marze

Fire suppression and lack of controlled burns leads to big fires. However in an environment with hot Santa Ana Winds, even with good forest land fuel management, a city like Pacific Palisades as it stood could conceivably burn from an accidental fire within the city.

The real question is this: do we have the capability to build a house that would not burn down if the neighboring house caught fire? If so, a city could be build that would be impervious to wild fire, arson, and accidental fires.

How much would this cost?

How much would it cost to create a data recorder with a built-in battery? Like a mini UPS that would power the recorder for one hour, if external power failed.

The antiquated technology in jets is mind boggling.

Couldn’t this fellow been identified after ten, rather than 200+?

What fraction of crustal uranium would you estimate was sourced from the "late veneer"?

Building functioning thrusters should be a routine task, these are used on many spacecraft all the time. But rockets are hard. SpaceX blew up a capsule on the test stand, due to an issue with the propulsion system (thrusters).

The only way they will risk astronaut lives and various reputations allowing them to return on the Boeing capsule is if they are 100% certain of a positive outcome. There are no rescue vessels in space right now, so even a minor problem can be deadly.

It seems unlikely at this point 100% certainty will be reached. And I'm sure NASA is very annoyed that the capsule isn't configured to do an unmanned return. Boeing needs to upload and test software for unmanned return, otherwise it is stuck there until they have those issues worked out (1 of only 2 docking ports perhaps?).

The vast majority of what is known about black holes comes from observations of AGN/quasars (super massive black holes that are "active"), which may be as luminous as ~0.5 quadrillion suns (1). This luminosity is powered by the quasar's central engine, which converts the gravitational potential energy of infalling matter to radiative energy, through means that are still debated. In an article in Nature commemorating the 50th anniversary of the discovery of quasars, a leading AGN researcher wrote "our best hope for understanding quasars is that extraterrestrials might drop in and explain them to us" (2). AGN/quasars are an underappreciated enigma.

(1) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-024-02195-x (2) https://www.nature.com/articles/495165a.pdf

Putting particulate mitigation gear on all existing coal plants that aren’t so equipped would be a good start. No tech dev required for that.

This flight experienced "clear air" turbulence. Such turbulence is not visible on radar and is not predictable.

Turbulence due to weather is what you are talking about.

If “the vast majority … are predictable”, why wouldn’t the airline pilot warn the passengers in advance?

Andrew Cote gives the missing details here:

https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1763063321857757210

No, but very close.

I emailed Bill Penzey a few years ago, asking if they did testing for lead in their turmeric, got no response.

Here is what Steve Jobs said about this in 1983 (copied from the book):

"The problem was, you can’t ask Aristotle a question. And I think, as we look towards the next fifty to one hundred years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit, or an underlying set of principles, or an underlying way of looking at the world, then, when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life—his or her whole life—and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday, after this person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, “Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?” And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me. And that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing."

You can see how far-seeing Jobs was by reading his words from the '70s / '80s, they don't sound "dated" at all, but sensible and reasonable.

So awesome this collection exists!

Besides the hypothesis in the essay, an undetermined link to smartphone use, proposed causes from the comments include:

-declining quality of education

-poor sleep from late-evening screen use

-social media use

-influencer culture makes ones own situation look dull

-overmedication

-state of world (wars, ecological risks etc)

-measurement artifact

-electromagnetic fields

-health issues that cause inflammation

-junk food/poor nutrition

Did I miss any others?

Missed that. I wonder if it is implemented now.

I think if you asked the engineers who designed the airbus in question, could you create a "leak" warning, using just the existing sensor suite, they'd say "sure".

You know the fuel level in each tank, and have a good estimate or actual flow data on engine fuel usage. Simple math says "leak" or "no leak".

If that would work, it is surprising it isn't in the software.

If, for example, new agriculture tech like robot weeding, seeding, etc., can improve land productivity by 10%, we could convert 10% of farmland to prairie for buffalo and still grow the same amount of food crops.

Of course the first step is admitting you have a problem. A problem many other people share these days...

Ideas: perhaps keep a daily written log and make a written summary of what you have learned at the end of each day. And, make written goals regarding the process, to guide it. I like exporting interesting web pages as a .pdf into a single unsorted directory, for possible use and organization at some future time, for things that aren't directly related to primary tasks.

Best idea is probably to solicit ideas and try out the most promising until you find a good solution, but in an organized way, with periodic evaluation and written reports.

Reducing residential water use is a nice symbolic gesture, but the vast majority of available water is used to grow alfalfa and a few other crops.

Symbolic gestures are good, but careful analysis and appropriate changes are needed to really make a difference.

I find it especially ironic that SWA system failed them, and this large failure was preceded by worse and worse "near failures", since SWA is in the aviation business.

In the aviation arena, high reliability is maintained in part by careful analysis of "near failures": lessons are extracted and improvements are made to aircraft designs, procedures, etc.

By contrast, the "near failures" of the SWA system as a whole don't appear to have been utilized to motivate system improvements.

Plastic doesn't recycle, at a practical scale. I like the idea of developing garbage burning plants with superb emission control, and burning it all locally.

As well as reducing plastic usage in low value applications. It is sad, all the plastic litter in the world.

Rather than "caused by illegal Indian call centres in 2022", wouldn't it be more accurate to say "Indian industrial-scale criminal scam operations"?

From the abstract:

"Using stellar population modelling, we find the galaxies typically contain a hundred million solar masses in stars, in stellar populations that are less than one hundred million years old. The moderate star formation rates and compact sizes suggest elevated star formation rate surface densities, a key indicator of their formation pathways. Taken together, these measurements show that the first galaxies contributing to cosmic reionisation formed rapidly and with intense internal radiation fields."

Two things, I set this up long ago before tunable bulbs were cheap, and the single tunable bulb I checked out subsequently didn't emit just orange, it had some blue.

This is so true. Thinning, tree health, soil health, all make a huge difference.

I use orange led bulbs in a parallel system to the white lights. Some in lamps plugged into a power strip with a switch.

Simple and cheap, but requires extra lamps.

The virtual presence tech should be near equivalent to in-person interactions within four years.

Comparing two systems, one with everyone using mass transit plus scooters of various types, the other, everyone owning an auto, I suspect the former would have a lower emissions footprint. A lot lower.

Scooters may be worse than walking, but they could be a step in the direction of a pollution-free future.

Are you trying to say building more solar is a bad idea, and building more of something else would be better? What would that be, specifically?

Texas needs a bunch of solar, a bit of battery, that would cover peaks due to air conditioning. More insulation specified in residential building codes wouldn't hurt.

Once most Texans have EVs that charge with solar, and plug in at night and feed to the grid, the solution is even more obvious.