Gary Taubes in "Good Calories, Bad Calories" clearly demonstrates that it was common knowledge for centuries that sugars and simple carbohydrates like bread, etc were major contributors to obesity. We've known that insulin is the primary hormone regulating lipogenesis since the 1960s.
We do need more and better nutrition studies that aren't an attempt to build scientific careers or salvage career-defining hypothesis, but we also need to quit ignoring the science we have that doesn't line up with the fat-is-bad, energy-balance-only arguments.
Dietary advice in our guilt-addled Christian culture really has a hard time escaping the orbit of blame and shame, and we keep reinvesting in scientifically dubious arguments about weight because they fit into puritanical, guilt-driven notions that overconsumption is our principal problem and the only path to salvation is through denial and suffering.
So many of the nagging problems of modern civilization (drugs, prostitution, unplanned pregnancy, obesity, poverty, etc) seem to succumb to reflexive, puritanical thinking that the proffered solutions to all of them can be created by doing a find-replace with passages from Christian theology. Solutions that don't align with this kind of thinking are rejected.
They could have woken up and realized that part of the reason Google's services did so well was that they presented a certain amount of advertising in a non-disruptive way.
Instead, they decided that blinking, audio, video, flash, javascript, animations, interstitials, anything that could be made as annoying as a six year old who wants attention was the right model.
Then they didn't mind their content and made it too easy for malware to get injected into their highly automated processes to boot.
And now they complain about ad blockers? Do they even realize how obnoxious their ads are?
Your link returns a blank page, which is disappointing, I'd like to read about this.
I think solar is a worthy marine battery extender for any boat -- even if its only a couple of hundred watts, it negates a lot of house power for things like a small DC fridge, stereo, etc. I don't know why every hardtop doesn't have panels or why sundecks aren't lined with them. Net positive (or no worse than net zero) solar for full house functionality seems a stretch if you start including bigger or hungrier appliances, especially a/c, etc.
A hybrid powerplant probably makes the most sense along the lines of the Volt -- sufficient battery for 10 or so miles at no-wake speed, but generator power on tap for recharges and supplemental power. It's a slippery slope, though, as the Volt's generator is 55kw which is great for the ICE-electric propulsion but too big for house power even if you ran a giant air conditioner, but it seems to be counter productive to have an additional 5kw ICE generator for house power, too. The challenges of electricity, I guess.
What kind of boat was this? 1000 HP of diesel plus Li batteries and seperate motor propulsion? That sounds like a big boat but strangely long runtime on DC power for only needing a week to recharge.
If I had the money/skill/etc, I'd be sorely tempted to pick up a 20 year old 30' "sport cruiser" in the Searay Sundancer mode for under $20k and try to convert it myself to some kind of low-speed battery-electric populsion.
A lot of these older cuisers have twin big-block V8s plus room for a 4kw generator and 100+ gallons of fuel. Since Mercury Marine's idea of propulsion innovation is keeping GM big block casting operations going in Mexico, so many of these boats have ended up with huge V8s, often two, and space for generator as well.
Swapping a pair of giant V8s for 100kw of Li battery and an electric motor or two ought to be a pretty good weight savings which would help with performance.
Performance will be ultimately limited by the planing hull design. They're not bad at 5-7 knots, but at a certain point they just plow unless you get to planing speed and I don't think that would be practical without the twin big blocks and gasoline. In an ideal world, the hull design would be closely tied to the propulsion goals.
Even if it ended up being only 5-7 knots, that's more than adequate for lots of inland freshwater lake usage. I boat a lot on a 14,000 acre lake (kind of a chain of bays, 120 miles of shoreline but only maybe 10 miles wide by 3 miles tall at the extreme ends) and it's a big lake, but realistically you can only go so far and most boats go out 2-3 miles max from the marina, anchor for a few hours, and then go back. 10 miles of distance covered maximum and almost never to do I see a 30' cruiser doing over 10-12 knots.
An electric powertrain is perfect for this usage pattern. Those twin V8s are great if you're on the Great Lakes, the ICW, the gulf or the ocean and you're looking at 50 miles at 20+ knots. But that kind of power and range is ridiculous everywhere else.
Tesla's "secret sauce" is the charging and conditioning of their batteries as well as armouring them against damage in a collision and preventing propagation of a fire in a series of cells spreading too quickly to the other cells in the pack.
I'd say that makes a "Tesla Battery" a unique product even if its constitutent cells aren't that unique.
If they would/could sell their batteries or powertrains I think there's probably other markets that could use them. Recreational boats is one application that comes to mind.
Lighting, electronics, small refrigeration, ventilation (excluding AC) all can run off batteries on boats, forgoing running the main engine or a generator but lead acid batteries are heavy and have limited capacity, especially if you want them to last. Space and weight limitations limit the amount of battery capacity and further increase the need for running generators.
Lithium batteries being lighter and more power dense would be really useful and while they exist now they're expensive and choices are limited.
I'd also like to see the entire Model S powertrain employed on a boat. On larger freshwater lakes 30' cruisers seldom go far, quite often have power at their slips and often don't cruise anywhere near the 30-35 knots they max out on (on twin V8s). It's not unusual to see 30' Sundancer 15 years old with under 400 hours on its engines.
I think a 30' cruiser targeted at limited range, freshwater usage patterns -- run five miles, anchor for several hours or overnight and then back to the slip -- would be a very viable application of a Tesla powertrain.
