?"
Hunt the good stuff: find out what thoughts or activities actually help you feel better and gravitate to those
"Accept the good" - you will have negative thoughts, but when you find a good thought accept it and embrace it.
Tuesday, April 5, 2022
Deadliest Roads Congo
A desperate situation where the government refuses to repair roads that are ridiculously difficult to pass, taking days to go 20 miles, and filled with corruption.
Monday, April 4, 2022
Re: Africa's Plan to Bring Chocolate Profits Home
Sadly, farmers in Côte D'Ivoire and Ghana, Africa's main chocolate producers, live in poverty and see less than 2% of the profits from selling chocolate. Refining and manufacturing chocolate locally would create jobs and keep more profits locally, but like many African products the raw materials are sent offshore. 
Sunday, April 3, 2022
WIND FARM ASSEMBLY
Massive machinery and millimeter precision
31:35 "wind is the adversary." The conundrum is that wind makes erecting the tower difficult (must be < 12m/s or 26 mph) yet wind farms are deliberately placed in windy locations.
Are birds immune to hot pepper, enabling them to eat vast amounts and spread the seeds?
"...While mammals will avoid food containing as little as 100-1000 parts per million (ppm) of capsaicin, birds will readily consume up to at least 20,000 ppm (mind, we're talking food that's 2% pure capsaicin here). The difference seems to be that bird receptor cells are largely insensitive to capsaicin."
"The reason chilies incorporate capsaicin in their fruits (and red/green peppers of course are fruits in a botanical sense, not vegetables) seems to be to ensure that their seeds are dispersed properly. When small birds consume the fruits of wild peppers the seeds pass through the gut undigested and, due to the birds' flight range, are deposited in distant places where they can grow with less competition. If the fruits were consumed by larger mammals the seeds would either be digested, or deposited much closer to the parent plant."
Not only that, but passing through the bird's gut actually helps the seeds germinate better:
"... Researchers conducted feeding trials with captive birds to obtain gut-passed seeds. The seeds then underwent planting trials to determine how they performed compared to seeds that hadn't passed through birds."
A Cure For Diabetes
Saturday, April 2, 2022
Study: Airbags Can Turn Phones into Dangerous Projectiles
I've wondered about this:
"Each time, the cellphone hit the dummy in the neck or square in the face."
I've wondered about this.
"The traffic division of the Dallas Police Department says its seeing a lot of minor accidents that are more serious than they should have been."
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