cwal37

A minor nitpick in the article, the $12.99 Amazon prime subscription does not cover their spotify competitor streaming service. I've always thought this was a bit odd given that it does include a netflix-esque amount of streamable video content. If I had to guess, I imagine it's all related back to the royalties situation in music. You do get "Prime Music", but it's not the Spotify competitor, that would be Amazon Music Unlimited. That service is an additional $7.99 if you're a Prime member.

eBooks are also mentioned there, but you don't get a huge library for being a Prime member either. Rather, it's a selection of ~1000 written things (books, comics, magazines) that is constantly rotating. Kindle Unlimited is another $9.99/month. You can do the Kindle library thing as a prime member, but that's one book a month drawing from a similar pool as Kindle Unlimited, which often doesn't have current best sellers anyways.

I guess props to Amazon for being so confusing in their myriad content subscription options that the author couldn't get it right. To get the same kind of all-you-can-consume options that spotify provides across the different media mentioned it's actually ~$30/month. Still strikes me as odd how "cheap" TV and movies seem to be in this model. I'm very curious about that now.

There's a big difference between general "emissions" which a lot of people take colloquially to just mean greenhouse gases (and CO2 in particular with combustion engines), and then the small particulates and other things (like NOx) that create worse local air conditions[1]. Most "modern" diesels in use do still have the latter problem. I think at the very cutting edge, if you maintain a very good filter and operate in favorable conditions you can cut those emissions dramatically, but as far as I know it isn't widespread among the personal diesel fleet.

[1] http://theconversation.com/fact-check-are-diesel-cars-really...

Chicago is so ridiculously cheap compared to the rest of the very small group of "large american cities with big functional public transit networks." Never thought I'd really consider moving back home, but that's definitely something I didn't appreciate growing up.

Given the lack of geographic constraints, it's amazing how expensive the DC area is. In % terms since 2000 it looks like only SF has exceeded it out of the big cities. NYC had a lower increase, and Seattle is only just now getting to a similar level. I hate looking for housing here.

At a previous job my first project was building a webscraper and some processing tools to pull down every application for preliminary permit ever filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to build a pumped storage plant.

The basis for this was two-fold, first, to get some kind of backing of what the potential supply might look like based on developer assumptions up to that point in time, second (and more germane to this discussion) to pull out every cost characteristics we could find in order to build a more robust set of cost models and cost prediction tools than had existed up to that point. Hydro costs are extremely site specific, so this is typically an onerous process.

I suppose the kicker here is that I was at a national lab and nominally employed by the Department of Energy, and they has such a sub-optimal grasp of hydropower that we were in the process of writing the first big national report on the resource in a long time[1]. Now hydro's also part of NREL's annual technology baselines[2], which was similarly fun to work on.

[1] https://energy.gov/eere/water/articles/hydropower-vision-new...

[2] https://atb.nrel.gov/

D.C.'s metro is plagued with problems: didn't stay on top of upkeep, no dedicated funding, semi-unworkable governance, service cuts in the last couple years. We just exited a year long "Safe Track" maintenance program earlier in 2017, but they weren't able to get nearly enough done and service on many lines in the evening will still often be 20-25 minute headways with single tracking for additional maintenance. During rush hour, it will fairly often be an 8+ minute wait for a train in some core stations. . . it's crazy. Having grown up in and around Chicago, I would take the L+Metra over the Metro any day. Every time I go home to visit friends and family I'm reminded of how disappointing transit is in the nation's capital.

If you're out in the evenings or need to work early in the morning on the weekends you're also out of luck. Train service ends early Sunday-Thursday, and starts late Saturday-Sunday. Going to a concert is an eternal crapshoot, the last train on our line during the week can be as early as 10PM. This all disproportionately affects service workers and people without consistent access to personal transit as well, which bothers me on a more fundamental level than the personal inconvenience in my life; I perceive it as a failure of the urban social contract.

Also, LA is basically the only one of the largest American cities that is actually expanding their system in a meaningful and relatively quick way. Alexandria (where I live) has been trying to get an infill station in Potomac Yards added for something like 20+ years.

Also fun, 1-2 times a year the Spallation Neutron Source[1] is shut down and the tunnels are open for tours. Was happy to have had the opportunity to check that out when I was working there, although I think my favorite high-science tour is still the National Ignition Facility[2]. Going inside of that places was awesome. Thinking back now, LLNL had a number of great tours actually, HEAF[3] was pretty cool as well.