You might also gain some efficiency by employing electric motor pod drives (like large, ocean-going diesel-electric ships do now), eliminating some of the mechanical losses from typical gear driven stern drives. Moving the motors into pod drives would also free a ton of "engine room" space for additional battery capacity, increasing range or utility.
Anyone, these kinds of marine uses are just one example where the general engineering of large battery systems and/or motive power would be useful.
I couldn't agree more. The media seldom reports on long term maintenance users. One exception happened in the wake of the Philip Seymour Hoffman overdose. A well known musician got caught up in the investigation surrounding Hoffmans death and in the article he said he had used it on and off for decades, often as an ad hoc treatment for fatigue during long recording studio sessions.
Don't most cars (excepting the most expensive, high-performance models) have knock sensors that tolerate regular unleaded even if they say use premium?
My car says premium is preferred, but that regular unleaded works fine but might result in slightly diminished performance. I've used both and not seen any difference in normal driving.
It'd be annoying to pay the 20-odd cent additional cost and get regular instead of premium, but I'm not sure most drivers would know the difference.
Of course diesel would be a real problem, but most stations that have diesel seem to use a completely different filler hose and I'd wager that the tanks and plumbing are physically separate between gasoline and diesel and no amount of electronic hacking could cause diesel to get into the gasoline system.
From what I've read, I don't think the "non-addictive" nature of heroin was really a Bayer greed conspiracy as much as a byproduct of poorly understood nature of opiate dependence.
Ironically, opiates saved countless lives from people suffering from intestinal illness where diarrhea would have killed them from dehydration. Considering the state of medical science at the turn of the century and the lack of alternative medications available, the opiates were miracle drugs. You have to wonder how many potentially life saving surgeries (like amputations or excisions of infection) wouldn't have happened without opiate pain relief or how many recoveries wouldn't have happened without opiate pain relief.
A lot of mass opiate addiction (to the extent that it existed at all) wasn't injected morphine, but smoking opium. For those with an opium habit, a small maintenance dose of a stronger opiate like heroin that allowed them to not spend hours in an opium den may have actually seemed like a cure to them, much as contemporary medicine might consider opiate maintenance with methadone or buprenorphine a therapy for heroin addiction.
You also have to wonder for some of the old use cases where it seems totally wrong now (like providing it to teething children) if perhaps the nature of its use didn't actually result in, say, toddlers getting addicted. Opiate tinctures were still manufactured medicines that cost money in an era where disposable income was small and geographic access to doctors or pharmacies to obtain it was limited. It's not hard to imagine that it may have been used sparingly due to cost, supply limitations or even medical advice from doctors who were aware of its habit forming potential, resulting in actual use not that different than a bottle of 20 vicodin provided after a wisdom tooth extraction today.
I had terrible ear infection problems as a child in the early1970s, getting drainage tubes in my ears more than once (which was a real hospital stay back then) and our pediatrician gave us a bottle of demerol to treat the pain from the ear infection something I doubt would even be considered today.
Isn't there an entire data back end to run? Whether they own and host it themselves or run it off EC2 or something, it still costs money.
And while working downtown, I walked past a building with signs on the door directing Uber drivers to a specific office suite, so I assume there's some kind of office presence where drivers sign up or something, and that must cost money in terms of people overhead and space rental.
Even though Uber doesn't want to follow most local taxi/limo specific rules, I think in a lot of cases they do some compliance with local rules so there must be a non-trivial group of people who sort through the myriad local rules to sort out what they can get away with not following vs. what will get them totally shut down.
Managing data and analytics isn't thousands of people, but it's more than just two guys, so there must be some overhead cost there.
Just look at the ancient world. Greece and Rome especially were extremely violent, deadly violence was a form of mass entertainment in Rome and Rome was almost constantly fighting and expanding its territory if not engaging in civil war. The battles themselves were often vicious, resulting in mass killing of armies or civilians. 350,000 people died in the sack of Carthage. The Romans lost an entire army of 12 legions, 80,000 men and likely more from support labor in one battle in one day during the Cimbrian war. Even outside of warfare, Rome was a violent city with only a nominal notion of civil protection.
My sense is that as modern and sophisticated as a society as Rome was was still very violent, it only seems reasonable that earlier civilizations that were smaller and less structured and sophisticated were as or even more violent.
They sure seem to want to come as close as possible to keeping it off.
The Amana DigiSmart unit is meant to set it back 2 deg F after 30 minutes, 3 degrees in one hour, and 6 degrees in 3 hours. It's non-sensitive enough that sitting still working at the desk results in it appearing to shut off and only turn on when I get up and move.
Set to a nominal temperature of 74, you could come back to a room that was 80 degrees after a day which isn't unlikely if housekeeping leaves a sun-facing room's windows wide open (which mine did).
I reset mine to zero degrees in 30 minutes, 1 degree in an hour and 2 degrees after 3 hours, but I set the thermostat at 71 so that when I returned the room was at least close to a nominal 74, which I think is kind of stuffy for a sun-facing hotel room.
In Googling for a hack/manual for this, I did read that some hotels with the slot do control HVAC. Apparently some are dumb slots that work with a business card inserted, but some only appeared to recognize the room key itself (ie, not any plastic card or even a generic mag stripe card).
More and more hotels play games to see how often they can keep the HVAC turned off.
