I guess if most sellers set their prices based on how rich the buyer is, most buyers would rather buy anonymously. This is the best explanation of Bezos' actions that I can figure.
Not just that, but if it becomes well-known that a rich buyer, especially if it's a large company, is making a land grab, a few property owners could basically extort the buyer for more cash. That is, the current owner could say to the buyer, "I know you're trying to buy up all this land for some important reason, and I know you can't do anything until you get my land, so start adding zeros to that check until I say stop." I believe the same sort of thing happened in the early days of the US railroad system.
Today's fun fact: a mole of Twinkies stacked end to end, assuming they're about three inches long (I haven't one around to measure), would stretch from here to Andromeda and about 90% of the way back.
Methanol is pretty bad for you, being readily absorbed through the skin and then metabolized into formaldehyde.
I forgot to mention (a rather important point!) that we diluted the methanol quite a bit -- probably to about 5-10% -- so in general I thought it was alright so long as we weren't bathing in it. We'd only use the methanol before lunch and before going home, as Fast Orange or equivalent did a decent enough job for a fifteen-minute break.
If I'm wrong, I guess I'm glad I only worked there for a year.:)
But your hands feel greasy for the rest of the day, even after washing them.
Try methanol. It's fantastic at cleaning the oil off your hands, with the added bonus of helping you find any cuts you didn't know about. It does tend to dry out your hands, though, so we usually washed our hands afterward with lotioned soap.
One person I spoke to told me that ethanol is incompatible with gasket materials on the interior of many engines in use at the moment. I can't find mention of this in TFA, though.
Fuels with heavy alcohol content are indeed hell on rubber gasket material and hoses, since alcohols tend to suck moisture out of rubber, rendering them hard and brittle, but burning E85 and the like also requires some special programming on your car's powertrain control module (PCM) and possibly an enhanced oxygen sensor. Since E85 burns best at a different air-fuel ratio than gasoline's 14.7:1, the PCM must be able to determine the fuel being burned and adjust the ratio accordingly. Electronic fuel injection (as in my 1995 Bonneville) isn't generally enough by itself, as the PCM programming assumes that it will only have to lean out or richen the fuel mixture by a small amount -- my car, for example, can only adjust the fuel trim +/- 10%, which likely isn't enough to encompass the range necessary to burn E85 efficiently. So even if you were to replace the affected gaskets and hoses, it's likely that you'd need custom firmware loaded onto your PCM and possibly a new O2 sensor to be able to use it, which is really more trouble than it's worth.
For the uninitiated, the "impact factor" of a scientific journal as calculated by the Institute for Scientific Information is the ratio of the number of times articles in that publication are cited in the journals the ISI tracks to the number of articles published in that publication. It's a useful but somewhat controversial measure of a publication's "importance" to the scientific community.
The net gain ($10b - $1.5b) would still be a revenue influx of $8.5b. This sounds like a (surprisingly) fair and mutually beneficial deal.
It does indeed, until you read that the government is selling off spectrum that belongs to the American public to commercial interests. The first comprehensive legislation on spectrum use and broadcasting was the Radio Act of 1927, which established the Federal Radio Commission, precursor to today's FCC. The Radio Act instructed the FRC to favor those stations which served the "public interest, convenience, or necessity," but the pro-commercial administration of the FRC soon began cracking down on precisely those sorts of stations, run by non-profit groups and universities across the country. The FRC constantly reallocated these stations' spectrum, and finally came to the compromise, if you can call it that, of "allowing" many public interest stations to share a minute portion of the overall spectrum, and licensed the rest of it to commercial networks like NBC and CBS. (In 1927, NBC and CBS hardly existed; in 1931, their stations accounted for 70% of the broadcast power in the U.S.)
This step was the first of many in severely hindering those who wanted to use the electromagnetic spectrum to serve the public interest. Anyone flipping through cable channels today knows all too well who won that battle, and the recent Telecommunications Act of 1996 was more or less the last nail in the coffin -- its deregulatory clauses allowed for the creation of what could perhaps be called a media cartel, as the limits on the number of broadcasting stations one company could own were all but eliminated. Smaller companies merged together and about half of the nation's broadcasting stations changed hands as media giants snapped up as many stations as they could lay their hands on. See the case of Clear Channel Communications, which now owns roughly 1200 stations across the country.
