Not sure I want anything made of this material in my house or vehicle.
I DEFINITELY don't want any of it in an implant - at least until they figure out how to make it using something other than aluminum in the initial unclump-the-nanoparticles step.
Aluminum inside the body is HORRIBLY toxic. It was the cause of the alzheimers-like "dialysis disease" that severely limited the time the early artificial kidneys could be used - before they figured that out and changed the material of the tub holding the water that the blood/water membrane assembly soaked in.
According to the Wikipedia article on Magnesium rims, the bulk metal is difficult to ignite. This mirrors my own experience - it's hard to ignite a strip of magnesium for a chemistry demonstration.
The power tools were off limits without supervision when I went to high school. This apparently became a hard rule a few years before, when the shop teacher walked in on a student who had a magnesium automotive wheel in the lathe, and was up to his knees in magnesium ribbon, in the form of long, curly shavings.
Yes, it's hard to light, but ribbon is much easier to get going than a block, and there's a lot of heat from metal working. (I hear one way to light a block is to curl up a tapered shaving and light the end of it.) Once it's lit it's nearly impossible to extinguish. (It burns in water, for instance, sucking out the oxygen and releasing hydrogen. It burns in carbon dioxide, similarly releasing a black cloud of carbon dust. Hit it with either of those types of extinguisher and it just gets more violent.) If the kid had managed to light those shavings they'd have tangled in his pants and followed him around as he tried to escape.
(I haven't tried it, but I bet an electric arc would light off a block of magnesium just fine...)
This stuff might be somewhat safer: I'd expect the nanoparticles to interfere with making long, thin, shavings.
Is beta-carotene toxic? I knew Vitamin A was quickly toxic, but I thought beta-carotene, which is converted to Vitamin A in the body was close enough to non-toxic.
beta-carotene is very close to non-toxic. The conversion to vitamin A is well regulated, so it normally won't cause hypervitaminosis A. It does react with cigarette smoke to somewhat increase lung cancer risk, has a slight association with raised rates of a couple other cancers, and, when taken with alcohol can lead to liver toxicity. But it's generally extremely safe (which is why you can take it - without vitamin A riding along with it - until you turn orange).
But while sweet potatoes have a lot of beta-carotine, they ALSO have a LOT of already formed vitamin A. Like over 14,000 IU per 100g serving (to a white potato's 2 IU). Daily Tolerable Upper Level of Vitamin A as Retinol for adults is only 10,000 IU. (Even if that 14,000 IU number includes the beta-carotine, that would only account for 10,600 IU, so 300g/day would be the safety limit.) Trying to live on just sweet potatoes is a recipe for a fatal case of hypervitaminosis A.
Two sets of distributed-on-dead-trees tables, which were central to engineering industrial civilization, were discovered, in this cybernetic era, to have substantial errors.
One was the table of integrals that was an appendix to just about every calculus book known to man. When the first symbolic math programs were being developed, one of the intended uses of them was to calculate, on the fly, good analytical solutions to the integrals of various functions. So of course the authors tested them against all those published (and believed to be gospel) table entries, to be sure they'd come up with correct solutions in useful forms.
But the number of mismatches was appalling. Some high two-digit percentage of the functions not only solve to the form in the books, they solved to a form that couldn't be converted to the form in the books - because they were just different. The authors tried debugging the program - and found the program was providing correct solutions! It turns out the books had publishing incorrect information for decades and it had not been caught (hopefully because the functions and their erroneous integrals that were not used often enough for important things for the errors to have mattered).
The behavior of water at various temperatures and pressures is horrendously complicated, practically impossible to calculate from the physics of the deceptively simple molecule, and extremely important in the design of many classes of powerful (and potentially dangerous) industrial devices - starting with steam engines and continuing with power plants (including fossil fuel and nuclear), chemical processing and refinery machinery, and so on. It shows up in all sorts of odd corners, too. So this very strange and very important behavior rated a large effort of measuring and publishing it. The result of these massive projects was "The Steam Tables", whole chapters of measured results that described this complex behavior. Again we had a printed gospel which was used for the foundation of industrial design.
For decades, scientists and computer programmers tried to come up with a set of equations and/or algorithms that would accurately compute the entries of this table. Even if it were pages of code, such a plugin could be the basis of wonderful computer-aided-design (CAD) programs, enabling complex projects, raising efficiency, and avoiding dangerous failure modes. Each component of such an algorithm would represent some physical pheomenon of water's behavior, potentially enabling new science and/or engineering functionality, new inventions. The benefits would be enormous.
But for all those decades such a compact description was elusive. Equations that fit part of the tables very well would blow up in other regions, fixes there would break things elsewhere, and so on. Eventually some formulations were found that worked VERY well for much of the space. So the authors looked closely at the regions where it missed. Maybe there was some interesting physics there.
Then somebody got the bright idea to ACTUALLY TAKE SOME NEW MEASUREMENTS OF REAL WATER, rather than just trusting the tables, to try to get better numbers to give an insight into what might be going on as the models and the tables began to diverge.
SURPRISE! The Steam Tables, on which industrial civilization was built, had great chunks that were JUST PLAIN WRONG! Fortunately, a century of engineering practice, fudge factors, and overdesign margins, along with a tendency to avoid the problematic temperature/pressure operating regimes, had mostly kept the world safe from industrial-scale disaster.
If you've lived for a few decades, you may have noticed that stuff these days "just works" - a LOT better than it used to. More reliability, more efficiency, and far less wear-out and breakdown. There were a lot of both breakthroughs, and incremental design and methodology improvements, better materials, and so on from decades of invention and experiment piling up knowledge. But things like those two big corrections have certainly had an impact in the smooth running of modern technology.
White potatoes have many (but not quite all) of the major nutrients. But you'd have to eat a LOT of them if that's all you ate.