The hotel I'm in now (a "Comfort Suite") is fine by basic hotel standards -- clean, friendly staff, fridge, etc etc.
But they've added the Amana IR door/motion senses to their HVAC system and when the sensor doesn't detect motion it turns off the HVAC, so you come back to your west-facing room (which housekeeping has helpfully opened the drapes) and it's hot and stuffy because the IR package sets back the temperature by 5 degrees. Even no motion for like 20 minutes sets it back 2 degrees, so you wake up to stuffy room.
Too bad for them I found the installation manual for the IR sensor on the web and the in-wall unit easily allows you to reprogram the setbacks (no security). Sorry, hotel, but I set them all to zero setback so the AC stays at my temperature.
My understanding is that this is common in a lot of European and Asian hotels, where you have to put your room key in a slot to make the lights and HVAC work. Ugh.
Like I said, I'm not trying to *justify* the law, just *explain* the likely rhetoric and mindset that went into getting it passed.
I think any kind of prior restraint or punishment for speech is a terrible idea. I think factory farming is pretty gross, too.
But I also want meat to be affordable, so I'm kind of inclined to believe that some kind of scaling up of livestock production has to happen. I don't know that free-range, natural grass, etc is practical at scale. I kind of think it might be (sort of) if we had more urban, extreme-local type agriculture. Space limitations may inhibit free range grazing and require more use of feed, but it doesn't have to be done factory style and it would probably result in better, fresher meat.
I think ultimately among people who get addicted there's probably some kind of natural imbalance that is fixed with opiates.
People who consume them in a way that's easiest to develop significant physical dependence (IV use, increasing dosage to increase the rush/euphoria at ingestion, etc) develop dangerous addictions that led to problems -- overdose risk as well as strong physical dependence coupled with the difficulty obtaining supplies that leads to all manner of social problems.
People with less aggressive usage patterns develop a physical dependence, but because they don't experience the strong euphoria of IV injection or consume large quantities that produce heavier physical dependence end up hitting a maintenance dose that makes them feel good but doesn't require constant and rapidly increasing dosages.
This was largely what addiction to opiates looked like around 1900 when oral opiates were commonly used -- pharmacists knew who the repeat customers were, and that may have helped keep them on more maintenance dosages.
Big picture, I would suspect that some people have a natural opiate imbalance that is "fixed" with low dosages of opiates, just like people with serotonin imbalances are fixed with low dosages of SSRIs. From what I've read, a lot of long term opiate users on maintenance doses say it just makes them feel "normal".
You can do this now with VMware, create a vSwitch with no NICs attached and connect machines that can only talk to each other. I think distributed vSwitches can carry this further and extend these across nodes, although as a more expensive licensed feature people usually map these internal test networks to an isolated VLAN so they can span nodes.
I had a hand injury that resulted in my left ring finger being amputated at the distal joint and my middle finger being fused at the distal joint.
60 mg/day oxycodone for two weeks, 5-15 mg for another 3-4 months. I was supposed to take the 60 mg dose for longer than two weeks, but dialed it back just as soon as the pain levels were manageable because the somnambulism and sluggishness were too much to take.
Quit before the pills ran out, never once had an urge to get more or keep taking it. No physical signs of dependence I could tell (ie, no mystery flu-like symptoms, increased pain perception, etc) Yes, the euphoria was nice but even at lower doses it made me kind of sluggish a couple of hours after taking it which was kind of a disincentive.
If opiates are so addictive, why wasn't I hooked after months of opiate use? My theory is that I didn't take the large doses (which were about 10 mg/4 hours) for a long enough time to truly gain physical dependence. My lower doses were spaced enough that the half life was shorter than the time between doses, inhibiting physical dependence. Can't really explain the lack of psychological/habit forming dependence other than the euphoria wasn't good enough to outweigh the sluggishness.
My larger point, though, seems illustrated by this -- you can take opiates without raging addiction and that it's possible indicates that it's how you take it that determines how likely you are to get addicted. I agree that chasing the euphoria/rush contributes to addiction, but I didn't really see a big change in the euphoria. I used to chew my tablets for faster onset and I think the euphoria was pretty consistent throughout.
The opiates are always addictive and leads to uncontrolled addiction line of reasoning doesn't explain why everyone who has ever used heroin isn't dead, either. I suspect that the volume of heroin sold versus the number of serious addicts doesn't line up and there are users that don't fit the media narrative who DO hit a maintenance dose on their own which they don't exceed. Physically dependent? Probably, but so long as they're functional they probably can stay at that level indefinitely. It's the entire theory behind methadone and buprenorphine maintenance.
It's kind of the same with alcohol. Alcohol is addictive, but only some people become addicted to it. Mostly because people follow rules and control their dosage and don't become addicted.
Is it a generic switching backplane that allows arbitrary software loads and more elaborate centralized configuration, perhaps enabling more exotic topologies?
How far are we away from this now? Most switches anymore seem like specialist PCs with a zillion NICs that boot some variant of linux or bsd and allow for pretty exotic topologies as it is, limited only by the interconnect hardware they have.
Or is it something tied to virtualization where its meant to describe networks that only exist in hypervisor clusters?
maybe not quite so much where the really hard stuff like heroin is concerned,
The problem with that is that from a pharmacology perspective, opiates aren't even as dangerous as alcohol. You can be on a maintenance dose of opiates for the rest of your life -- it's actually the preferred treatment for addiction via methadone or buprenorphine maintenance.
