erentz

Video without the paywall: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopuses-may-have...

Looks good thanks! Though it's giving system errors at the moment so I'll try back later.

Does anyone know of a good tool for modeling wind potential?

For example, PVWatts [1] makes it very easy to get solar potential for a site (at hourly granularity). But having trouble finding something similar for wind. Ideally want something that is also validated against data from real world wind farms after they're built.

[1] https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/

Yeah we handled the mask issue so poorly.

It very quickly stopped being about finding what is a reasonable policy to just a stupid culture war fight over all masks all the time vs any masks anytime are communist police state designed to make your child gay.

Just dumb dumb dumb.

Even in places that handled the pandemic fairly well like NZ their mask policies were kind of silly.

My peeve that I will never stop being angry about is we knew from quite early on that COVID was airborne and surgical masks were not very effective. But public health authorities refused to communicate this to the public. They did not make an effort to make people aware or to issue N95/KN95 masks and update the policies to reflect more balance about which places it’s optimal to mask vs not.

It was just left to individuals to work it out on their own.

More like the progress of AI may be our savior here. Allowing fewer to be more productive. (Hopefully.)

I worry the impact this will have long term. Both economically as a lot are taken out of the workforce or remain but with less function. And socially as we have this bigger pool of people we need to care for (and likely fail to care for). It’s remarkable it’s been ignored but turning it into a culture war for short term political gain seems to have made any serious discussion about it impossible now. Just look how immediately comments about masking in this discussion were grayed out.

> Evolution has had billions of years to do it, and for whatever reason the conclusion is that either it's not possible, or the cost is not worth it.

For a lot of history dying young was common due to forces that have nothing to do with our own biology. So maybe it's more that environmental conditions did not give any reason for evolution to select for longer life, or select against cells that age. Also it might be that there are trade offs about selecting against cells that age that may have been sucky in the past and not led to fast reproduction, but that those trade offs don't matter now.

For others, not you because you're a troll, I will clarify:

Glory to Ukraine is a simple formulation of words that cannot be owned by any particular group, and to suggest its a Nazi phrase is russian propaganda. The phrase first came to use amongst students in Kharkiv at the end of the 19th century and wider use during the War of Independence from 1917-1921. All before the Nazi party in Germany was created and before the OUN was created. The phrase was subsequently forbidden for a time by the Soviet regime which also attempted to discredit it for the same reasons they did any idea that opposed them.

You are confused. The article talks about reactor construction time in countries.

E.g. Hinkley Point C is being built in the UK, that means it gets recorded in data about construction in the UK, even though it is designed by a French company, and owned by a French and Chinese company.

The same applies for reactors designed by Rosatom and built around the world. A VVER-1200 built in China may be a russian design, but the data is recorded as construction in China for obvious reasons.

> Sorry to break it to you, but the USSR dissolved over 30 years ago.

Yes, you're the one that was confused why Belarusian projects did not count as russian, and you ignored the Former USSR information in the article. If you would like to know why she aggregated the data that way and didn't break it out into before and after USSR dissolution, you should go and post a comment asking on her Substack.

Wind and solar also have many years (and decades) of planning involved. And many also fail to get past the planning phase.

> However, in the US, we simply don't have the political will to build them.

Fair enough, though this article is about Australia. Here in the US we do have the TVA that is looking to go ahead with new nuclear. But we will likely lag other countries such as Canada (OPG and SaskPower are proceeding with new nuclear builds).

> Funny article. It talks about time to build nuclear reactors but never mentions Russia. > ... > For example, the reactor in Belarus was built in 8 years[1].

Sorry to break it to you but Belarus is still not russia, yet.

If you look again at the article you'll see lots of countries that have nuclear reactors are not specifically mentioned, however in the one section where countries are specifically mentioned a group for all former USSR countries is called out that includes russia and other countries. This will be due to how reactor data was recorded prior to the dissolution of the USSR.

Slava Ukraini

> The difference is that a lithium battery facility can be installed and functional in 12-24 months.

These things aren't comparable without putting it together as a system.

> A nuclear plant takes 12-24 years.

You're thinking about wild outliers there. It's around 6.5 years median [1].

[1] https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/nuclear-construction-ti...

Vogtle is an outlier in most regards. A tech revolution isn’t really needed, the tech works fine. Simplifications of existing tech like the BWRX-300 seem to be gaining a lot of traction (in theory should be more expensive per watt, but can be contracted in more palatable sizes). TVE is pushing ahead with plans to build BWRX-300s. Canada is returning to building nuclear again. As is France. Poland. So on. Sadly it seems the US may lag but that’s the way with a lot of things in this country. It will still be good if other countries can make the advancements.

[1] https://twitter.com/_hannahritchie/status/163712120205237452...

I’m of two minds about that. I agree this is a guy with a history of peddling conspiracies and dictators. Not someone I want in a debate that should be driven by facts and reason. But I realized, in my experience there is a large overlap between people with anti-nuclear attitudes and fans of his. (Boomers, greens, far leftists, et al.) So if they see someone they (sadly) respect put out the message that “we’ve been wrong about nuclear”, the maybe they’ll be open to hearing it?

It’s tritium. It sounds like it’s at concentrations that are below the safety thresholds. You have tritium in your tap water.

I mean I agree it's been made pointlessly complicated. But this is all born out of the fact that everything we do in the US we insist on finding silly ways to insert unnecessary private middle men. But the fixes people are calling for with national healthcare policies like Medicare For All are precisely to do away with the problems you bring up AND extend the resulting system to everyone. I think a good start is just doing away with the things you bring up even if it's just for 65+ at least.