White and sweet are very close on most things, with a few major exceptions: White is a bit higher in protein. Sweet has about an order of magnitude more sodium (which white is very low in). Sweet also has a bunch more sugar. And sweet is LOADED with vitamin A and Beta-carotene - which is great for a serving but terribly toxic if you get too much - as you would if you tried to live off just sweet potatoes.
So, no, sweet potatoes are NOT more nutritious than white (except if you need some vitamin A and are only eating sweet potatoes as PART of a balanced diet.)
Sweet potatoes are also more nutritionally beneficial than white potatoes.
ORLY?
I was under the impression (from a claim I heard in a discussion of The Potato Famine) that ordinary potatoes of the sort grown in Ireland a century and a half or so ago, though heavy on starch (and thus leading to overweight issues if you try to live on them alone and aren't extremely active), were nutritionally complete, or very close to it. (That's why the Brit landlords could get away with exporting everything else farmed there while the peasants lived on potatoes - and starved when the potatoes were blighted and the other stuff was still being reserved for export.)
Sweet potatoes, however, are a different thing and much heavier in sugar.
But I haven't looked it up lately, so I'm not asserting the above as truth.
Pascal's wager used to be good logic and effectively neutral...
Pascal's wager falls apart if there is more than one incompatible alternative for the "There is a Heaven and this is how you get there." side. There are many. (Most of them claim that adhering to another is damming, as well.)
It also breaks down if there are substantial costs to betting on religion (and you don't allow the "infinite reward" claim to swamp your estimate of the probability of its truth.)
[global warming / climate change is] a very serious existential threat to our whole species.
That - with a particular form of it, and a particular, single, solution prescribed for it - is the claim. It may even be correct. (I'm not going to even get started on the explosion of issues with evidence, alternatives, etc.)
Unfortunately, it is being promulgated as a "One True Religion", rather than being subject to proper scientific debate and examination, and is being used to sell a particular, very expensive, product that may be anything from salvation, through snake oil, to deadly poison.
As with (any other) religion, Pascal's Wager breaks down unless it's the only play in town. Get back to me when its adherents are willing to expose the raw data, along with their reasoning and calculations, to open analysis, rather than using governmental power and money, and politically correct social pressure, to shut down anyone who even mentions any alternative, or questions any aspect of their claims.
Part of the problem is that while they claim there's no proof that it's caused by man, they also implicitly take the next step and imply that it's not that big a disaster.
ORLY?
The last I heard, the only way the issue of whether the claimed climate change is, as also claimed, caused by man (by fossil-fuel sourced carbon dioxide emissions) entered into it is that, if such human emissions are not a major causative factor, reduction of them by draconian government intervention is useless. (Worse than useless, actually, since the economic disaster such intervention represents could destroy the possibility of applying some effective solution if it is actually needed. For instance: If the planet is disastrously cooking and all else fails, we could orbit some continent-scale sunshades - but only if we could still afford an industrial-scale space program.)
That is a completely separate issue from whether climate change is happening. It is also separate from whether, if it is happening, it is a disaster, an annoyance, neutral, or even a good thing.
There are a lot of steps from "We noticed the temperature measurements are bit different from a century ago." to "We must reverse this trend, even if it means destroying industrial civilization, and freezing in the dark, and the exercise of totalitarian governmental power, or we'll all die!" Government and financial figures have jumped over all the steps - straight to the convenient-for-them totalitarian intervention and billions of dollars siphoned off from production to the operators of carbon credit markets - before the first couple steps were exposed to any substantial peer review.
High impedance of the SOURCE DOES enable greater energy transfers through high impedance - including high resistance - of the channel.
In this case that takes the form of a "found" channel of fixed, and high, impedance. A high voltage, low current, source will drive far more energy through that channel than a source that is capable of delivering the same amount of energy but only at a lower voltage and higher current. Impedance is voltage over current. If it weren't for breakdown (think arcing) the higher the voltage the more energy you send.
Impedance is voltage over current. When applied to the energy source, impedance doesn't mean what the name would naively imply. Having a high impedance doesn't imply that the source has any losses at all.
Electric currents are known to travel underground. There's also the piezoelectric effect where crystals put under strain can generate electric currents and thus magnetic fields.
Under stress, actually. And producing very high voltage electric fields. So the impedance is very high, allowing small currents through even high resistances to transfer large amounts of energy, potentially for long distances.
(It's almost Tesla style.)
I've wondered for decades (since first hearing about "earthquake lights") whether:
- Continental drift stresses on piezoelectic minerals might create such electric fields
- the CHANGES in stresses during earthquakes (and their foreshocks) might create strong electric fields deltas and associated electrical, radio, and visual phenomena
- minute, but high voltage, currents through conductive material (such as water in a fault) might carry the energy, at electrical speeds, to piezoelectric rocks in other locations, to be transduced back into large forces that might, in turn, affect the release of faults and/or the propagation of rips in them (and among nearby fault systems)
- these electrical phenomena might be measured, or detected as ultra-low-frequency ground currents or radio waves.
- externally applied high voltages might also flex piezoelectric minerals, allowing triggering of quakes by things like lightning strikes or even human intervention.
The energy involved in an earthquake's stress relief is on the order of, to a few orders greater than, that of very large nuclear bombs. There's a LOT of deposits of piezo materials down there - notably quartz - often with very large crystals to provide similarly-oriented force/voltage transduction, rather than randomly-directed forces or electrical potential vectors. If even a tiny amount of an earthquake or foreshock's energy is transformed from mechanical stress changes to electrical signals, you're dealing with lightning-strike, or far greater, levels of electrical activity.
For some time now the medical community has been using inkjet technology, with the ink loaded with live cells, to "seed" 3D printed organ scaffolds with live cells, which then populate, then replace, the scaffold, yielding a live replacement part suitable for implantation. But that depends on the cells' ability to do the fine details of self-organization to handle the small geometry.