Where am I going with all this? If anything, I'd like to see parts of that reclaimed spectrum reserved for public broadcasting, and a significant portion of profit gained from the sale of the rest of the spectrum to private interests allocated to fund public broadcasting. I simply don't think it's justified to use that money for anything else.
For more information on the political history of broadcasting in the U.S., see Robert W. McChesney's Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times, ISBN 1-56584-634-6.
The life support system needed to sustain the bacteria colony while the truck is not running (i.e., not producing heat, not producing CO) would probably be cost-prohibitive to mobile implementation of this idea. Unless, of course, gas stations started culturing bacteria so you could top off your H-farm along with your diesel tank.
Re:Robust == Robust flavor? This is incorrect
on
Drink Decaf and Die
·
· Score: 1
Decaf coffee is in general bad because it's expensive to process. If you use the same high-quality beans as you'd use for caffeinated coffee, the added cost of time and equipment would drive the price of a cup of decaf higher than the price of a cup of regular. That's bad for business -- most people probably wouldn't pay extra for a cup of decaf. So the processors use cheap, lower-quality beans for decaf, and the final price ends up closer to the price of regular coffee.
The reason that the terminals on your battery get "yucky" is the sulfuric acid leaking from behind the terminals onto the metal. A mixture of baking soda and water is good at cleaning corroded terminals because it neutralizes the acid, which then allows the ions to dissolve in water. If you were to dip the terminal of a corroded battery cable in mixture of baking soda and water, you'll notice that after a while the water turns a greenish-blue -- those are the copper ions that the acid has "liberated" from the metal of the terminal. This effect has nothing to do with AC vs DC and everything to do with leaky acid-cell batteries.
Copper and aluminum bus bars in AC power substations corrode just as much as they would if they were carrying DC; in fact, if you were to ever watch a substation being put together, every electrical connection is slathered with an anti-oxidation compound like "NoOx" (for copper) or "NoAlOx" (for aluminum) to prevent oxidatation that could then lead to hotspots and eventually fire.
Actually, proximity to girls caused higher brain functions to be transferred to an area just below the waist. You could still technically think, but it was limited in scope.
Robin Williams described this phenomenon well: "God gave men a brain and a penis, but only enough blood to work one at a time."
Lenna is one of the many "standardized" images used in image processing research, akin to the well-understood strains of Norway rats used by medical researchers all over the world so that their peers can reproduce their experiments. For more examples of standard research images, see the USC-SIPI image database.
Geosynchronous orbits are quite a bit further away (42164 km) than low Earth orbits (typically 350-1400 km). In order for a billboard in geosynchronous orbit to appear as large as one in LEO, it'd have to be about three orders of magnitude larger.
Not all mineral oils are clear, and mineral oils are certainly used in electrical equipment. Dielectric oil, used for insulation and arc-extinguishing in power distribution equipment like circuit breakers or power factor correction capacitors, usually has a nice yellow tint to it straight from the manufacturer.
Best part is, you can usually get 55-gallon drums of the stuff from a local rural power co-op. (The stuff makes great diesel fuel once you filter out the carbon -- I used to use it in a Reddy-Heater to keep my workshop warm in the winter.) Just make sure the used oil is PCB-free, which it should be since companies that handle used oil are generally required to submit extensive paperwork on PCB-contaminated oil to verify that it's disposed of properly.
One factor you failed to take into account in your experiment is that modern vehicles have a computer, commonly called a PCM for Powertrain Control Module, that, amongst hundreds of other things, adjusts the long- and short-term fuel trim to achieve the correct stoichiometric air/fuel ratio (AFR) of 14.7:1. Basically, the PCM controls the pulse width of the fuel injectors to control the amount of fuel injected into each cylinder. It then measures the amount of oxygen in the exhaust, and based on these two figures, calculates the AFR. If the AFR is not ideal, the PCM changes the short-term fuel trim (STFT) to correct it. The STFT responds to short-duration extremes, such as sudden increases in driver demand (e.g., flooring it). The long-term fuel trim (LTFT) monitors the average values of the STFT; if STFT is at an average of, say, -3% for some predetermined amount of time, the PCM will adjust in the negative direction in hopes that the average STFT will then hover about 0%.