FWIW I am on Medicare (due to disability) and I expletive love the experience compared to the gold plated, Silicon Valley tech company, private insurance I had before I became eligible. I've not had to think about a prior-auth or appeal in the entire time. I've had no reduction in the doctors I can see (I saw specialists across the country). And I receive about $8,000 of specialty drugs a month without any questions.

Something to be aware of is that when using Original Medicare you will want to also get a Medicare Supplement (Medigap) plan. Medicare only pays 80%, the Medigap pays the extra 20% (no questions, anything approved by Medicare they cover the gap on).

But you are only guaranteed to be able to join Medigap during your initial enrollment at 65. If you switch back from Medicare Advantage to Original Medicare you are not guaranteed to be able to get Medigap. This can leave you stuck. It will possibly vary from state to state so it pays to get up to speed with the rules in your local state.

If you're expecting to be sick in old age or if you get Medicare due to a disability that is likely to have a lot of expensive treatment or require you to see different doctors in different areas it is best (IM-somewhat-experienced-O) to take Original Medicare.

What would be the evolutionary conditions that would lead us to mentally think we are older as we age? For much of evolutionary history we were expected to produce offspring then kick the bucket. No advantage to feeling older, not even expected to get that much older than what most people feel.

If we solved the problem of aging this wouldn’t be a puzzle at all and it would immediately make perfect sense. The age we feel we are would correspond roughly to the age we were fully developed (mid 20s) and the age our body would stay at without aging.

The one side effect I’ve heard from my doctor who has patients on LDN, that fortunately seems fairly rare, but that can catch people off guard is sudden depression. People a few days to a week into starting it suddenly having uncontrollable crying and other things. Apparently corrects quickly after stoping so not something to be afraid of so long as aware. LDN seems to help a lot of people.

Oh that’s not good. Thanks for letting me know.

This is quite interesting to me also. I have a neuro and inflammatory disease with elevated liver enzymes since getting sick. It seems TUDCA is fairly safe.

How does one calculate their dose?

Looks like I need to find a reputable brand and seller, that's lab made (rather than bear bile) if anyone has suggestions.

EDIT: Okay this is quite shocking to me so had to share, in searching for reliable sources of TUDCA it looks like pharmaceutical versions are now being approved in Canada and the US for treatment of ALS that cost $13,000 per month!

https://biopharma.media/amyotrophic-lateral-sclerosis-new-dr...

Typically they're just left there. But every once in a while someone will decide it makes sense to acquire the cable for cheap, pull it up, and re-use it somewhere else that doesn't have high bandwidth requirements but would still benefit from getting subsea connectivity. Seen this for Pacific and some Caribbean islands.

Do we know it was without being detected? I got the impression somewhere that it was ignored because they frequently are for a while due to lack of sidings of adequate length to stop in.

Maybe not? If what we care about isn't derailed trains but the actually derailed cars, like say lost packets on a network. Here's a graph of total derailed cars. He has a lot of graphs I haven't reviewed all of them. But might be some other interesting ones in there.

https://twitter.com/mike10010100/status/1628072318491668500?...

Saw this interesting Twitter thread with some data yesterday. In fact it doesn't seem derailments are unusually high compared with history. It seems they may even be decreasing.

https://twitter.com/mike10010100/status/1627344918220767232

The complaints about precision scheduled railroading are valid though. Every foamer has been talking about it. And again as your link shows this derailment (like many) had absolutely nothing to do with the overturning of the breaking rule that has frustratingly grabbed everyone's attention. (I guess everyone loves a simplistic explanation that blames government officials even if it's wrong.)

One of the biggest issues that prevents this is that states cannot require residency requirements (e.g. must have lived in state for 2 years) as part of the criteria for access to such social safety nets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapiro_v._Thompson

Probably because the F-22 wasn't needed since this one was at a lower altitude, ~20,000 ft if I recall correctly.

Couple of interesting twitter threads on this from Tyler (The Drive). He suggests this has been coming/happening for some time.

https://twitter.com/aviation_intel/status/162414986417840128...

Also that we are seeing a lot more now because we have turned down/off the filters on the radars. Which means also we can expect a lot more false positives.

https://twitter.com/aviation_intel/status/162461466198661120...

> But you probably knew all that and I have been concern trolled. Oh well, I try.

I think the less than hour old account with random username might've given it away. :-) Unfortunately a seemingly unusual amount of that on this story.

Hersh didn't just question some narrative. He presented a fanciful story as fact that is full of holes and does not stand up to scrutiny. Those who are motivated to see the US blamed for it seem to be uninterested in whether his story actually is true or not. The truth of what happened and how it happened doesn't seem to matter. They believe the US did it, so they believe Hersh's story.

It's frustrating because having a theory that the US did it isn't unreasonable, and could be discussed. My initial reaction was that the US probably did it, it was only later after more details came out and really thinking it through I came to realize it wouldn't make sense. Though if they did it certainly would not have occurred in the fanciful way Hersh presented. I do not know who did it, while I could put a good theory together why Russia did it and can see they had some motivation, I could also make a good Hershesque story about how some criminal environmentalist group from Germany did it. Or why Poland did it. Or Sweden.

EDIT: Actually when you think about it, with the alternative Yamal pipeline through Poland, and Poland's distrust of Germany. Poland had plenty of motivation! Much more than the US. They have the explosives, they can whip together a few tech divers for an easy 80-100m dive, and they have easy access to the Baltic. But motivation and opportunity is not enough.