It looks like this printer technology could put the cells right where they belong, or pretty much so, enabling the construction of a replacement organ or component in fine detail. Like for kidneys.
Maybe even lay down guides for growing neural interconnections, to get the wiring diagram right. That's getting precariously close to being able to reanimate cryonics patients by (probably destructively) scanning the details of the neural interconnections and other stored state of the nervous system, then building a working brain (with freezing damage and the like repaired) with an accurate and functional instance of the original mind in it.
For $3.40 per watt, that included a "smart inverter", one that runs each panel to its max power,...
Sounds like a distorted description of a "max power point"" inverter - which runs the panels at the voltage where the most energy is extracted from them and down-converting to the desired output voltage, trading the extra voltage for more output current, rather than clamping them to the output voltage and discarding the extra energy as heat in the panels.... if one is dirty, blocked, or fails, it doesn't stop the others.
Unless you have one of those pricey systems where there's a separate inverter on each panel, that's just done by paralleling the panels and (at voltages where it matters) giving each panel a blocking diode. Then the panels do it for you. (The diode throws away a little power, but at the higher voltages where the wiring is efficient, rather than something heavy-duty like automotive starter cables, you need the diodes anyway. Otherwise the high voltage panels would exceed the breakdown voltage of the cells in the partially shaded panel(s) and fry them (starting at the point in each cell where the junction first goes into reverse avalanche mode and ends up dissipating the power from several other panels RIGHT THERE.)
It included wiring, permits, grid-tie, a second power box in the garage, and all the attachment hardware for the roof.
Grid tie adds several grand to the inverter. Grid tie with backfeed (letting you turn on the "sell" {power to the grid} switch) also adds a LOT of red tape - largely to convince the power company you have a certified design that will detect outages (mainly by frequency fluctuations) and not "island" - feeding your neighbors' houses and electrocuting the lineman they sent out to restore power.
"Sell" grid-tie (as opposed to having an inverter that can also charge your local batteries from the grid - and feed your house - when they're getting too low) is normally not worth it unless you can get some net-metering or annual-metering deal with the power company (without paying a big premium), letting you use the grid as a "big battery" to "store" your power over seasons. That, and/or the grid-is-my-backup approach, lets you get away with a much smaller battery system (or none, using grid power when the sun is gone, but not being powered if the grid goes down then).
I priced solar just 2 months ago, talked to two local companies that sell solar, the end price is just nuts, about $3.40 a watt installed for a 10.5 KW system in Texas.
Then you're probably paying about $2.45/W for supports and installation.
And storage and electronics (systems are a lot more than panel farms) and site planning and contractor/electrician licenses and insurance and their kid's college education...
I priced solar just 2 months ago, talked to two local companies that sell solar, the end price is just nuts, about $3.40 a watt installed for a 10.5 KW system in Texas. Then you're probably paying about $2.45/W for supports and installation. Raw panels - in pallet lots or slightly more if repackaged for fewer than 25 panels - are regularly well under $1/W, and you can get B grade (blemished but still fully functional and guaranteed) for about half that.
One of the cheaper places to get them is Sun Electronics, headquartered in Florida but with sites elsewhere. But there are plenty more.
A lot of the government subsidies require installation by licensed contractors (who mark things up substantially more than the subsidy, so it's really government welfare for contractors). But you can still do-it-yourself and be permitted, inspected, and approved in essentially all jurisdictions.
Remember to be nice to the inspectors. Talk it over with them - or the chief of their department - in advance, but do your homework even before that and come to them with a plan or quick questions - not wasting their time (ESPECIALLY on inspections, when they have a tight schedule) is VERY important. When you're ready to go get the permit. Do it THEIR way - their word is effectively the law. Try to get it right the first time (so they don't have to come back after you correct something). Don't cut corners - do it better than a contract electrician. (You can afford to spend a little extra time to make everything neat and better done.)
It doesn't matter if you can make a battery with very high energy density but with a very short lifespan.
And sulfur-lithium cells have had a history of short lifetimes. It will be interesting to see if Sony has beaten that - or at least gotten them to last longer than equivalently priced lithium cells of more conventional design.
In general, I'm skeptical of claims of massive improvement in batteries. As with new solar systems, if every single in-lab claimed battery improvement all were genuine and implementable we'd have solves all the world's energy problems years ago.
On the other hand, commercially available, UL-approved (so they don't void your fire insurance), solar panels are now cheap enough (WITHOUT subsidies) to beat grid power on price/performance on sunny sites in the temperate zone. The control and conversion electronics has participated in the general Moore's Law style semiconductor technology improvement curve (and will also benefit from economy-of-scale as deployments continue to ramp up). The third piece of the off-gridding puzzle is storage...
Learn this now; this is not an oversight. People who still think the government is an institution that is meant to do best for the people they represent is utter nonsense.
My point exactly. Which I was pointing out to others.
I've known this about governments since the '60s. Back in those days the ideas of the Founding Fathers were still occasionally taught in high-end high schools, the writings of critics of government in general - by their and our contemporaries and people from eras in between (such as the historic anarchists), were readily available, and what became the Libertarian Party was just spinning out of the Republican Party (with the help of some of my friends B-) ).
David Friedman was fun. In those days he ran around with a giant fake gold medallion on a chain around his neck, with the inscription "T.A.N.S.T.A.A.F.L." on it. (Some of those friends were plotting to give him a free lunch, made of such things as salvaged ingredients that were being discarded by supermarkets as too near their end-of-life.) "The Murray Twins" (Bookchin and Rothbard) were always entertaining, and thought-provoking, as well.
The govenment fining the company and keeping the money just makes the company have to charge more and/or cut service for a given fee, adding insult to injury.
- The municipalities install bundles of conduit, along with pull-boxes, manholed repeater vaults, and the like. Also install, or allow the user to install, per-house or per-apartment-complex conduit to the nearest valult. (Include this in the utility hookup zoning and permitting requirements on any new developments, too.)