In a way, the LTFT describes how you drive; if you've constantly got your foot to the floor, it's likely that your STFT might be often correcting for lean conditions at wide-open throttle, and driving your LTFT towards an overall rich condition. (Or vice versa; some vehicles tend toward rich conditions at WOT.) If you're a very smooth driver, your LTFT should hover around 0%, since rapid changes in driver demand aren't knocking the STFT about (barring any other idiosyncrasies of your fuel system). The important point here, though, is that your PCM needs to "relearn" your driving style; a more correct way to perform this experiment would be to:
1) drive like you normally do for one tank and calculate;
2) fill up, drive home, and pull off the positive battery cable for 15 minutes or so to let the PCM "forget" your previous LTFT;
3) drive with a different driving style for one tank just to let the PCM relearn;
4) drive the same way as in 3) for another tank and calculate;
It's stated on Moller's website that the Moller Skycar, linked above and also featured in the article, that it can "achieve up to 28 miles per gallon." That's better than I'm getting.
"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [of pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it..."
Hon. Potter Stewart, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, JACOBELLIS v. OHIO, 378 U.S. 184 (1964)
Wood is what you need. Dries out the bugs in no time at all.
Actually only one scientific study (by the University of Wisconsin, I believe) has shown that wood cutting boards have anti-microbial properties. Further studies have failed to duplicate their results, and the most recent studies by the FDA suggest that wood does, as we've all been taught, hang on to microbes much better than plastic or metal does.
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I guess if most sellers set their prices based on how rich the buyer is, most buyers would rather buy anonymously. This is the best explanation of Bezos' actions that I can figure.
Not just that, but if it becomes well-known that a rich buyer, especially if it's a large company, is making a land grab, a few property owners could basically extort the buyer for more cash. That is, the current owner could say to the buyer, "I know you're trying to buy up all this land for some important reason, and I know you can't do anything until you get my land, so start adding zeros to that check until I say stop." I believe the same sort of thing happened in the early days of the US railroad system.
Today's fun fact: a mole of Twinkies stacked end to end, assuming they're about three inches long (I haven't one around to measure), would stretch from here to Andromeda and about 90% of the way back.
OtterBox makes nigh-indestructible (and waterproof!) cases of all sorts, and it looks like they've branched out into laptop cases as well.
Methanol is pretty bad for you, being readily absorbed through the skin and then metabolized into formaldehyde.
:)
I forgot to mention (a rather important point!) that we diluted the methanol quite a bit -- probably to about 5-10% -- so in general I thought it was alright so long as we weren't bathing in it. We'd only use the methanol before lunch and before going home, as Fast Orange or equivalent did a decent enough job for a fifteen-minute break.
If I'm wrong, I guess I'm glad I only worked there for a year.
But your hands feel greasy for the rest of the day, even after washing them.
Try methanol. It's fantastic at cleaning the oil off your hands, with the added bonus of helping you find any cuts you didn't know about. It does tend to dry out your hands, though, so we usually washed our hands afterward with lotioned soap.
One person I spoke to told me that ethanol is incompatible with gasket materials on the interior of many engines in use at the moment. I can't find mention of this in TFA, though.
Fuels with heavy alcohol content are indeed hell on rubber gasket material and hoses, since alcohols tend to suck moisture out of rubber, rendering them hard and brittle, but burning E85 and the like also requires some special programming on your car's powertrain control module (PCM) and possibly an enhanced oxygen sensor. Since E85 burns best at a different air-fuel ratio than gasoline's 14.7:1, the PCM must be able to determine the fuel being burned and adjust the ratio accordingly. Electronic fuel injection (as in my 1995 Bonneville) isn't generally enough by itself, as the PCM programming assumes that it will only have to lean out or richen the fuel mixture by a small amount -- my car, for example, can only adjust the fuel trim +/- 10%, which likely isn't enough to encompass the range necessary to burn E85 efficiently. So even if you were to replace the affected gaskets and hoses, it's likely that you'd need custom firmware loaded onto your PCM and possibly a new O2 sensor to be able to use it, which is really more trouble than it's worth.