The problem with opiate use usually involves IV injection and addiction to the "rush" that comes after injection and the need to consume increasing amounts to get that rush. Combine this with illicit supplies of unknown potency and you end up with overdoses.
Alcohol is nasty, toxic stuff, but we (mostly, if you ignore the alcoholics, drunk drivers, domestic violence, the college students that die from alcohol poisoning...) manage to make it work because we have a couple of millenniums worth of experience with it and have elaborate laws, social customs and norms that basically keep most people from getting hopelessly addicted or dying.
There's no good reason we couldn't teach people how to use opiates on demand and avoid physical dependence.
I even question why it would even be bad if someone was addicted to some maintenance-type dose of an opiate. We expect people to take anti-depressants basically forever, yet no one crows over how "addicted" they are to them, yet these are people who take a drug every day because it makes them feel better. Why would it *matter* whether the drug they took was fluoxetine or oxycodone? It's not like fluoxetine is side-effect free, either.
The issue isn't patient privacy -- even people opposed to abortion would find filming a private medical procedure offensive and would reject such tactics.
The idea behind so many of these "exposes" is to create shock agitprop that convinces neutrals and other fence-sitters that what's being exposed is horrible, etc.
My guess is that the argument went something like this:
The public doesn't understand livestock farming beyond what is shown in Little Golden Books read to preschoolers, ie farmer Brown with a handful of free-range, pet-like animals who can recite their ABCs. Animal rights activists will use carefully edited imagery showing normal agricultural practices structured in a way that will shock the public and cause harm to farmers generally and possibly individual farmers specifically.
I think there's no question the law is bad and seems designed to shield the worst big-ag factory farming practices. But it probably got buy-in from farmers, people who have been on working farms and likely even hunters because they have some understanding of the difference between livestock raised and killed for food and pets.
There's probably also a general animosity in a rural state to the entire line of reasoning promoted by PETA and other similar groups who are seen as promoting radical ideas.
I can't defend the law, but I can sort of understand the mindset that went into it. Animal rights groups kind of do to animal agriculture what the anti-abortion people recently did to Planned Parenthood -- carefully edited videos designed to show their opponent in the worst possible light to people who have no idea what normal day-to-day activity is in a place they don't have any experience with.
I'd wager a side of free-range, organic beef that if Planned Parenthood could get a law passed against hidden camera exposes in their clinics they would do it because they know that their opponents aren't using such footage to provide a balanced, fair and informative documentary, they're doing it to create shocking propaganda to promote their political position.
This is just the tech flavored version of the great CEO myth, the idea that the success of some giant multinational is due to the tireless genius of one man.
Sadly, the partial truth of this myth is that so often CEOs essentially make giant bets with company resources which helps them claim to be business geniuses.
The everyday reality is that of course it ignores the individual contributions of all the thousands of employees, not to mention the specific contributions of the small army of advisers and experts who basically distill down a million details of even their big bets into something that allows them to make that great decision.
The same is true in politics (Presidents -- they're somehow personally responsible for nearly everything), the military (Patton took North Africa and Sicily personally, didn't he?). Although lately it seems that there's at least a lot of public noise about the value of individual soldiers and their sacrifices, heroism, etc, although I think a lot of that isn't about denying the greatness of the leader but about ginning up support for the military generally.
I wonder how many infected systems either were originally VMs or physical systems turned into VMs that will live on in VM farms far longer because they support some obsolete or unupgradeable system or because nobody wants to turn them off.
It's not hard to see systems that should eventually die off live on far longer thanks to virtualization.
I'm pretty sure the answers are everything but sexism.
Let's start with differing official and fashion-driven clothing standards. Women and men dress differently. Women's clothes tend to made of more sheer material and they generally wear less of it, especially younger women. Women get to adapt to hot weather with skirts, light blouses, Even though many men don't have to wear suits, men are still expected to wear pants and in some cases jackets even if ties aren't required, but there are still places that require old-school suit and tie apparel.
Then there's HVAC systems that were designed for buildings or floors when they were built but not changed to new floor layouts. In those rare times where somebody thinks of the computer network and invites the network guy to a couple of remodel/new space meetings, I've heard building maintenance managers suggest changes to ducting and airflow balance and heard it rejected outright. So now you've got a redesigned/re-purposed space that has poor airflow characteristics -- some areas end up hot because they don't get good airflow, some end up cold because of it. Often the areas that are hot are more uncomfortable, so the thermostat gets changed to try to fix it when the ductwork needs to be changed instead.
And it wouldn't surprise me that in many buildings built before the desktop computer and the "open" office plan became commonplace that zoned heating can be tricked by having a bunch of people and computers concentrated in one place, locally heating an area near a temperature sensor that causes badly balanced airflow to over cool spaces further from the temperature sensor.
Then there's the fact that HVAC equipment doesn't last forever and I doubt that replacement and repair decisions are always made with ideal climate control goals. I'd wager that cost is almost always bigger factor, allowing the cheaper fix/replacement to get made, making the overall system somewhat worse than it was before.
And then there's the fact that no matter how good the HVAC system is tuned, some non-trivial percentage of people will be unhappy and some of these people will be the more dramatic types who amplify the perception that the space is too hot or too cold often leading to counter-productive changes.
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Gary Taubes in "Good Calories, Bad Calories" clearly demonstrates that it was common knowledge for centuries that sugars and simple carbohydrates like bread, etc were major contributors to obesity. We've known that insulin is the primary hormone regulating lipogenesis since the 1960s.