- Then lease a conduit right-of-way and vault rack space to all comers on equal terms: AT&T and your local mom-and-POP can both string their cables, fibres, or what-not on equal terms, and NONE of them have to get their investors to pony up, up front, to dig up the whole city - separately. (With N conduits in each vault-to-vault hop the first N comers initially have a conduit to themselves, though they may have to share it eventually.)
- String fibre bundles through the first conduit, use some of the fibres for the municipal net, and (if the federal rules don't block it), lease a limited-number-per-customer to all comers, ditto (reserving a few for backups for failed fibres and for future expansion.)
As with "dark fibre", almost all the cost is digging up the countryside to install the conduits and fibre runs. Putting in more conduit, or using fibre cables with more fibres, vastly multiplies the capacity with a small percentage increment on the cost of the installation. This "future-proofs" it. With dense wavelength division a single pair of fibres can carry a major telecom's entire local traffic. Run a dozen four-inch pipes between each vault and you can expect it to serve all the city's communication requirements for far longer than the expected life of the other aspects of the city's infrastructure.
instead of lead, they had to add other chemicals to raise octane ratings to reduce knocking. Those chemicals cost more.
Some of them also had other issues - like being toxic in other ways, or causing other problems.
MTBE (the first big tetraethyl lead replacement), for instance, has leaked out of storage tanks and contaminated ground water. It produces a foul taste in microgram concentrations, so even if it turns out not to be hazardous, a little can make a lot of ground water undrinkable. There are claims it causes or exacerbates asthma in the concentrations people were exposed to when filling their own cars at self-service stations (let alone the exposure a gas station worker might experience.) It hasn't (yet?) been shown to cause cancer, but cancer takes a while and research continues.
Ethanol (and methanol moreso, when added by unscrupulous gasoline suppliers) attacked the rubber in fuel lines (causing fuel leaks), dissolved plastic carburetor floats (causing first rich mixtures, then flooding, then gasoline spillage over the engine), removed protective internal coatings in fuel systems (causing corrosion, leading to both gas leaks and clogging), and dissolved gasket sealing compounds (leading to blown head gaskets and other leakage issues). This resulted in a lot of engine damage and fires (sometimes fatal) in older cars when mandated ethanol was first added to fuel supplies. Engines and fuel systems had to be redesigned to survive it. (They're still mostly rated for no more than 85% ethanol in the fuel mix. You need a little oil in the fuel to lubricate a number of moving parts that are constantly washed by the fuel.)
(Eco-regulators knew the fires were happening, but didn't do anything about it: It was perceived as getting the older, more polluting, cars off the road, and what did a few fatalities and millions of dollars of losses among the poorest drivers matter in the face of cleaning up the air? Hurrah!)
The redesign also involved pricey modifications to the valves and their guides. Leaded gasoline deposits a thin coating of lead on exhaust valve stems. This lubricates them where they rub against the valve guides (typically bronze). Exhaust valves get HOT, so lubricating them any other way is problematic. But any sticking causes immediate and major problems, from a "burned valve" due to hot exhaust eroding any leaking point, to a stuck valve being hit by the piston, breaking both and causing the engine to suddenly fail.
The ubiquity of lead-containing fuel additives let the engine designers get away with a simple solution for much of a century. Removing the lead meant they had to solve the hard problem a harder way - and that older engines would self-destruct if fed unleaded gas.
This is why aviation gas is still leaded: Sudden engine stoppage while airborne is a disaster, and getting a new engine design approved by the FAA is akin to getting a new drug approved by the FDA when it comes to cost and red tape. Most commercial flight is jets these days, so piston-engine lead pollution is miniscule, making it hard for the government to justify the cost of mandating the designing, approving, and (for existing planes) retrofitting of replacement engines.
I'm not sure that Libertarians want a completely open border, as it would lead to tens of millions of immediate entrants, with hundreds of millions soon after, eventually making the US the most populous nation on the planet.
Some libertarians (including Ron Paul, for example), recognize that, desirable as they believe open borders might be, they have to wait until some other things are fixed.
This is why I call myself a "law-n-order minarchist". You can't just repeal laws. You have to do it in the right ORDER, or you can break things even worse.
Example: Open borders have to happen AFTER entitlement reform.
Actually, if he really wanted to get rid of them he would propose a bill to end the program, right?
The program was SUPPOSED to bring in a handful of rare talents. It was corrupted to bring in wholesale replacements for native white-collar workers (just as illegal immigration brings in wholesale replacements for blue-collar workers, breaking unions and depressing blue-collar wages).
Putting a realistic floor on the H1B salaries, and prioritizing the visas so they go to the highest-paid guest workers first, should bring the corrupt gaming of the system to a screeching halt while still serving the original purpose for the few special talents that ARE hard enough to get that they can command the high price.
(And I say that as someone who IS a high-priced native talent and would still face competition from H1Bs at that price floor. I believe I can hold my own, even in the estimation of fad-driven pointy-haired-bosses, against people at and above that price range, but not against the (IMHO incorrect) perception that three or more lesser talents might provide more value for the same bucks.)
On the other hand, my experience trying to get work out of a few H1Bs and offshore employees has been that they are substantially (like sometimes a factor of several) less productive than typical citizen workers. If this is a general trend, rather than just the individuals I happen to have experience with, $110k is close enough that the economic advantage would still flip to the native (and maybe the fully naturalized) workers.
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Not sure I want anything made of this material in my house or vehicle.
I DEFINITELY don't want any of it in an implant - at least until they figure out how to make it using something other than aluminum in the initial unclump-the-nanoparticles step.
Aluminum inside the body is HORRIBLY toxic. It was the cause of the alzheimers-like "dialysis disease" that severely limited the time the early artificial kidneys could be used - before they figured that out and changed the material of the tub holding the water that the blood/water membrane assembly soaked in.