I was just reading about this the other day for some reason. The Wikipedia entry on the eight-hour workday is a good starting point.
For the uninitiated, the "impact factor" of a scientific journal as calculated by the Institute for Scientific Information is the ratio of the number of times articles in that publication are cited in the journals the ISI tracks to the number of articles published in that publication. It's a useful but somewhat controversial measure of a publication's "importance" to the scientific community.
The net gain ($10b - $1.5b) would still be a revenue influx of $8.5b. This sounds like a (surprisingly) fair and mutually beneficial deal.
It does indeed, until you read that the government is selling off spectrum that belongs to the American public to commercial interests. The first comprehensive legislation on spectrum use and broadcasting was the Radio Act of 1927, which established the Federal Radio Commission, precursor to today's FCC. The Radio Act instructed the FRC to favor those stations which served the "public interest, convenience, or necessity," but the pro-commercial administration of the FRC soon began cracking down on precisely those sorts of stations, run by non-profit groups and universities across the country. The FRC constantly reallocated these stations' spectrum, and finally came to the compromise, if you can call it that, of "allowing" many public interest stations to share a minute portion of the overall spectrum, and licensed the rest of it to commercial networks like NBC and CBS. (In 1927, NBC and CBS hardly existed; in 1931, their stations accounted for 70% of the broadcast power in the U.S.)
This step was the first of many in severely hindering those who wanted to use the electromagnetic spectrum to serve the public interest. Anyone flipping through cable channels today knows all too well who won that battle, and the recent Telecommunications Act of 1996 was more or less the last nail in the coffin -- its deregulatory clauses allowed for the creation of what could perhaps be called a media cartel, as the limits on the number of broadcasting stations one company could own were all but eliminated. Smaller companies merged together and about half of the nation's broadcasting stations changed hands as media giants snapped up as many stations as they could lay their hands on. See the case of Clear Channel Communications, which now owns roughly 1200 stations across the country.
Where am I going with all this? If anything, I'd like to see parts of that reclaimed spectrum reserved for public broadcasting, and a significant portion of profit gained from the sale of the rest of the spectrum to private interests allocated to fund public broadcasting. I simply don't think it's justified to use that money for anything else.
For more information on the political history of broadcasting in the U.S., see Robert W. McChesney's Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times, ISBN 1-56584-634-6.
"...didn't being marked at 20 approximately 20 points."
He's obviously speaking Foghorn Leghorn-ese. Think of it instead as "being marked at 20 I say 20 points" and it makes a lot more sense.
The life support system needed to sustain the bacteria colony while the truck is not running (i.e., not producing heat, not producing CO) would probably be cost-prohibitive to mobile implementation of this idea. Unless, of course, gas stations started culturing bacteria so you could top off your H-farm along with your diesel tank.
Decaf coffee is in general bad because it's expensive to process. If you use the same high-quality beans as you'd use for caffeinated coffee, the added cost of time and equipment would drive the price of a cup of decaf higher than the price of a cup of regular. That's bad for business -- most people probably wouldn't pay extra for a cup of decaf. So the processors use cheap, lower-quality beans for decaf, and the final price ends up closer to the price of regular coffee.
The reason that the terminals on your battery get "yucky" is the sulfuric acid leaking from behind the terminals onto the metal. A mixture of baking soda and water is good at cleaning corroded terminals because it neutralizes the acid, which then allows the ions to dissolve in water. If you were to dip the terminal of a corroded battery cable in mixture of baking soda and water, you'll notice that after a while the water turns a greenish-blue -- those are the copper ions that the acid has "liberated" from the metal of the terminal. This effect has nothing to do with AC vs DC and everything to do with leaky acid-cell batteries.
Copper and aluminum bus bars in AC power substations corrode just as much as they would if they were carrying DC; in fact, if you were to ever watch a substation being put together, every electrical connection is slathered with an anti-oxidation compound like "NoOx" (for copper) or "NoAlOx" (for aluminum) to prevent oxidatation that could then lead to hotspots and eventually fire.