We do need more and better nutrition studies that aren't an attempt to build scientific careers or salvage career-defining hypothesis, but we also need to quit ignoring the science we have that doesn't line up with the fat-is-bad, energy-balance-only arguments.
Dietary advice in our guilt-addled Christian culture really has a hard time escaping the orbit of blame and shame, and we keep reinvesting in scientifically dubious arguments about weight because they fit into puritanical, guilt-driven notions that overconsumption is our principal problem and the only path to salvation is through denial and suffering.
So many of the nagging problems of modern civilization (drugs, prostitution, unplanned pregnancy, obesity, poverty, etc) seem to succumb to reflexive, puritanical thinking that the proffered solutions to all of them can be created by doing a find-replace with passages from Christian theology. Solutions that don't align with this kind of thinking are rejected.
They could have woken up and realized that part of the reason Google's services did so well was that they presented a certain amount of advertising in a non-disruptive way.
Instead, they decided that blinking, audio, video, flash, javascript, animations, interstitials, anything that could be made as annoying as a six year old who wants attention was the right model.
Then they didn't mind their content and made it too easy for malware to get injected into their highly automated processes to boot.
And now they complain about ad blockers? Do they even realize how obnoxious their ads are?
Your link returns a blank page, which is disappointing, I'd like to read about this.
I think solar is a worthy marine battery extender for any boat -- even if its only a couple of hundred watts, it negates a lot of house power for things like a small DC fridge, stereo, etc. I don't know why every hardtop doesn't have panels or why sundecks aren't lined with them. Net positive (or no worse than net zero) solar for full house functionality seems a stretch if you start including bigger or hungrier appliances, especially a/c, etc.
A hybrid powerplant probably makes the most sense along the lines of the Volt -- sufficient battery for 10 or so miles at no-wake speed, but generator power on tap for recharges and supplemental power. It's a slippery slope, though, as the Volt's generator is 55kw which is great for the ICE-electric propulsion but too big for house power even if you ran a giant air conditioner, but it seems to be counter productive to have an additional 5kw ICE generator for house power, too. The challenges of electricity, I guess.
What kind of boat was this? 1000 HP of diesel plus Li batteries and seperate motor propulsion? That sounds like a big boat but strangely long runtime on DC power for only needing a week to recharge.
If I had the money/skill/etc, I'd be sorely tempted to pick up a 20 year old 30' "sport cruiser" in the Searay Sundancer mode for under $20k and try to convert it myself to some kind of low-speed battery-electric populsion.
A lot of these older cuisers have twin big-block V8s plus room for a 4kw generator and 100+ gallons of fuel. Since Mercury Marine's idea of propulsion innovation is keeping GM big block casting operations going in Mexico, so many of these boats have ended up with huge V8s, often two, and space for generator as well.
Swapping a pair of giant V8s for 100kw of Li battery and an electric motor or two ought to be a pretty good weight savings which would help with performance.
Performance will be ultimately limited by the planing hull design. They're not bad at 5-7 knots, but at a certain point they just plow unless you get to planing speed and I don't think that would be practical without the twin big blocks and gasoline. In an ideal world, the hull design would be closely tied to the propulsion goals.
Even if it ended up being only 5-7 knots, that's more than adequate for lots of inland freshwater lake usage. I boat a lot on a 14,000 acre lake (kind of a chain of bays, 120 miles of shoreline but only maybe 10 miles wide by 3 miles tall at the extreme ends) and it's a big lake, but realistically you can only go so far and most boats go out 2-3 miles max from the marina, anchor for a few hours, and then go back. 10 miles of distance covered maximum and almost never to do I see a 30' cruiser doing over 10-12 knots.
An electric powertrain is perfect for this usage pattern. Those twin V8s are great if you're on the Great Lakes, the ICW, the gulf or the ocean and you're looking at 50 miles at 20+ knots. But that kind of power and range is ridiculous everywhere else.
Tesla's "secret sauce" is the charging and conditioning of their batteries as well as armouring them against damage in a collision and preventing propagation of a fire in a series of cells spreading too quickly to the other cells in the pack.
I'd say that makes a "Tesla Battery" a unique product even if its constitutent cells aren't that unique.
If they would/could sell their batteries or powertrains I think there's probably other markets that could use them. Recreational boats is one application that comes to mind.
Lighting, electronics, small refrigeration, ventilation (excluding AC) all can run off batteries on boats, forgoing running the main engine or a generator but lead acid batteries are heavy and have limited capacity, especially if you want them to last. Space and weight limitations limit the amount of battery capacity and further increase the need for running generators.
Lithium batteries being lighter and more power dense would be really useful and while they exist now they're expensive and choices are limited.
I'd also like to see the entire Model S powertrain employed on a boat. On larger freshwater lakes 30' cruisers seldom go far, quite often have power at their slips and often don't cruise anywhere near the 30-35 knots they max out on (on twin V8s). It's not unusual to see 30' Sundancer 15 years old with under 400 hours on its engines.
I think a 30' cruiser targeted at limited range, freshwater usage patterns -- run five miles, anchor for several hours or overnight and then back to the slip -- would be a very viable application of a Tesla powertrain.