According to the Wikipedia article on Magnesium rims, the bulk metal is difficult to ignite. This mirrors my own experience - it's hard to ignite a strip of magnesium for a chemistry demonstration.
The power tools were off limits without supervision when I went to high school. This apparently became a hard rule a few years before, when the shop teacher walked in on a student who had a magnesium automotive wheel in the lathe, and was up to his knees in magnesium ribbon, in the form of long, curly shavings.
Yes, it's hard to light, but ribbon is much easier to get going than a block, and there's a lot of heat from metal working. (I hear one way to light a block is to curl up a tapered shaving and light the end of it.) Once it's lit it's nearly impossible to extinguish. (It burns in water, for instance, sucking out the oxygen and releasing hydrogen. It burns in carbon dioxide, similarly releasing a black cloud of carbon dust. Hit it with either of those types of extinguisher and it just gets more violent.) If the kid had managed to light those shavings they'd have tangled in his pants and followed him around as he tried to escape.
(I haven't tried it, but I bet an electric arc would light off a block of magnesium just fine...)
This stuff might be somewhat safer: I'd expect the nanoparticles to interfere with making long, thin, shavings.
Didn't some country use magnesium for tank armor because of the strength?
And then they discovered if the tank was hit, the magnesium caught on fire and the crew died of toxic fumes.
Don't know whether it's true. But if it is, I'd expect them to die from the searing heat.
Is beta-carotene toxic? I knew Vitamin A was quickly toxic, but I thought beta-carotene, which is converted to Vitamin A in the body was close enough to non-toxic.
beta-carotene is very close to non-toxic. The conversion to vitamin A is well regulated, so it normally won't cause hypervitaminosis A. It does react with cigarette smoke to somewhat increase lung cancer risk, has a slight association with raised rates of a couple other cancers, and, when taken with alcohol can lead to liver toxicity. But it's generally extremely safe (which is why you can take it - without vitamin A riding along with it - until you turn orange).
But while sweet potatoes have a lot of beta-carotine, they ALSO have a LOT of already formed vitamin A. Like over 14,000 IU per 100g serving (to a white potato's 2 IU). Daily Tolerable Upper Level of Vitamin A as Retinol for adults is only 10,000 IU. (Even if that 14,000 IU number includes the beta-carotine, that would only account for 10,600 IU, so 300g/day would be the safety limit.) Trying to live on just sweet potatoes is a recipe for a fatal case of hypervitaminosis A.
Two sets of distributed-on-dead-trees tables, which were central to engineering industrial civilization, were discovered, in this cybernetic era, to have substantial errors.
One was the table of integrals that was an appendix to just about every calculus book known to man. When the first symbolic math programs were being developed, one of the intended uses of them was to calculate, on the fly, good analytical solutions to the integrals of various functions. So of course the authors tested them against all those published (and believed to be gospel) table entries, to be sure they'd come up with correct solutions in useful forms.
But the number of mismatches was appalling. Some high two-digit percentage of the functions not only solve to the form in the books, they solved to a form that couldn't be converted to the form in the books - because they were just different. The authors tried debugging the program - and found the program was providing correct solutions! It turns out the books had publishing incorrect information for decades and it had not been caught (hopefully because the functions and their erroneous integrals that were not used often enough for important things for the errors to have mattered).
The behavior of water at various temperatures and pressures is horrendously complicated, practically impossible to calculate from the physics of the deceptively simple molecule, and extremely important in the design of many classes of powerful (and potentially dangerous) industrial devices - starting with steam engines and continuing with power plants (including fossil fuel and nuclear), chemical processing and refinery machinery, and so on. It shows up in all sorts of odd corners, too. So this very strange and very important behavior rated a large effort of measuring and publishing it. The result of these massive projects was "The Steam Tables", whole chapters of measured results that described this complex behavior. Again we had a printed gospel which was used for the foundation of industrial design.
For decades, scientists and computer programmers tried to come up with a set of equations and/or algorithms that would accurately compute the entries of this table. Even if it were pages of code, such a plugin could be the basis of wonderful computer-aided-design (CAD) programs, enabling complex projects, raising efficiency, and avoiding dangerous failure modes. Each component of such an algorithm would represent some physical pheomenon of water's behavior, potentially enabling new science and/or engineering functionality, new inventions. The benefits would be enormous.
But for all those decades such a compact description was elusive. Equations that fit part of the tables very well would blow up in other regions, fixes there would break things elsewhere, and so on. Eventually some formulations were found that worked VERY well for much of the space. So the authors looked closely at the regions where it missed. Maybe there was some interesting physics there.
Then somebody got the bright idea to ACTUALLY TAKE SOME NEW MEASUREMENTS OF REAL WATER, rather than just trusting the tables, to try to get better numbers to give an insight into what might be going on as the models and the tables began to diverge.
SURPRISE! The Steam Tables, on which industrial civilization was built, had great chunks that were JUST PLAIN WRONG! Fortunately, a century of engineering practice, fudge factors, and overdesign margins, along with a tendency to avoid the problematic temperature/pressure operating regimes, had mostly kept the world safe from industrial-scale disaster.
If you've lived for a few decades, you may have noticed that stuff these days "just works" - a LOT better than it used to. More reliability, more efficiency, and far less wear-out and breakdown. There were a lot of both breakthroughs, and incremental design and methodology improvements, better materials, and so on from decades of invention and experiment piling up knowledge. But things like those two big corrections have certainly had an impact in the smooth running of modern technology.
So I looked it up.
White potatoes have many (but not quite all) of the major nutrients. But you'd have to eat a LOT of them if that's all you ate.
