amrcnimgrnt

"A car needs several car-lengths of space between them."

The distance between bumpers actually cancels out (actually it comes out in the car's favor). First notice that in the picture the cars are almost touching, so clearly you mean in fast moving traffic.

In fast moving traffic the carrying capacity of a lane is equal of the inverse reaction time (typically engineers use a large margin of safety and 2 seconds is used -> 1800 cars/(lane hour)).

For bikes, since they travel more slowly, you have to add the time it takes to travel their own length. So the carrying capacity of a lane is 1/(reaction time + length of bike / speed of bike).

The "several car lengths between them" is literally space that exists only because cars have generated themselves by virtue of going very fast (since fast moving vehicles get to where they want to be quicker and therefore get off the road to make space for someone else).

This doesn't mean that cars make sense in dense cities. They don't.

This doesn't means cars don't take more space by virtue of being longer in slow traffic. They do

But it does mean that, if there are "several car lengths between them", they are in fact operating in a more space efficient regime.

That's context dependent. Where I live it's not a problem that a car takes up space (my car is parked in my home's basement).

Where I typically go to it's a relatively minor problem - most places I go to only need 4 to 5 places to park cars.

Work is in the middle of nowhere, again not an issue except that the government employees have reserved the lot by the building for themselves despite it being large enough to house the contractors as well (the govt. employees want to ensure they get the spots nearest the building).

Should the city of Rome have cars? No. But we don't (nor can we!) all live in a small European city

It also assumes the cars have one occupant. I rarely drive alone these days

You haven't thought it through. It's terrible to be confused, whereas, it's nothing to be dead. You just rot, blissfully unaware.

Unless you're religious. Then it's not death you should fear, but the judgement.

"Yeah. I was born and lived before the Internet (in its widespread form) existed."

So you're in-between the age of 40 to 60? Let's say you're 60, born in 1961:

- Your local pop radio station often plays a rock song from your adolescence. The Queen of Pop whose posters adorned your room and so scandalized your grand-parents still sings at the Super Bowl.

- The Star Wars movie you geeked out as a teen/young adult has become a billion dollar franchise your grandkids drag you to

- The ATM you learned to use thirty years ago are still around basically unchanged.

- the quarter the tooth fairy left you as a kid that you found in the tin can of boyhood treasures is still accepted as currency

Compare that to a 60 year old person born in 1820.

They have yet to have seen a train: most people in the world at the time lived their whole lives in their villages far from any railroad. China's first railroad was built in 1875, and quickly dismantled. (China, alone, in the 19th century had between 30 to 38% of the world population)

Most likely this person lives in feudally arranged society. The emancipation of the serfs in Russia was in the mid 1800s, and that was the last of the European countries to remove feudalism.

In the anglo saxon world, women were effective properties of their spouses.

The superiority/inferiority of races was obvious to the learned classes.

Slavery was practiced throughout the world except Europe and then the US.

Homosexuality was punishable by execution most everwhere in the world

Sexual roles were well defined and strictly obeyed according to local customs (i.e. they weren't universal norms, but norms existed universally).

The only way to fly was in a hot air baloon. The only people who ever witnessed this lived in Paris or in London

Steel existed but was extremely expensive and not used for construction. Wrought iron was used instead, and it was a brittle mess that resulted in catastrophes. As a result the buildings in urban areas were typically no more than 6 stories high. Religious buildings were much taller, but projects that took centuries to build.

Communicating with someone across the Atlantic took weeks.

Now, let's say our hypothetical person living in 1880 and born in 1820 lived another 60 years.

The airplane is invented and used to devastating effect in multiple wars

The automobile is invented, and by 1940 mass produced.

Throughout the world, therefore, buses provide transport to remote area that aren't serviceable by rail

Skyscrapers pop up.

A world war has impacted most people in the world. A new one has just started.

A communist society exists and has mechanized death killing millions.

Telecommunication, first by wired-telegraph, then by wireless telegraph, and finally by radio exists and enables instant communication across the globe. The most remote villages can receive the BBC world service, often in their native language.

Our gentleman most likely wouldn't be aware of this development but classical physics has been shattered, the concept of time turned upside down. The atomic era has also begun, but most people will be blissfully unaware for another 5 years.

Penicillin is about to revolutionize life expectancy.

