cmsmith

Informative headline, for those not wanting to figure out the wsj paywall:

>Faced with an influx of visitors, India's picturesque village of Jibhi has shut down the local liquor store and tried to restrict loud music, smoking and barbecues

Yes, the assisting crane is a mobile crane where the boom pivots up and down about the base. Some have booms that need to be disassembled piece-by-piece, so you just pivot it down until the top is resting on a flatbed trailer, then unbolt it.

These mobile cranes can reach just as high as tower cranes, but can't carry as much, can't reach out over the tops of buildings, and take up more room on the ground. Hence the need for tower cranes.

Hydro doesn't need pumping to provide load balancing. Just build more turbines [1] than you need for average load - then you can flow extra water overnight and less water during the day while keeping the average the same. This is then equal to the superposition of a traditional and PSH dam, but all in one footprint.

[1] Yes, extra turbines are expensive. But you'd need to build them anyways for a PSH facility.

It wouldn't be exactly a polar orbit, but slightly offset from one - like a sun-synchronous orbit around the earth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit

The bridge looks to be precast concrete box-girders (hollow rectangular beams with plenty of steel reinforcement around the edges). The 'gravel' is the asphalt roadway (often this will be cast-in-place concrete) that's poured on top of the precast girders. The purpose of pouring the asphalt/concrete roadway on top is as a sacrificial wear element to prevent the structural beams being worn down by traffic.

Nah, the building is (mostly) just as good at the end of that time. It's just a convenience to make the probabilities easier to conceptualize. If we designed buildings such that the design earthquake had a 5e-6 daily chance of occurring, we'd just be confused.

Japan and California are pretty comparable in terms of science and engineering for earthquake resistance. There are some differences on the public policy side, which influence how the engineering requirements are implemented, but Japanese buildings are not intrinsically safer. Note that the 1994 Northridge (Calif.) and 1995 Kobe (Japan) earthquakes were about the same side - the Japanese quake was ~10x as costly and ~20x as deadly (mostly due to population density around the epicenters).

Current building codes are intended to design to a 10% probability of collapse in the "Maximum Considered Earthquake", which is roughly a 2475-year event. The 2475-year event has a 2% chance of occurring during the (assumed 50 year) lifetime of a building.

News article titles:

> 7% of Scott Kelly's DNA was changed due to his year in space

> Humans and chimps share 96% of the same DNA

Seeing as how Scott Kelly is not severely mutated (or dead, as the article says), this should be an indication that something is wrong with the reporting.

>shows commercials even to premium users

I think this idea that businesses are only allowed to have one revenue stream seems a bit strange. Other businesses that are supported by payments and ads include: magazines, cable TV, movie theaters, newspapers, public transit, air travel, and amusement parks. If Hulu thought that people would pay twice as much for ad-free content, then I'm sure they'd offer it.

>If Mr. Musk were somehow to increase the value of Tesla to $650 billion — a figure many experts would contend is laughably impossible and would make Tesla one of the five largest companies in the United States, based on current valuations — his stock award could be worth as much as $55 billion

Except that as the article says, he already owns 20% of Tesla, so his current shares would rise in value by $110B. He could fail to meet any of performance targets and still be pulling in a billion dollars a year in capital gains.

Data: https://www.recode.net/2017/11/8/16617798/uber-delete-uber-l...

It is a real trend, but doesn't represent 'most' users.

>A single interrogator can cover some 40 kilometers of fiber, Biondi says, and monitor a virtual sensor every couple of meters.

Earthquake engineer here. This is the cool part. We've got plenty of data to detect and locate any given earthquake occurred. And we have maps that show approximately how hard the soil is under any given site. But the intensity that any building sees is still only known to +-50%, mostly due to variation in the subsurface conditions that we don't have enough resolution to model.

In DC, the mass transit agency is usually referred to as Metro, and offers two main services - Metrorail and Metrobus.

There are also single-use radon test kits, which should be fine if your home is in a relatively steady-state condition.

I'll take a guess:

300 feet is awfully deep. If you believe that 300 feet of draft is needed to get the stability they need, then this seems like the only way to get it. There are no ports, or even semi-protected waters, where you could build, launch, or dock something like that without it running aground.

Some quick research shows that the deepest draft on oil platforms is in the range of 25m (1/4 of the FLIP ship), and further that this ship was built a decade before the development of floating oil platforms.

There is also a lot of more dangerous nuclear material scattered all over the country in bombs and power plants - none of which are designed to last more than a few decades. If society does collapse, and that collapse is not precipitated by total nuclear war, then it seems like the spent fuel won't even be the worst of the nuclear worries out there.

>Creating them, however, is a monumental task. There are more than four million miles of roads in the United States.