White and sweet are very close on most things, with a few major exceptions: White is a bit higher in protein. Sweet has about an order of magnitude more sodium (which white is very low in). Sweet also has a bunch more sugar. And sweet is LOADED with vitamin A and Beta-carotene - which is great for a serving but terribly toxic if you get too much - as you would if you tried to live off just sweet potatoes.
So, no, sweet potatoes are NOT more nutritious than white (except if you need some vitamin A and are only eating sweet potatoes as PART of a balanced diet.)
Sweet potatoes are also more nutritionally beneficial than white potatoes.
ORLY?
I was under the impression (from a claim I heard in a discussion of The Potato Famine) that ordinary potatoes of the sort grown in Ireland a century and a half or so ago, though heavy on starch (and thus leading to overweight issues if you try to live on them alone and aren't extremely active), were nutritionally complete, or very close to it. (That's why the Brit landlords could get away with exporting everything else farmed there while the peasants lived on potatoes - and starved when the potatoes were blighted and the other stuff was still being reserved for export.)
Sweet potatoes, however, are a different thing and much heavier in sugar.
But I haven't looked it up lately, so I'm not asserting the above as truth.
Pascal's wager used to be good logic and effectively neutral ...
Pascal's wager falls apart if there is more than one incompatible alternative for the "There is a Heaven and this is how you get there." side. There are many. (Most of them claim that adhering to another is damming, as well.)
It also breaks down if there are substantial costs to betting on religion (and you don't allow the "infinite reward" claim to swamp your estimate of the probability of its truth.)
[global warming / climate change is] a very serious existential threat to our whole species.
That - with a particular form of it, and a particular, single, solution prescribed for it - is the claim. It may even be correct. (I'm not going to even get started on the explosion of issues with evidence, alternatives, etc.)
Unfortunately, it is being promulgated as a "One True Religion", rather than being subject to proper scientific debate and examination, and is being used to sell a particular, very expensive, product that may be anything from salvation, through snake oil, to deadly poison.
As with (any other) religion, Pascal's Wager breaks down unless it's the only play in town. Get back to me when its adherents are willing to expose the raw data, along with their reasoning and calculations, to open analysis, rather than using governmental power and money, and politically correct social pressure, to shut down anyone who even mentions any alternative, or questions any aspect of their claims.
Part of the problem is that while they claim there's no proof that it's caused by man, they also implicitly take the next step and imply that it's not that big a disaster.
ORLY?
The last I heard, the only way the issue of whether the claimed climate change is, as also claimed, caused by man (by fossil-fuel sourced carbon dioxide emissions) entered into it is that, if such human emissions are not a major causative factor, reduction of them by draconian government intervention is useless. (Worse than useless, actually, since the economic disaster such intervention represents could destroy the possibility of applying some effective solution if it is actually needed. For instance: If the planet is disastrously cooking and all else fails, we could orbit some continent-scale sunshades - but only if we could still afford an industrial-scale space program.)
That is a completely separate issue from whether climate change is happening. It is also separate from whether, if it is happening, it is a disaster, an annoyance, neutral, or even a good thing.
There are a lot of steps from "We noticed the temperature measurements are bit different from a century ago." to "We must reverse this trend, even if it means destroying industrial civilization, and freezing in the dark, and the exercise of totalitarian governmental power, or we'll all die!" Government and financial figures have jumped over all the steps - straight to the convenient-for-them totalitarian intervention and billions of dollars siphoned off from production to the operators of carbon credit markets - before the first couple steps were exposed to any substantial peer review.
High impedance of the SOURCE DOES enable greater energy transfers through high impedance - including high resistance - of the channel.
In this case that takes the form of a "found" channel of fixed, and high, impedance. A high voltage, low current, source will drive far more energy through that channel than a source that is capable of delivering the same amount of energy but only at a lower voltage and higher current. Impedance is voltage over current. If it weren't for breakdown (think arcing) the higher the voltage the more energy you send.
Impedance is voltage over current. When applied to the energy source, impedance doesn't mean what the name would naively imply. Having a high impedance doesn't imply that the source has any losses at all.
Electric currents are known to travel underground. There's also the piezoelectric effect where crystals put under strain can generate electric currents and thus magnetic fields.
Under stress, actually. And producing very high voltage electric fields. So the impedance is very high, allowing small currents through even high resistances to transfer large amounts of energy, potentially for long distances.
(It's almost Tesla style.)
I've wondered for decades (since first hearing about "earthquake lights") whether:
- Continental drift stresses on piezoelectic minerals might create such electric fields
- the CHANGES in stresses during earthquakes (and their foreshocks) might create strong electric fields deltas and associated electrical, radio, and visual phenomena
- minute, but high voltage, currents through conductive material (such as water in a fault) might carry the energy, at electrical speeds, to piezoelectric rocks in other locations, to be transduced back into large forces that might, in turn, affect the release of faults and/or the propagation of rips in them (and among nearby fault systems)
- these electrical phenomena might be measured, or detected as ultra-low-frequency ground currents or radio waves.
- externally applied high voltages might also flex piezoelectric minerals, allowing triggering of quakes by things like lightning strikes or even human intervention.
The energy involved in an earthquake's stress relief is on the order of, to a few orders greater than, that of very large nuclear bombs. There's a LOT of deposits of piezo materials down there - notably quartz - often with very large crystals to provide similarly-oriented force/voltage transduction, rather than randomly-directed forces or electrical potential vectors. If even a tiny amount of an earthquake or foreshock's energy is transformed from mechanical stress changes to electrical signals, you're dealing with lightning-strike, or far greater, levels of electrical activity.
For some time now the medical community has been using inkjet technology, with the ink loaded with live cells, to "seed" 3D printed organ scaffolds with live cells, which then populate, then replace, the scaffold, yielding a live replacement part suitable for implantation. But that depends on the cells' ability to do the fine details of self-organization to handle the small geometry.