I think this person born in 1820 would be very uncomfortable if living today.

Now start doing the math for how much power (I made it easy, I I'm only asking for the rate) that is required to keep someone alive indefinitely.

Don't cheat! Don't use the caloric needs of a fully grown adult. Their bodies stoically accept a lot of the damage done by entropy. You have expend additional energy to reverse it.

Don't cheat, remember to account for a population growth rate == the current birth rate.

If you don't like having to account for the growth rate, please give a moral explanation for why some select few get to live forever and others croak.

How much power do you need? How are you supplying this power? It's cute to say "Sun". But solar panels (let's assume 100% efficient) require surface area that would otherwise be used by plant and animals for their existence.

So live forever by

1. Radically transforming the Earth into a massive ball of polycrystalline silicon 2. Giving eternity to only a (very) select few.

Reversing the flow of aging is reversing entropy locally, so you're, overall, increasing entropy more outside of your body.

The live forever types are just assuming that energy will be plentiful enough to sustain hundreds of billions of people indefinitely [1] and heat easy to dissipate

[1] The population of the earth is stable at 7 billion only because people have this nasty habit of dying. If we stopped doing that, the population would grow exponentially at the birth rate of 1.7%. Or a doubling every 42 years. In 160 years (not that far off from the current record of longevity) the world's population would hit 100 billion people.

Of course the "live forever" types never mention that eternity is a promise for the privileged, and not for the masses.

"America is the land of immigrants. "

I should know, I've lived here for 14 y years (and, no, I'm not 14 years old).

"Every batch of immigrants provide the fuel for growth and innovation."

So the people already in America are useless? As an immigrant I feel someone should have told me that my children will become sloths.

"Whatever might be the political climate but US is still the country to come if you want to make your dreams come true."

That's really little more than regurgitating a slogan.

Anyway, the duty of the American government is to Americans. My home country's government's duty is to me, and my duty to my home country's government (that's why I refuse to become American - I'm not ready to pledge the oath of allegiance against "foreign enemies" that might include my home country).

Or why are Americans the only people in the world not allowed to have a government and a State that looks out for their interests?

Easy enough solution, tax outsourced jobs.

"* = Compared to the average American, the average H1-B holder has substantially less purchasing power, before immigrating."

So? Is America's immigration system supposed to serve the interest of foreigners, or Americans?

But for the long tail, sometime they can't be beat.

Which sucks, because I otherwise have eliminated Amazon in my life.

You can't reverse aging, that's a violation of the second law of thermodynamics.

You might be able to restore the body's ability to regenerate itself. But that's a terrible idea. I shudder at the idea of living to 120, never mind 200. Imagine being born in 1821 and having to live today. Imagine how confusing that would be.

"We have done substantial testing."

So go get vaccinated! If you trust the vaccine that it works, and that it's safe, go get it. I certainly have urged people I know who are high-at-risk and don't share my ethical concerns about them to get the vaccine.

If they're safe and effective, get vaccinated!

If they're safe and not effective, or lossy effective, we have very big problems and vaccinating the hold outs will not change anything

Well there are a few issues with your question.

I don't think a society can be as "advanced" as Star Trek. Societies are hard. To abuse CS terminology, they're NP-hard (or harder?). Star Trek seems to have only external threats, all internal problems are solved. The most boring problem a real society has is that of production and it is definitely NP-hard (see Hayek?). Star Trek has not only solved that at galactic scales, but has solved much hard problems than production.

Nor I don't think Star Trek is advanced in the sense that I would consider it "progress" vs. just change. I view Star Trek as the propaganda reel of (not for, of) a techo-distopia. Vulkans and that Data android fellow freak me out more than the Klingons whose society, while brutal, I can understand. I see more humanity in a Klingon because I can see a human society degenerating into the Klingons'. I don't see any humanity in Vulcans.

Btw, their technology bores me. Their tech is either impossible (warp drives). Surpassed (communicators). Or fraught with angels-dancing-on-pins philosophical questions (the "beam me up scotty" machines)

So, with the caveat that you used ST as an example and I'm definitely not a Trekkie, let me address your question:

No, I don't.

Biological systems are far more complicated than any system mankind has made. Every "cure" or therapy is really a very good whack-a-mole with hopefully lots of statistical information to back it up.