You might also gain some efficiency by employing electric motor pod drives (like large, ocean-going diesel-electric ships do now), eliminating some of the mechanical losses from typical gear driven stern drives. Moving the motors into pod drives would also free a ton of "engine room" space for additional battery capacity, increasing range or utility.
Anyone, these kinds of marine uses are just one example where the general engineering of large battery systems and/or motive power would be useful.
I couldn't agree more. The media seldom reports on long term maintenance users. One exception happened in the wake of the Philip Seymour Hoffman overdose. A well known musician got caught up in the investigation surrounding Hoffmans death and in the article he said he had used it on and off for decades, often as an ad hoc treatment for fatigue during long recording studio sessions.
Don't most cars (excepting the most expensive, high-performance models) have knock sensors that tolerate regular unleaded even if they say use premium?
My car says premium is preferred, but that regular unleaded works fine but might result in slightly diminished performance. I've used both and not seen any difference in normal driving.
It'd be annoying to pay the 20-odd cent additional cost and get regular instead of premium, but I'm not sure most drivers would know the difference.
Of course diesel would be a real problem, but most stations that have diesel seem to use a completely different filler hose and I'd wager that the tanks and plumbing are physically separate between gasoline and diesel and no amount of electronic hacking could cause diesel to get into the gasoline system.
From what I've read, I don't think the "non-addictive" nature of heroin was really a Bayer greed conspiracy as much as a byproduct of poorly understood nature of opiate dependence.
Ironically, opiates saved countless lives from people suffering from intestinal illness where diarrhea would have killed them from dehydration. Considering the state of medical science at the turn of the century and the lack of alternative medications available, the opiates were miracle drugs. You have to wonder how many potentially life saving surgeries (like amputations or excisions of infection) wouldn't have happened without opiate pain relief or how many recoveries wouldn't have happened without opiate pain relief.
A lot of mass opiate addiction (to the extent that it existed at all) wasn't injected morphine, but smoking opium. For those with an opium habit, a small maintenance dose of a stronger opiate like heroin that allowed them to not spend hours in an opium den may have actually seemed like a cure to them, much as contemporary medicine might consider opiate maintenance with methadone or buprenorphine a therapy for heroin addiction.
You also have to wonder for some of the old use cases where it seems totally wrong now (like providing it to teething children) if perhaps the nature of its use didn't actually result in, say, toddlers getting addicted. Opiate tinctures were still manufactured medicines that cost money in an era where disposable income was small and geographic access to doctors or pharmacies to obtain it was limited. It's not hard to imagine that it may have been used sparingly due to cost, supply limitations or even medical advice from doctors who were aware of its habit forming potential, resulting in actual use not that different than a bottle of 20 vicodin provided after a wisdom tooth extraction today.
I had terrible ear infection problems as a child in the early1970s, getting drainage tubes in my ears more than once (which was a real hospital stay back then) and our pediatrician gave us a bottle of demerol to treat the pain from the ear infection something I doubt would even be considered today.
Isn't there an entire data back end to run? Whether they own and host it themselves or run it off EC2 or something, it still costs money.
And while working downtown, I walked past a building with signs on the door directing Uber drivers to a specific office suite, so I assume there's some kind of office presence where drivers sign up or something, and that must cost money in terms of people overhead and space rental.
Even though Uber doesn't want to follow most local taxi/limo specific rules, I think in a lot of cases they do some compliance with local rules so there must be a non-trivial group of people who sort through the myriad local rules to sort out what they can get away with not following vs. what will get them totally shut down.
Managing data and analytics isn't thousands of people, but it's more than just two guys, so there must be some overhead cost there.
And they spend huge on lawyers and lobbying, too.
Just look at the ancient world. Greece and Rome especially were extremely violent, deadly violence was a form of mass entertainment in Rome and Rome was almost constantly fighting and expanding its territory if not engaging in civil war. The battles themselves were often vicious, resulting in mass killing of armies or civilians. 350,000 people died in the sack of Carthage. The Romans lost an entire army of 12 legions, 80,000 men and likely more from support labor in one battle in one day during the Cimbrian war. Even outside of warfare, Rome was a violent city with only a nominal notion of civil protection.
My sense is that as modern and sophisticated as a society as Rome was was still very violent, it only seems reasonable that earlier civilizations that were smaller and less structured and sophisticated were as or even more violent.
They sure seem to want to come as close as possible to keeping it off.
The Amana DigiSmart unit is meant to set it back 2 deg F after 30 minutes, 3 degrees in one hour, and 6 degrees in 3 hours. It's non-sensitive enough that sitting still working at the desk results in it appearing to shut off and only turn on when I get up and move.
Set to a nominal temperature of 74, you could come back to a room that was 80 degrees after a day which isn't unlikely if housekeeping leaves a sun-facing room's windows wide open (which mine did).
I reset mine to zero degrees in 30 minutes, 1 degree in an hour and 2 degrees after 3 hours, but I set the thermostat at 71 so that when I returned the room was at least close to a nominal 74, which I think is kind of stuffy for a sun-facing hotel room.
In Googling for a hack/manual for this, I did read that some hotels with the slot do control HVAC. Apparently some are dumb slots that work with a business card inserted, but some only appeared to recognize the room key itself (ie, not any plastic card or even a generic mag stripe card).
More and more hotels play games to see how often they can keep the HVAC turned off.
The hotel I'm in now (a "Comfort Suite") is fine by basic hotel standards -- clean, friendly staff, fridge, etc etc.