It looks like this printer technology could put the cells right where they belong, or pretty much so, enabling the construction of a replacement organ or component in fine detail. Like for kidneys.
Maybe even lay down guides for growing neural interconnections, to get the wiring diagram right. That's getting precariously close to being able to reanimate cryonics patients by (probably destructively) scanning the details of the neural interconnections and other stored state of the nervous system, then building a working brain (with freezing damage and the like repaired) with an accurate and functional instance of the original mind in it.
For $3.40 per watt, that included a "smart inverter", one that runs each panel to its max power, ...
Sounds like a distorted description of a "max power point"" inverter - which runs the panels at the voltage where the most energy is extracted from them and down-converting to the desired output voltage, trading the extra voltage for more output current, rather than clamping them to the output voltage and discarding the extra energy as heat in the panels. ... if one is dirty, blocked, or fails, it doesn't stop the others.
Unless you have one of those pricey systems where there's a separate inverter on each panel, that's just done by paralleling the panels and (at voltages where it matters) giving each panel a blocking diode. Then the panels do it for you. (The diode throws away a little power, but at the higher voltages where the wiring is efficient, rather than something heavy-duty like automotive starter cables, you need the diodes anyway. Otherwise the high voltage panels would exceed the breakdown voltage of the cells in the partially shaded panel(s) and fry them (starting at the point in each cell where the junction first goes into reverse avalanche mode and ends up dissipating the power from several other panels RIGHT THERE.)
It included wiring, permits, grid-tie, a second power box in the garage, and all the attachment hardware for the roof.
Grid tie adds several grand to the inverter. Grid tie with backfeed (letting you turn on the "sell" {power to the grid} switch) also adds a LOT of red tape - largely to convince the power company you have a certified design that will detect outages (mainly by frequency fluctuations) and not "island" - feeding your neighbors' houses and electrocuting the lineman they sent out to restore power.
"Sell" grid-tie (as opposed to having an inverter that can also charge your local batteries from the grid - and feed your house - when they're getting too low) is normally not worth it unless you can get some net-metering or annual-metering deal with the power company (without paying a big premium), letting you use the grid as a "big battery" to "store" your power over seasons. That, and/or the grid-is-my-backup approach, lets you get away with a much smaller battery system (or none, using grid power when the sun is gone, but not being powered if the grid goes down then).
I priced solar just 2 months ago, talked to two local companies that sell solar, the end price is just nuts, about $3.40 a watt installed for a 10.5 KW system in Texas.
Then you're probably paying about $2.45/W for supports and installation.
And storage and electronics (systems are a lot more than panel farms) and site planning and contractor/electrician licenses and insurance and their kid's college education ...
What was in the proposal besides the panels?
I priced solar just 2 months ago, talked to two local companies that sell solar, the end price is just nuts, about $3.40 a watt installed for a 10.5 KW system in Texas.
Then you're probably paying about $2.45/W for supports and installation. Raw panels - in pallet lots or slightly more if repackaged for fewer than 25 panels - are regularly well under $1/W, and you can get B grade (blemished but still fully functional and guaranteed) for about half that.
One of the cheaper places to get them is Sun Electronics, headquartered in Florida but with sites elsewhere. But there are plenty more.
A lot of the government subsidies require installation by licensed contractors (who mark things up substantially more than the subsidy, so it's really government welfare for contractors). But you can still do-it-yourself and be permitted, inspected, and approved in essentially all jurisdictions.
Remember to be nice to the inspectors. Talk it over with them - or the chief of their department - in advance, but do your homework even before that and come to them with a plan or quick questions - not wasting their time (ESPECIALLY on inspections, when they have a tight schedule) is VERY important. When you're ready to go get the permit. Do it THEIR way - their word is effectively the law. Try to get it right the first time (so they don't have to come back after you correct something). Don't cut corners - do it better than a contract electrician. (You can afford to spend a little extra time to make everything neat and better done.)
It doesn't matter if you can make a battery with very high energy density but with a very short lifespan.
And sulfur-lithium cells have had a history of short lifetimes. It will be interesting to see if Sony has beaten that - or at least gotten them to last longer than equivalently priced lithium cells of more conventional design.
In general, I'm skeptical of claims of massive improvement in batteries. As with new solar systems, if every single in-lab claimed battery improvement all were genuine and implementable we'd have solves all the world's energy problems years ago.
On the other hand, commercially available, UL-approved (so they don't void your fire insurance), solar panels are now cheap enough (WITHOUT subsidies) to beat grid power on price/performance on sunny sites in the temperate zone. The control and conversion electronics has participated in the general Moore's Law style semiconductor technology improvement curve (and will also benefit from economy-of-scale as deployments continue to ramp up). The third piece of the off-gridding puzzle is storage...
Learn this now; this is not an oversight. People who still think the government is an institution that is meant to do best for the people they represent is utter nonsense.
My point exactly. Which I was pointing out to others.
I've known this about governments since the '60s. Back in those days the ideas of the Founding Fathers were still occasionally taught in high-end high schools, the writings of critics of government in general - by their and our contemporaries and people from eras in between (such as the historic anarchists), were readily available, and what became the Libertarian Party was just spinning out of the Republican Party (with the help of some of my friends B-) ).
David Friedman was fun. In those days he ran around with a giant fake gold medallion on a chain around his neck, with the inscription "T.A.N.S.T.A.A.F.L." on it. (Some of those friends were plotting to give him a free lunch, made of such things as salvaged ingredients that were being discarded by supermarkets as too near their end-of-life.) "The Murray Twins" (Bookchin and Rothbard) were always entertaining, and thought-provoking, as well.
Maybe baseband hacks are not that practical?
Or maybe they're just not, or not yet, lowered in classification, productized, and released to the readers of that catalogue.
The govenment fining the company and keeping the money just makes the company have to charge more and/or cut service for a given fee, adding insult to injury.