As far as I know none of those are open to the general public though; you have to work there. Someone I was dating at the time went on the public's tour of NIF, which really only involved them standing in the lobby. Ironically, she was a nuclear physicist and I do environmental and energy economics-y things, so I was completely unqualified to know anything about what I was seeing and she didn't even get a physicist as her tour guide.

[1] https://neutrons.ornl.gov/sns

[2] https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/what-is-nif

[3] https://wci.llnl.gov/facilities/heaf

For an individual? Not really, no * . The residential geothermal you refer to is actually not geothermal at all, but more accurately a ground source heat pump which is relying on the fact that the soil temperature a couple meters down is about the average annual air temperature. Actual geothermal-powered applications typically require engineering at depths well beyond the grasp of an individual household, and at costs that almost certainly wouldn't make sense for any reasonable payback period that was only covering household energy consumption.

MIT/INL had a nice overview ~10 years ago[1] on enhanced geothermal systems across the USA. Even the commercial power plants that rely on this type of resource are typically situated only in areas with very nice conditions. You also need to be mindful of the heat extraction over the area underground vs. the natural recharge rate. You can draw down the resource if you don't have a good model of recharge, which is particularly problematic for something you probably want to just run constantly once in service.

* Obviously, it is possible for there to be exceptions based on extremely fortuitous resource access (in terms of both the heat and personal capital), but for almost everyone this isn't going to be the case.

[1] https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/MITEI-The-...

Yup, mostly tourism/maintenance of flows, downstream concerns, etc. It's drawn up in a treaty between the US and Canada, I think the International Joint Commission[1] is in charge/involved. The International Control Dam is the key structure[2].

[1] http://www.ijc.org/en_/inbc [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Control_Dam

EDIT: Also, there's the St. Lawrence Power Project[1] at the Moses-Saunders Power Dam[2]. A similar cooperation with very different design. New York has the most hydropower in the eastern half of the united states by quite a lot.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Moses-Saunders+Power+Dam,+...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses-Saunders_Power_Dam

Haha, no worries, and sorry if that came off as overly pedantic, I work in the broader industry and was still winding down from aggressively-reading-things-about-energy-mode.

Glad you found it interesting! One additional tidbit is that they have to keep the water level at the pools downstream of the intakes within 1.5ft +/- the historical mean. There's a bit more leeway than that over time, but they do typically hit the mark. It's quite the operation.

Not quite. It's to refill the Lewiston Reservoir (on the American side).

The Robert Moses Niagara Power Project runs at a deficit of water during the day once the morning really picks up and through peak hours into the evening. On a slightly longer timescale it also runs at an overall deficit during the workweek, drawing down water throughout the week until electricity use drops on the weekend. At that point it relies significantly less on the reservoir (and more on the forebay) and fills back up.

There are also 13 turbine generating units in RMNPP, while Lewiston pumped storage (the reservoir) has 12 much smaller (~1/10th the size) turbines as well. This allows quite a bit of flexibility in terms of output from what is a much larger power plant overall.

EDIT: Oh, and the reservoir was built on Native American land, which resulted in a Supreme Court case related to the Federal Power Act (I believe since it was treaty-breaking, can't quite recall) in case anyone is interested in that sort of thing.

You're not alone in thinking that. It works[1], and it's cheaper than the current revolving door of policies and support systems. The problem seems to be that people have a strong negative reaction to "undeserving others" getting things "for free".

[1] https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...

I pretty much always read the entire thing, and I love them for the extensive context. I have the opposite problem these days, where shorter articles without much else going on fail to hold my attention. There are plenty of those out there, but far fewer longform pieces that give me a more complete picture of the topic at hand. I actually just clicked over here from finishing this article[1] which was fairly lengthy, but also informative, relevant, and interesting.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/magazine/the-resegregatio...

What you want is NREL's Annual Technology Baseline spreadsheet/presentation/scenario viewer[1]. Plenty of fun numbers and formulas to look at there (Disclaimer: I worked on the hydro section, so I'm a bit biased to think it's useful).