Take blood. It has hundreds, if not thousands, of components. Some are in pg/dL level of concentrations (that's 10^-12g / 100ml). See this chart [1]. How can we every really understand all the interactions among those various components?

That is not to say that I'm a bio-luddite (I am, but that's besides the point). Take penecillin. It's brutal on the body, but is one of the most important discoveries in human history. It has saved millions, if not billions, of lives. Im very grateful for penicillin, and yet, what an illustrative example! We gave too much penicillin with too much abandonment. So now, we have anti-biotic resistant bacteria. And, almost 90 years after it's first discovery we're finally starting to understand it's role in the havoc in our gut flora.

Btw, gut flora is another, fascinating, example of how complicated bio-systems are. We're evolved to depend on a symbiotic relationship with a gut flora that we've destroyed over the last 70 years of anti-biotics and cheap sugar.

So, while I think ab-initio methods (what Star Trek does) can inform and accelerate drug discovery (I worked on that briefly in my PhD), ultimately, no, I don't think we can ab-initio drugs through the whole pipeline (need-->development-->safety_evals-->approval).

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Referenc...

I'll leave it to you, a user, that strong EM fields also blind the devices. The signals the ICD is trying to measure are very weak. I can imagine that strong 50/60Hz surge currents really screw things up, especially in single conductor power distribution situations (UK ring circuits, rural farms, etc).

That being said, the article (TL/DR) appears to focus on "static" magnetic fields. The near field charging feature of the iPhone barely makes mention.

I think the "disable ICD" being a simple magnetized reed switch for an implantable medical device is a bit silly. At least tap a code into that reed switch a little!

Because I have children that I would like for one day to be able to afford a house.

I mean, OPs idea was silly beyond belief. Even the socialists dont say: "The only person who can profit from this are the capitalists (necessarily) who first build this. The buyer can't make a profit from the re-sale".

I met a builder once that you probably have never heard of. He is a billionaire. He can profit from the sale of homes, but my parent's can't? Never mind that the tripling of the price of my parent's home over the last 22 years was driven by silly economic policies. Otherwise the house would have appreciated maybe 50%.

The problem appears to me to be a design problem of the implanted devices, not the iPhone.

Unless I'm mistaken this is what's happening:

1. ICDs want/need to communicate with the outside (at least one way).

2.However, this is not trivial since a human body is a bag of salt water. Therefore low frequencies are needed.

3. Low frequencies are very difficult at the necessary length scales with electric fields, so they used the magnetic field instead.

So far, so good. But then they assumed that the person would never be next to a magnet? That's a design flaw on their end, not the iPhone's. There's magnets, and low moving large currents, everywhere!

The should have implemented a primitive type of port knocking.

For the record, I volunteered for a COVID vaccine trial.

"mRNA vaccines have been tested in humans since 2011"

So barely 10 years. A study on a dozen or so participants, all white, college aged men with largely identical diets. I guarantee you that not one participant in the 2011 study was pregnant. (Btw, I looked at your reference. A Bush era press release was less manipulative. There wasn't a single peer-reviewed reference. All press releases and from interested parties)

Compare that with other vaccine technologies for which we have centuries of data, and inoculation in general for which we might have a thousand years worth of safety data.

Or did we forget about all the inconvenient facts about drug testing? We appear to have forgotten all the research done about regulatory capture and all the ineffective and unsafe pharmaceuticals the FDA approves.

But, nvm. #BelieveTheScience and de-platform anyone who asks inconvenient questions. And let's compartmentalize away the replication crisis modern science is going through.

Also, for some of us 10 years is not very impressive at all. "It's not new, nRNA has been around since the 90s!" is a massive value judgement for the word "new". Not all of us work developing webpages with 3 month old technology stacks!

It wasn't an excuse. It was just the easiest way to get street preachers on a power trip to bugger off

Or they have other reasons for not getting it, reasons that are personal/mocked/dismissed by others, and the emergency approval was the easiest way to get these street preachers to make like a tree.

Thats really cool.

I feel that modern computers are so powerful that they are productivity sappers. For me to be productive, I think a system with low latency but otherwise very limited would be the best.