Oh, you mean the Hindenburg?
Too soon!
It's not the fall that kills them, it's the landing.
Reminded me of an old comic from the now-defunct The Parking Lot is Full webcomic. (Mirrored here since the original site is acting sluggish.)
Actually, proximity to girls caused higher brain functions to be transferred to an area just below the waist. You could still technically think, but it was limited in scope.
Robin Williams described this phenomenon well: "God gave men a brain and a penis, but only enough blood to work one at a time."
Lenna is one of the many "standardized" images used in image processing research, akin to the well-understood strains of Norway rats used by medical researchers all over the world so that their peers can reproduce their experiments. For more examples of standard research images, see the USC-SIPI image database.
Geosynchronous orbits are quite a bit further away (42164 km) than low Earth orbits (typically 350-1400 km). In order for a billboard in geosynchronous orbit to appear as large as one in LEO, it'd have to be about three orders of magnitude larger.
Not all mineral oils are clear, and mineral oils are certainly used in electrical equipment. Dielectric oil, used for insulation and arc-extinguishing in power distribution equipment like circuit breakers or power factor correction capacitors, usually has a nice yellow tint to it straight from the manufacturer.
Best part is, you can usually get 55-gallon drums of the stuff from a local rural power co-op. (The stuff makes great diesel fuel once you filter out the carbon -- I used to use it in a Reddy-Heater to keep my workshop warm in the winter.) Just make sure the used oil is PCB-free, which it should be since companies that handle used oil are generally required to submit extensive paperwork on PCB-contaminated oil to verify that it's disposed of properly.
One factor you failed to take into account in your experiment is that modern vehicles have a computer, commonly called a PCM for Powertrain Control Module, that, amongst hundreds of other things, adjusts the long- and short-term fuel trim to achieve the correct stoichiometric air/fuel ratio (AFR) of 14.7:1. Basically, the PCM controls the pulse width of the fuel injectors to control the amount of fuel injected into each cylinder. It then measures the amount of oxygen in the exhaust, and based on these two figures, calculates the AFR. If the AFR is not ideal, the PCM changes the short-term fuel trim (STFT) to correct it. The STFT responds to short-duration extremes, such as sudden increases in driver demand (e.g., flooring it). The long-term fuel trim (LTFT) monitors the average values of the STFT; if STFT is at an average of, say, -3% for some predetermined amount of time, the PCM will adjust in the negative direction in hopes that the average STFT will then hover about 0%.
In a way, the LTFT describes how you drive; if you've constantly got your foot to the floor, it's likely that your STFT might be often correcting for lean conditions at wide-open throttle, and driving your LTFT towards an overall rich condition. (Or vice versa; some vehicles tend toward rich conditions at WOT.) If you're a very smooth driver, your LTFT should hover around 0%, since rapid changes in driver demand aren't knocking the STFT about (barring any other idiosyncrasies of your fuel system). The important point here, though, is that your PCM needs to "relearn" your driving style; a more correct way to perform this experiment would be to:
1) drive like you normally do for one tank and calculate;
2) fill up, drive home, and pull off the positive battery cable for 15 minutes or so to let the PCM "forget" your previous LTFT;
3) drive with a different driving style for one tank just to let the PCM relearn;
4) drive the same way as in 3) for another tank and calculate;
5) repeat 2)-4) as necessary.
It's stated on Moller's website that the Moller Skycar, linked above and also featured in the article, that it can "achieve up to 28 miles per gallon." That's better than I'm getting.
Credit where credit's due:
"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [of pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it..."
Hon. Potter Stewart, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, JACOBELLIS v. OHIO, 378 U.S. 184 (1964)
I 3 NIN.
I 4 NIN.
Wait, I don't want to play this game, I'm gonna lose.
Wood is what you need. Dries out the bugs in no time at all.
Actually only one scientific study (by the University of Wisconsin, I believe) has shown that wood cutting boards have anti-microbial properties. Further studies have failed to duplicate their results, and the most recent studies by the FDA suggest that wood does, as we've all been taught, hang on to microbes much better than plastic or metal does.