I assume that most passenger-miles are driven on <0.5MM miles of roads, moreso if they are marketing mainly to normal suburb-city commuters. And the advantage of self driving cars isn't really in the last mile. In my commuting days, I would have said

driving myself for 40 minutes <<< self driving car drives for 35 minutes and I drive for 5 < self driving car drives for 40 minutes

Your distance is off by quite a bit (should be ~1e11 m at closest approach).

The actual force is closer to 10^16 N. Which is big, but 10^7 weaker than the earth-sun interaction. But the sun has to move the earth by a couple AU per year whereas Mars has had a couple billion years to move it by the same amount.

Read more carefully - HR8799 is the subject of the animation up top, and the subject of the quote about motion interpolation. Both are credited to J. Wang, while the composite photo of Fomahault B is credited elsewhere. Also note the use of the term 'animation', and that he refers to images taken since 2009 (whereas the Fomahault B images start in 2004).

I shopped for created diamonds a year or two ago, and like others was disappointed with the cost savings. It seems awfully odd that on the spectrum from $0.01/caret to $1,000,000/caret, that created diamonds ended up costing exactly the same as a mined diamond, less maybe 30%. It's clear that there are only a couple players in the clear created diamonds market, and no one is too eager for a price war and to stop printing money. In which case it doesn't sound all that different from the mined diamond market

I worked at NIST until recently, and my password expired every 90 days. We also had separate passwords for a half-dozen legacy IT systems (timesheets, travel requests, IT support, etc), all with more stringent and senseless length/character requirements than the last. And password managers were not allowed per security policy.

It was frustrating.

Given the choice between Thiel (favors reconstitution of our political establishment and believes in science and technology) and the rest of the Trump hangers-on (are ambivalent towards reconstitution of the establishment and are anti-science), this is a decent outcome.

You could just as easily argue that environmental effort is not a zero-sum game, and that recycling gives people a sense of ownership over the environment and increases their appetite for more important efforts.

The author should have been more specific in referring to the professional 'self', rather than the general self. My takeaway was that they don't want people who value their own professional advancement at the expense of the company/product as a whole (e.g. backstabbing co-workers, hoarding resources).

I don't think that the author was suggesting that the employees are expected to value the company's interest over their own personal lives. At least I hope not.

Note as well that for 50-80% of the year (depending on location), the farmers market tomatoes are just Mexico tomatoes bought at Costco.

I work at NIST and took a tour of this machine a few months ago. A few bonus facts:

- The spatial distribution of the local gravity field is a significant part of the uncertainty of these measurements. The weights extend into the basement of the lab, and the gravity in the basement is less than that above the surface. They produce gravity maps by dropping things in a vacuum to get a handle on it.

- The drift in the dead weight standard was mostly caused by the individual masses welding themselves together under the immense pressure of the weight stack. The interface has been designed to reduce this effect.

- The same group is also working to count the number of atoms in the kilogram, so that the mass of the dead weight stack will not be 500,000 times the mass of a piece of platinum in Paris, but will be 500,000 times the mass of 6.XX E23 silicon atoms.

>Also, why the dead weight? 500 tons is easily doable with a (smallish) hydraulic press.

Sure, but how do you know the hydraulic press is applying 500 tons? You need to have a universal standard for length (to determine the area of your piston) and for force (which doesn't exist), and consider the friction in your hydraulic system. We can generate a universal standard for the kilogram, then duplicate that log(500) times, and create a very well controlled mass that we can hang from stuff. The level of accuracy that is needed would surprise you.

>there is hardly any authentic science left

I'm sorry, but what? You list a half dozen of the hottest-button research areas, but those represent (with the exception of pharma) probably less than 2-3% of non-proprietary research. The rest of the iceberg is just normal scientists working on hard problems that aren't going to make anyone rich, and scraping by on whatever money they can find. And keeping the 'science=corrupt' idea out there doesn't make it any easier.

>If an idea is good, monopoly is icing, but not required for its adoption.

I would amend this to say that if an idea is obviously very good, and has an obviously large market, then monopoly is icing. The inventions that you described fit this description, but 99% of inventions do not. It's more likely that your invention is either a small part that might contribute to a big improvement in a major industry, or a complete invention that could make a big difference in a market that doesn't exist yet. In either case, a company might not want to invest the resources to find out if your invention is useful just to have their competitors copy them once the proof-of-concept is available.

>Do US Gov patents require that manufacturing be in the US?

Not by statute that I'm aware of. But again, if you've invented some esoteric device that might have a $50M market one day, nothing makes government patent review boards happier than licensing that to a small business in Minneapolis who will hire a few dozen engineers and maybe even get the thing built in the US.