Here's an end run for such regulations:
- The municipalities install bundles of conduit, along with pull-boxes, manholed repeater vaults, and the like. Also install, or allow the user to install, per-house or per-apartment-complex conduit to the nearest valult. (Include this in the utility hookup zoning and permitting requirements on any new developments, too.)
- Then lease a conduit right-of-way and vault rack space to all comers on equal terms: AT&T and your local mom-and-POP can both string their cables, fibres, or what-not on equal terms, and NONE of them have to get their investors to pony up, up front, to dig up the whole city - separately. (With N conduits in each vault-to-vault hop the first N comers initially have a conduit to themselves, though they may have to share it eventually.)
- String fibre bundles through the first conduit, use some of the fibres for the municipal net, and (if the federal rules don't block it), lease a limited-number-per-customer to all comers, ditto (reserving a few for backups for failed fibres and for future expansion.)
As with "dark fibre", almost all the cost is digging up the countryside to install the conduits and fibre runs. Putting in more conduit, or using fibre cables with more fibres, vastly multiplies the capacity with a small percentage increment on the cost of the installation. This "future-proofs" it. With dense wavelength division a single pair of fibres can carry a major telecom's entire local traffic. Run a dozen four-inch pipes between each vault and you can expect it to serve all the city's communication requirements for far longer than the expected life of the other aspects of the city's infrastructure.
instead of lead, they had to add other chemicals to raise octane ratings to reduce knocking. Those chemicals cost more.
Some of them also had other issues - like being toxic in other ways, or causing other problems.
MTBE (the first big tetraethyl lead replacement), for instance, has leaked out of storage tanks and contaminated ground water. It produces a foul taste in microgram concentrations, so even if it turns out not to be hazardous, a little can make a lot of ground water undrinkable. There are claims it causes or exacerbates asthma in the concentrations people were exposed to when filling their own cars at self-service stations (let alone the exposure a gas station worker might experience.) It hasn't (yet?) been shown to cause cancer, but cancer takes a while and research continues.
Ethanol (and methanol moreso, when added by unscrupulous gasoline suppliers) attacked the rubber in fuel lines (causing fuel leaks), dissolved plastic carburetor floats (causing first rich mixtures, then flooding, then gasoline spillage over the engine), removed protective internal coatings in fuel systems (causing corrosion, leading to both gas leaks and clogging), and dissolved gasket sealing compounds (leading to blown head gaskets and other leakage issues). This resulted in a lot of engine damage and fires (sometimes fatal) in older cars when mandated ethanol was first added to fuel supplies. Engines and fuel systems had to be redesigned to survive it. (They're still mostly rated for no more than 85% ethanol in the fuel mix. You need a little oil in the fuel to lubricate a number of moving parts that are constantly washed by the fuel.)
(Eco-regulators knew the fires were happening, but didn't do anything about it: It was perceived as getting the older, more polluting, cars off the road, and what did a few fatalities and millions of dollars of losses among the poorest drivers matter in the face of cleaning up the air? Hurrah!)
The redesign also involved pricey modifications to the valves and their guides. Leaded gasoline deposits a thin coating of lead on exhaust valve stems. This lubricates them where they rub against the valve guides (typically bronze). Exhaust valves get HOT, so lubricating them any other way is problematic. But any sticking causes immediate and major problems, from a "burned valve" due to hot exhaust eroding any leaking point, to a stuck valve being hit by the piston, breaking both and causing the engine to suddenly fail.
The ubiquity of lead-containing fuel additives let the engine designers get away with a simple solution for much of a century. Removing the lead meant they had to solve the hard problem a harder way - and that older engines would self-destruct if fed unleaded gas.
This is why aviation gas is still leaded: Sudden engine stoppage while airborne is a disaster, and getting a new engine design approved by the FAA is akin to getting a new drug approved by the FDA when it comes to cost and red tape. Most commercial flight is jets these days, so piston-engine lead pollution is miniscule, making it hard for the government to justify the cost of mandating the designing, approving, and (for existing planes) retrofitting of replacement engines.
I'm not sure that Libertarians want a completely open border, as it would lead to tens of millions of immediate entrants, with hundreds of millions soon after, eventually making the US the most populous nation on the planet.
Some libertarians (including Ron Paul, for example), recognize that, desirable as they believe open borders might be, they have to wait until some other things are fixed.
This is why I call myself a "law-n-order minarchist". You can't just repeal laws. You have to do it in the right ORDER, or you can break things even worse.
Example: Open borders have to happen AFTER entitlement reform.
Now index it for cost of living and include automatic inflation adjustments and we've got something to talk about.
According to TFA, he DID. B-)
Actually, if he really wanted to get rid of them he would propose a bill to end the program, right?
The program was SUPPOSED to bring in a handful of rare talents. It was corrupted to bring in wholesale replacements for native white-collar workers (just as illegal immigration brings in wholesale replacements for blue-collar workers, breaking unions and depressing blue-collar wages).
Putting a realistic floor on the H1B salaries, and prioritizing the visas so they go to the highest-paid guest workers first, should bring the corrupt gaming of the system to a screeching halt while still serving the original purpose for the few special talents that ARE hard enough to get that they can command the high price.
(And I say that as someone who IS a high-priced native talent and would still face competition from H1Bs at that price floor. I believe I can hold my own, even in the estimation of fad-driven pointy-haired-bosses, against people at and above that price range, but not against the (IMHO incorrect) perception that three or more lesser talents might provide more value for the same bucks.)
That's still poverty in Silicon Valley
$110k is a bit low for Silicon Valley.
On the other hand, my experience trying to get work out of a few H1Bs and offshore employees has been that they are substantially (like sometimes a factor of several) less productive than typical citizen workers. If this is a general trend, rather than just the individuals I happen to have experience with, $110k is close enough that the economic advantage would still flip to the native (and maybe the fully naturalized) workers.