It's like what a friend said in college about getting a dual monitor setup: "Your productivity doubles until you realize you can watch movies on the other one"

Andre Fachat also wrote a pre-emptive multitasking kernel for the 6502:

http://www.6502.org/users/andre/osa/oa1.html

This is basically the same CPU as in the NES.

Why?

You inspired me to come up with this conjecture:

The number of correct papers grows logarithmically with the number of papers published.

Finding the root causes of mental illness.

it's like protesting overmedication of type two diabetes patients by pointing out that surgery isn't very effective. I agree, it isn't, but we know why the patient has type 2 and how he could cure himself!

My thermostat is located in a cooler part of my house compared to my bedroom -> my thermostat has to be set to 73 to cool my bedroom to a nice T.

If my AC is very large it wont run very long between cycles. When it does it will wring every bit of moisture out of that relatively small amount of air.

If the AC were smaller, the AC would run just about all day long, more of the air would then go get its moisture removed.

In other words:

1 unit of 4C air mixed with 9 units of 30C air -> 10 units 27.4C. Assuming I've removed all the water in the one unit of 4C air the water content has only gone down 10%

5 units of 24.8 C air mixed with 5 units of 30 C air -> 10 units of 27.4C. If I can get just 50% of the air out chilled 5 units of air, I've removed 25% of the water in the air.

These numbers are just thrown at you, so take them with a BIG grain of salt. You'd have to look at the water saturation tables to really do the math.

Kinda.

First some terminology.

HVAC mean Heating Ventilation and AC (i guess). It is the name for the general problem of dealing with the environment in the house.

Second, about the Northern states.

It really depends where you are and what your AC unit is.

Some heat pumps don't have the capacity to heat a house in the North. If they're sized just right for cooling, they wont be powerful enough to heat your home [1] . As a result these units will start using resistive heating (emergency heat) which is the worst way to heat your home.

Also, there is the edge case of extremely cold cities in the Midwest (Chicago is not cold enough). These cities have some days where the T can be -20F (about -30C). Not only does the COP start to plummet, the temperatures might be outside the operating range of the coolant.

So you do have to do your homework before you install a unit.

But I live in a Northern city now, with bad lows of 0F (-13C?) and the heat pumps work just fine.

[1] In the South if you size your heat pump for cooling, you're sized ok for the heating. Even if you get a few days below freezing triggering the emergency heat, that's not a big problem.

I dunno, I took optics 15 years ago and only one signals class :P

I'd just average the lowest (N-1) pixels. N-1 because shot noise is a very bright pixel - if I have a bright pixel not including it is best for the avg. If the pixel is not surging, not including it doesn't affect my average much.

People really don't appreciate how brutal humidity is on our bodies' ability to cool down.

I run my AC more to dehumidify than to cool. I hate setting my AC below 78, that's freezing, but I have to because of improperly sized AC units, poor HVAC installation, etc.

No need to apologize, precision is important. Perhaps my point blurred two different things.

Point number 1 (directly referencing your question):

No, I did mean it's easier to heat than to cool. Basically every mechanism release heat, including heat pumps. Ultimately, to get a person to a comfortable temperature, all that is needed is to wrap them up in insulation until their body heat matches the heat loss for the required Delta(T).

Cooling is another thing altogether. There is no cooling mechanism, all we can do is:

1. absorb heat (i.e. evaporation) 2. move it somewhere else (i.e. heat pumps)

Your body can do 1. but only if the humidity is low enough, but it can't do 2. My conclusion here is to illustrate that your body can largely take care of itself when it comes to warming itself up, but it's (comparatively) very bad at cooling itself.

Point number 2:

While heating is very easy, it's also very energetically wasteful for two reasons:

1. The Delta(T) you have to fight against is larger, often double so the losses are larger (Delta(T) sets the heat loss of your home)

2. Most heating isn't done with heat pumps which are very efficient, whereas all cooling is pretty much only done with heat pumps [1].

3. You can use heat that the AC moved around. Today you can hook up your AC to your boiler so the heat you moved out of your home is dumped into your boiler. As long as you use enough hot water, the more you run your AC the lower your carbon emissions will be since the water boiler runs off gas (I'm not advocating for using more hot water, btw)

So, while using your AC is not good for the climate, it is not the easiest optimization to do first.

[1] Swamp coolers are weird: you live in an arid enough place that evaporating water cools you down... so you waste that precious water when you could just run an AC???