But they've added the Amana IR door/motion senses to their HVAC system and when the sensor doesn't detect motion it turns off the HVAC, so you come back to your west-facing room (which housekeeping has helpfully opened the drapes) and it's hot and stuffy because the IR package sets back the temperature by 5 degrees. Even no motion for like 20 minutes sets it back 2 degrees, so you wake up to stuffy room.
Too bad for them I found the installation manual for the IR sensor on the web and the in-wall unit easily allows you to reprogram the setbacks (no security). Sorry, hotel, but I set them all to zero setback so the AC stays at my temperature.
My understanding is that this is common in a lot of European and Asian hotels, where you have to put your room key in a slot to make the lights and HVAC work. Ugh.
Like I said, I'm not trying to *justify* the law, just *explain* the likely rhetoric and mindset that went into getting it passed.
I think any kind of prior restraint or punishment for speech is a terrible idea. I think factory farming is pretty gross, too.
But I also want meat to be affordable, so I'm kind of inclined to believe that some kind of scaling up of livestock production has to happen. I don't know that free-range, natural grass, etc is practical at scale. I kind of think it might be (sort of) if we had more urban, extreme-local type agriculture. Space limitations may inhibit free range grazing and require more use of feed, but it doesn't have to be done factory style and it would probably result in better, fresher meat.
I think ultimately among people who get addicted there's probably some kind of natural imbalance that is fixed with opiates.
People who consume them in a way that's easiest to develop significant physical dependence (IV use, increasing dosage to increase the rush/euphoria at ingestion, etc) develop dangerous addictions that led to problems -- overdose risk as well as strong physical dependence coupled with the difficulty obtaining supplies that leads to all manner of social problems.
People with less aggressive usage patterns develop a physical dependence, but because they don't experience the strong euphoria of IV injection or consume large quantities that produce heavier physical dependence end up hitting a maintenance dose that makes them feel good but doesn't require constant and rapidly increasing dosages.
This was largely what addiction to opiates looked like around 1900 when oral opiates were commonly used -- pharmacists knew who the repeat customers were, and that may have helped keep them on more maintenance dosages.
Big picture, I would suspect that some people have a natural opiate imbalance that is "fixed" with low dosages of opiates, just like people with serotonin imbalances are fixed with low dosages of SSRIs. From what I've read, a lot of long term opiate users on maintenance doses say it just makes them feel "normal".
When these batteries come to market they will come with a free bundled cube of holographic memory.
You can do this now with VMware, create a vSwitch with no NICs attached and connect machines that can only talk to each other. I think distributed vSwitches can carry this further and extend these across nodes, although as a more expensive licensed feature people usually map these internal test networks to an isolated VLAN so they can span nodes.
I had a hand injury that resulted in my left ring finger being amputated at the distal joint and my middle finger being fused at the distal joint.
60 mg/day oxycodone for two weeks, 5-15 mg for another 3-4 months. I was supposed to take the 60 mg dose for longer than two weeks, but dialed it back just as soon as the pain levels were manageable because the somnambulism and sluggishness were too much to take.
Quit before the pills ran out, never once had an urge to get more or keep taking it. No physical signs of dependence I could tell (ie, no mystery flu-like symptoms, increased pain perception, etc) Yes, the euphoria was nice but even at lower doses it made me kind of sluggish a couple of hours after taking it which was kind of a disincentive.
If opiates are so addictive, why wasn't I hooked after months of opiate use? My theory is that I didn't take the large doses (which were about 10 mg/4 hours) for a long enough time to truly gain physical dependence. My lower doses were spaced enough that the half life was shorter than the time between doses, inhibiting physical dependence. Can't really explain the lack of psychological/habit forming dependence other than the euphoria wasn't good enough to outweigh the sluggishness.
My larger point, though, seems illustrated by this -- you can take opiates without raging addiction and that it's possible indicates that it's how you take it that determines how likely you are to get addicted. I agree that chasing the euphoria/rush contributes to addiction, but I didn't really see a big change in the euphoria. I used to chew my tablets for faster onset and I think the euphoria was pretty consistent throughout.
The opiates are always addictive and leads to uncontrolled addiction line of reasoning doesn't explain why everyone who has ever used heroin isn't dead, either. I suspect that the volume of heroin sold versus the number of serious addicts doesn't line up and there are users that don't fit the media narrative who DO hit a maintenance dose on their own which they don't exceed. Physically dependent? Probably, but so long as they're functional they probably can stay at that level indefinitely. It's the entire theory behind methadone and buprenorphine maintenance.
It's kind of the same with alcohol. Alcohol is addictive, but only some people become addicted to it. Mostly because people follow rules and control their dosage and don't become addicted.
It kind of seems cloud-ish in its specifics.
Is it a generic switching backplane that allows arbitrary software loads and more elaborate centralized configuration, perhaps enabling more exotic topologies?
How far are we away from this now? Most switches anymore seem like specialist PCs with a zillion NICs that boot some variant of linux or bsd and allow for pretty exotic topologies as it is, limited only by the interconnect hardware they have.
Or is it something tied to virtualization where its meant to describe networks that only exist in hypervisor clusters?
maybe not quite so much where the really hard stuff like heroin is concerned,
The problem with that is that from a pharmacology perspective, opiates aren't even as dangerous as alcohol. You can be on a maintenance dose of opiates for the rest of your life -- it's actually the preferred treatment for addiction via methadone or buprenorphine maintenance.
