U.S. Coast Guard's Jet Boats are AWESOME - Smarter Every Day 272

https://youtu.be/uFzuRm3wCDk

24:50 "listening to him made excited about our future as a nation, knowing that motivated people like this are coming up through the ranks of the US Coast Guard." 

19:32 the "Aha moment," when he realizes how it maneuvers sideways

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." 

https://nyti.ms/1Kq7LTm

"engineered landscapes that demonstrate, in visceral ways, our species's awesome capacity for problem-solving and how far we've come." 

https://images.app.goo.gl/padb1JNpr5ZYudubA

Beautiful photos of landscape destruction - poignant. 

Teens Are In Mental Health Crisis. Here’s Why. | NYT

https://youtu.be/Wr7BrKOX6bE

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

https://youtu.be/wpulMxLba1U

Like Tesla roofing, but wires are exposed. 

Designed to be walked on - easier to install than raised panels. 

NYTimes: What You Don’t Know About Amazon

 https://nyti.ms/3OsSzis

When it comes to liability for bad products, Amazon considers itself a conduit for sales, much like a shopping center, and denies culpability. 

"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." 

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. 

https://youtu.be/lgZBlD-TCFE

3:40 not all available sunlight can be converted into biomass - after a defined saturation point is reached, plants can't absorb any more sunlight and have to get rid of the excess energy by evaporating water. 

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

AI Glasses Describe the World Around You

https://youtu.be/Dk-3MsPwLDk

A great use case for Google glass. Helps blind people navigate the world. 

Rumble Strip - 99% Invisible

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/rumble-strip/

At the end of the podcast, the 2 hosts talk about why and how they make podcasts. 

"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

https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/a-conspiracy-of-silence/

Preference falsification can happen at a trivial or national level, where people verbally support something they're opposed to. 

"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"

Remastered Original Classic Cars

https://youtu.be/GY-ZUa2Pq0I

10:05 reimagined Mini with more horsepower, better soundproofing and structural integrity, leather interior, and A/C. 

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. 

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.

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."

https://www.clinicaloncology.com/Current-Practice/Article/07-18/A-Brief-History-of-Obesity-Truths-and-Illusions/51221

*The Scrabble word was actually "sonsier," since in Scrabble you're often trying to use up the letter "i."

Emotional ambivalence spurs creativity

Although being ambivalent has been shown to diminish people's perception of your character,  experiments have shown that:

24:00 Feeling emotional ambivalence makes you cognitively more flexible

24:50 "when we shut down ambivalence, we start to prioritize decisiveness over accuracy" 

https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/the-benefits-of-mixed-emotions/

Committee that approves emojis - LA Times

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-emoji-q-and-a-20160125-htmlstory.html

"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."