How to replace plastic with avocados, algae, mushrooms

https://youtu.be/6MhPY4UAm7w

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

21:52 harvested algae blooms are blended with plastic to make pellets - 22:47 has to be mixed with plastic or the final foam wouldn't be springy enough, so it's 10-30% algae

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. 

Conversational receptiveness "H. E. A. R." makes people feel they're heard. 

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]..."

https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/relationships-2-0-how-to-keep-conflict-from-spiraling/

Storm Chaser Footage

https://youtu.be/AULpqdZxGtE

Highest storm surge ever was 42 feet in Australia. 

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://www.newyorker.com/culture/on-television/fake-famous-and-the-tedium-of-influencer-culture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B7m-ARHz0c

https://youtu.be/lFaZEudkbVY

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." 

https://www.nauticapedia.ca/Articles/Articles_Receiver.php

How Rescue Swimmers Prepare for Missions - U.S. Coast Guard

https://youtu.be/G3Dl9Ir6Dhw

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." 

https://www.vibenomics.com/grocery-store-science/

"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." 

https://retailwire.com/discussion/whats-the-ideal-soundtrack-for-grocery-shopping/

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

Why The U.S. Hates Roundabouts

https://youtu.be/AqcyRxZJCXc

10:25 roundabouts reduce fatal collisions by 38%, they are cheaper to construct, reduce congestion and improve traffic flow, are better for the environment, and are cheaper to maintain. 

10:59 89% reduction in vehicle delays, and 56% reduction in vehicle stops, 28% reduction in fuel consumption.

Gibraltar Dealer Sells White Toyotas That Save The World

https://youtu.be/_Z_V5ggUo2Y

5:08 in Gibraltar, an aftermarket company takes 650 bare-bones bulletproof (i.e. no electronics) Toyota trucks a month and converts them for NGO customers. 

5:37 They're such antiquated design that they're not legal to register in Europe, for environmental reasons. 

HSA - Health Savings Account Insane Benefits

https://youtu.be/xn6FtTZYeWE

Having an HSA (10:54) gives you triple tax benefits

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]

https://towardsdatascience.com/teslas-deep-learning-at-scale-7eed85b235d3

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)

Standard Reference Materials

https://youtu.be/esQyYGezS7c

Manufacturers need standardized materials to calibrate their quality control systems, and this government department provides these exhaustively studied, incredibly consistent samples of everything from peanut butter to steel, household dust to sewer sludge. 

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.