The problem with opiate use usually involves IV injection and addiction to the "rush" that comes after injection and the need to consume increasing amounts to get that rush. Combine this with illicit supplies of unknown potency and you end up with overdoses.
Alcohol is nasty, toxic stuff, but we (mostly, if you ignore the alcoholics, drunk drivers, domestic violence, the college students that die from alcohol poisoning...) manage to make it work because we have a couple of millenniums worth of experience with it and have elaborate laws, social customs and norms that basically keep most people from getting hopelessly addicted or dying.
There's no good reason we couldn't teach people how to use opiates on demand and avoid physical dependence.
I even question why it would even be bad if someone was addicted to some maintenance-type dose of an opiate. We expect people to take anti-depressants basically forever, yet no one crows over how "addicted" they are to them, yet these are people who take a drug every day because it makes them feel better. Why would it *matter* whether the drug they took was fluoxetine or oxycodone? It's not like fluoxetine is side-effect free, either.
The issue isn't patient privacy -- even people opposed to abortion would find filming a private medical procedure offensive and would reject such tactics.
The idea behind so many of these "exposes" is to create shock agitprop that convinces neutrals and other fence-sitters that what's being exposed is horrible, etc.
My guess is that the argument went something like this:
The public doesn't understand livestock farming beyond what is shown in Little Golden Books read to preschoolers, ie farmer Brown with a handful of free-range, pet-like animals who can recite their ABCs. Animal rights activists will use carefully edited imagery showing normal agricultural practices structured in a way that will shock the public and cause harm to farmers generally and possibly individual farmers specifically.
I think there's no question the law is bad and seems designed to shield the worst big-ag factory farming practices. But it probably got buy-in from farmers, people who have been on working farms and likely even hunters because they have some understanding of the difference between livestock raised and killed for food and pets.
There's probably also a general animosity in a rural state to the entire line of reasoning promoted by PETA and other similar groups who are seen as promoting radical ideas.
I can't defend the law, but I can sort of understand the mindset that went into it. Animal rights groups kind of do to animal agriculture what the anti-abortion people recently did to Planned Parenthood -- carefully edited videos designed to show their opponent in the worst possible light to people who have no idea what normal day-to-day activity is in a place they don't have any experience with.
I'd wager a side of free-range, organic beef that if Planned Parenthood could get a law passed against hidden camera exposes in their clinics they would do it because they know that their opponents aren't using such footage to provide a balanced, fair and informative documentary, they're doing it to create shocking propaganda to promote their political position.
This is just the tech flavored version of the great CEO myth, the idea that the success of some giant multinational is due to the tireless genius of one man.
Sadly, the partial truth of this myth is that so often CEOs essentially make giant bets with company resources which helps them claim to be business geniuses.
The everyday reality is that of course it ignores the individual contributions of all the thousands of employees, not to mention the specific contributions of the small army of advisers and experts who basically distill down a million details of even their big bets into something that allows them to make that great decision.
The same is true in politics (Presidents -- they're somehow personally responsible for nearly everything), the military (Patton took North Africa and Sicily personally, didn't he?). Although lately it seems that there's at least a lot of public noise about the value of individual soldiers and their sacrifices, heroism, etc, although I think a lot of that isn't about denying the greatness of the leader but about ginning up support for the military generally.
I wonder how many infected systems either were originally VMs or physical systems turned into VMs that will live on in VM farms far longer because they support some obsolete or unupgradeable system or because nobody wants to turn them off.
It's not hard to see systems that should eventually die off live on far longer thanks to virtualization.
10, 20, 30 kw? More?
It seems kind of hard to judge what the generation options are without knowing how much power an individual site uses.
I'm pretty sure the answers are everything but sexism.
Let's start with differing official and fashion-driven clothing standards. Women and men dress differently. Women's clothes tend to made of more sheer material and they generally wear less of it, especially younger women. Women get to adapt to hot weather with skirts, light blouses, Even though many men don't have to wear suits, men are still expected to wear pants and in some cases jackets even if ties aren't required, but there are still places that require old-school suit and tie apparel.
Then there's HVAC systems that were designed for buildings or floors when they were built but not changed to new floor layouts. In those rare times where somebody thinks of the computer network and invites the network guy to a couple of remodel/new space meetings, I've heard building maintenance managers suggest changes to ducting and airflow balance and heard it rejected outright. So now you've got a redesigned/re-purposed space that has poor airflow characteristics -- some areas end up hot because they don't get good airflow, some end up cold because of it. Often the areas that are hot are more uncomfortable, so the thermostat gets changed to try to fix it when the ductwork needs to be changed instead.
And it wouldn't surprise me that in many buildings built before the desktop computer and the "open" office plan became commonplace that zoned heating can be tricked by having a bunch of people and computers concentrated in one place, locally heating an area near a temperature sensor that causes badly balanced airflow to over cool spaces further from the temperature sensor.
Then there's the fact that HVAC equipment doesn't last forever and I doubt that replacement and repair decisions are always made with ideal climate control goals. I'd wager that cost is almost always bigger factor, allowing the cheaper fix/replacement to get made, making the overall system somewhat worse than it was before.
And then there's the fact that no matter how good the HVAC system is tuned, some non-trivial percentage of people will be unhappy and some of these people will be the more dramatic types who amplify the perception that the space is too hot or too cold often leading to counter-productive changes.