[1] http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/data_tech_baseline.html

For some reason people have this idea that LNG tankers are a big bomb waiting to go up, but that's not really true. Vapor cloud detonation has never been considered particularly likely, and never documented as far as I know. Mostly it seems the vapors that hit the right mix of oxygen and such would burn pretty rapidly, while the warmer gas began to rise. It would certainly be a large fire for a while, but shouldn't have the lasting impact of an oil spill. Here's a paper[1].

[1] http://www.mhpa.co.uk/uploads/Marine_docs/lng_carriers.pdf

The main finding, which I'm shocked hasn't been so clearly enunciated before, is that within a 25 mile radius of an outdoor power plant coal stockpile you have a measurable increase in infant mortality rates. Personally, I think the externalities around some of these traditional generation options need to be more thoroughly understood and discussed, and this type of analysis is a good jumping off point. It is extremely sad that we have to re-litigate the localized environmental impacts of the mid 20th century, today.

As an example, you can see some of that in the evolution of stacks on coal-fired power plants. First, they were short and people nearby got sick (some of these plants even made it into the last 5-10 years in major urban areas in the US, once the communities around them became impoverished over the decades, there had minimal advocates for their elevated cancer and respiratory illness rates). After quite a while there were local restrictions so they built massively tall stacks to vent particulates and other waste high enough for it to drift away. Those stacks in the Midwest and rust belt caused damage (in the form of acid rain) in the mid-Atlantic and northeast. Today, there are scrubber systems and filters, and the idea that those emissions could just be stuck in the ground. However, the solution to the acid rain and long stacks issue was the market-based cap and trade of the early 90s, which has been less effective recently as prices for compliance have exceeded the cost of penalties, leading to greater rates of pollution.

South Africa has some very specific definitions[1] for this type of thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloureds

Piggybacking off of your Monterey suggestion, take the slight detour there to check out Point Lobos, a particularly beautiful state park.

Also, strongly second Nightlife at the Cal Academy of Sciences. I try to design my trips to the bay area such that I'll be there on a the day of the week those are so I can go (Thursday I think?). It's a great museum, very hands on, and those nights have always had a really enjoyable vibe when I've been.

Oh, and taking 1 north of the city along Point Reyes for a ways is also an excellent drive. You can cut back inland through some rolling hills and get a very different vibe than the city and coast going south towards Big Sur

Not on the coding side, but the inspiration. . . For those of us in the USA, there is a much more accessible version of synchronous fireflies at Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. I lived there for a few years and went multiple times[1].

The dates get announced a month or so beforehand, and tickets are based on a lottery system since it only[2] occurs on one side of one river for less than a mile. You can technically also hike in if you're ok with 8 or so miles near sunset and then the same amount out in the pitch black. I believe that is frowned upon, but very few people do it that way (I was the only one the year I couldn't get tickets and decided to hike).

[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/23215983@N02/albums/7215764507...

[2] Not exactly only, but certainly the most strongly.

Super fun diagrams. I interned at LLNL at one point and did a little work with some Sankey variants visualizing energy and resource flows in urban environments[1]. I think I still have the code lying around somewhere, I'd love to return to it someday.

People at the lab who were aware of them were uniformly pretty proud of those main energy figures. I had multiple old hands approach me at the poster presentation who were really enamored of the design, one fellow actually said he thought it was the best figure the lab produced. Of course, I was a pretty dumb grad student and wasn't totally sure what I was doing, so mine don't have the polish of the official ones. They were fun to work on though.

[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/23215983@N02/albums/7215763423...

Just FYI, you can get a more fuel and technology specific breakdown of generation and inputs from form 923, but it's timelagged and many plants don't show up in the monthly reports, so you have to wait for the annual.

Here is an at least a somewhat optimistic take on this issue in that it's looking for mitigation techniques and IDing possible research[1]. I worked for the lead author one summer at LLNL right around when this was published, and I believe he's continued to work on aspects of this in the interim, although I must confess that I'm terrible at keeping up with people and am not entirely sure.

[1] http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es204686w

Shoreham is actually way more interesting and complicated than that. The plant was never really in operation, but a deal was struck for it to briefly "turn on" so that cost recovery could be triggered and passed on to the rate base. It never entered real operation despite being completely finished.

If you want an extremely thorough look into the operation of New York State's (including NYC of course) electricity market I would recommend the market monitoring unit's State of the Market Report[1]. The deregulated markets have a lot of quirks, but I think their operation and set of outcomes is pretty interesting.

[1] http://www.nyiso.com/public/webdocs/markets_operations/docum...

With timed exclusives they can also capture some amount of revenue from conversion of free trial users into "forgot to unsubscribe" users.

They got me with Coloring Book a few months ago. It wasn't available elsewhere, so I signed up for the free trial. Well before the free trial was over Coloring Book appeared on Spotify (my preferred platform). I prompt forgot about Apple Music until I saw a bill in my inbox. I then couldn't figure out how to unsub without googling the process, it's certainly not readily available as an option in-app (although that just might be the way Apple sometimes tends to obfuscate through streamlining).

You could reflexively post that, or you could read the article, which provides some evidence that the answer seems to range from "possibly", to "yes". It's tempting to just link to Betteridge's Law and move on, but it's not universal, and sometimes piece is legitimately presented as reviewing the evidence of some topic.

Personally, I think this is actually a useful conceit when considering something like this (which I believe I've actually seen on HN multiple times in the past) where a connection is being made that perhaps one had never considered before.

I've been (and am) there. My undergrad was at least half ecology with plenty of field work (in the states and briefly in Africa), and one of my graduate degrees was also in environmental science, but somehow here I am in a windowless concrete cube for the last 2.5 years writing code and building models. When I was finishing undergrad I was looking at park ranger type jobs, but it turned out that with a couple of wars on those jobs were almost impossible to get for someone who wasn't preference eligible. I could have gone to grad school more explicitly for fieldwork-related disciplines, but I wanted to focus on getting a solid set of technical and policy skills, which ended up with me in an office in the south, driving everywhere and getting fat.

After about a year of that I really buckled down and focusing a lot more free time on exploring the outdoors and the ecological and geological systems I enjoyed in undergrad. I end up spending a lot of time outside: hiking, camping, backpacking, even just relaxing in a hammock, and exploring the natural processes I know as best I can in a somewhat-informed sense (Why is that gullying? What's that on this tree? Was this burn prescribed or accidental? How old is this rock? What is this rock? How hard is this rock?).

Basically, you never know what path you're gonna go down, but it's not the end for you to pursue physical, hands-on knowledge on your own, you just won't get paid to do it. The motivation can be often hard to come by, but when I'm out there and get to take a nap on top of a mountain, clamber up onto a boulder mid-river, or get that perfect picture of a bee pollinating some wild flowers I feel quite at peace, even if the rest of my week is in that windowless concrete cube.

Oh, awesome! And yeah, I know plenty of them don't get that big as they age, not every tree can rely on being fed the way the giants out west are haha. It's an unfortunate situation here these days, pollution, disease, and invasives have really damaged things, and it's pretty clear to see.

I guess I was mostly thinking about the general conception a lot of people tend to have that when they go to something like a national park (particularly in the east), that it's been completely untouched by time, when in fact we had fairly indiscriminate industry and war that giant swathes of places that were only received protections in the early 20th century and beyond.

Oh, and if we're sharing pics of big/interesting trees I would be remiss to skip the road trip where I was fortunate enough to see fat trees[1], dead trees[2], and rare trees[3].

[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/23215983@N02/26863377690/in/da...

[2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/23215983@N02/26863377830/in/da...

[3] https://www.flickr.com/photos/23215983@N02/27069305001/in/da...

Hmm. That's a pretty broad list. I live right outside the Smokies for example, and hike quite a lot in and around the park. Old growth trees are rare enough that individuals get called out in trail guides, let alone the quite unique entire stands that are at least pre-colonization. Maybe I'll try to add some specificity to that section.

Yeah, it feels like one of those immediately neat things that falls apart when you look a little closer. The data behind it is quite easy to work with though, and I think there's some better (more interactive, a bit more control) visualizations someone could come up with.

I used it myself last year when I was wondering about the emissions associated with different diets (specifically I was curious about what was more effective from a reduction standpoint: being a vegetarian at different points of time vs. owning an electric car. Since the disposition of electricity has changed pretty significantly since the early 90s in some places it varied pretty widely [the informal lit review of food-based emissions was quite a mess though]).

It's not quite that simple because the overall impact of an individual compound relies on both its atmospheric residence time and infrared absorption. This article[1] covers the basics.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential