msandford

It's all well and good to suggest that each program receiving funding gets a thorough review. Of course, that review needs to be by experts, to ensure it gets a fair shake. Who are the experts in the field? The odds that you can be an expert in the field (by publication count, let's say) without having already been funded by the NIH is pretty slim. So now your experts are also insiders.

That's going to be a big problem as very few insiders are going to be willing to rock the boat. Even if it's necessary.

Maybe you've got a good idea of how to solve this "good review requires experts, experts are very likely insiders, insiders are unlikely to rock the boat" problem. It would be wonderful if there was some solution, even if it was hard.

It's probably more efficient for society to subsidize micro grids using solar and wind and batteries for rural electrification than to bury all the power lines that it'll take.

A $100 million project to bury the lines to 1000 houses is $100k per house which just ain't worth it. Not saying this is a real number but it could easily be if it's costing $0.20/kWh to do distribution.

Democrats say they want to improve these things, then get in office and worry more about trivialities then doing the work of governing.

A green new deal that set out to get electricity to people's houses at $0.08/kwh and stood a reasonable chance of doing so would have been a great start. That's not what it was, alas.

You can't just look at what the parties say they want to do when they're in power. You have to look at what they actually spend their time and energy on while in power.

Both parties are pretty hypocritical when it comes to stated goals vs revealed goals.

>> That's why there's a Senate in the US. So that the rural folks get some kind of voice in these matters when they don't have enough bulk population to matter in the House.

> No, there's a senate to get the small states in the late 18th century to ratify the constitution.

There's nothing really incompatible about these statements. The reason you needed a Senate to get the little states in on the whole deal was precisely the "populous states swamp out the less populous states" problem. I'm pretty sure the rural vs urban divide was already happening even then even if it was smaller in magnitude.

I would love to know more about the statehood population minimum you've referred to. Did some googling and didn't find much so a link would be greatly appreciated.

It's very easy to be generous with other people's resources. We see it everywhere.

That's why there's a Senate in the US. So that the rural folks get some kind of voice in these matters when they don't have enough bulk population to matter in the House.

There was absolutely no theoretical reason that some moldy cheese would kill bacteria but thankfully Fleming noticed what happened and we got antibiotics.

There was no theoretical reason that washing your hands would do anything to combat the spread of disease and all the smart doctors knew otherwise. Some kooky doctor named Semmelweisz proposed that doctors should wash their hands between childbirths in 1847, 14 years before Pasteur published his findings on germ theory in 1861. When some doctors listened to him maternal mortality dropped from 18% to 2%.

I'm all for basic science when the statistical significance becomes so great it really starts to look like causality and then you start figuring stuff out.

It doesn't seem like the statistical significance of the amyloid theory is strong enough that the direction of the arrow of causality can be determined. That's too bad.

The strength of the effect of keto diet interventions in Alzheimer's is pretty strong to my understanding. Which should be aggressively hinting that there's likely some as-yet unknown causality that's worth investigating. We don't have to spend billions to do that. But we do need more funding for it which is hard to get while all the amyloid hypothesis folks are really invested and clamoring.

Turns out there are enough studies for a meta analysis. Is that basic science? I'm not sure what counts.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S127977072...

If amyloid is truly the critical "but for" cause then how on earth is it possible that reducing amyloid burden doesn't really make a difference?

https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2024/03/13/why-alzheimers-pla...

I'm far, far more interested in anecdotes about completely halting or reversing decline than I am in rock solid data about a 30% reduction in decline speed.

Antibiotics started out as an anecdote about something whose effect was so stark it couldn't be missed. Chasing promising anecdotes is far more valuable (in my opinion) than attempting to take a 30% effect to a 100% effect.

Others are free to feel differently of course. I'm open to hearing about 100 different times that finding a tiny effect that got grown and magnified into a huge effect that totally changed medicine. I'm just not aware of many at this point.

There is anecdotal evidence and perhaps even some small studies showing that a keto diet can halt and even reverse Alzheimer's symptoms.

Compared to that, reducing the speed of decline isn't terribly impressive. It's better than nothing to be sure! But what people want is BIG progress, and understandably so. Billions have been spent.

I had this problem on a low power design. We were making an industrial temperature sensor for something that moved and we needed to run on battery.

What I ended up doing was using a second voltage regulator with an enable pin for all the accessories. When the MCU wakes up it turns power on to the accessories and waits for things to stabilize, maybe 1ms or so. Then it does what it needs to do and before going back to sleep turns all the accessories back off.

Costs you a few extra parts and a second voltage bus and the hassle of programming but it turns "small quiescent draw" into essentially zero. Maybe the regulator has a bit of leak but it should be pico amps or less.

> better insulation

It's very, very hard to get insulation that's not good for at least 100V and I suspect that just about any generic wire is good for more like 300V.

The only exception that comes to mind is wire that's specifically for "household low voltage" like 24V AC for thermostat, doorbell, sprinklers, landscape lighting. Also normal ethernet. But these are almost all what you'd call signalling wiring rather than power wiring.

Your average hook-up wire that you could buy at the auto parts store to make some repairs is almost certainly rated for 300V already. Mostly because of chafe resistance. Wikipedia says that the dielectric breakdown strength of PVC is 40 millions volts per meter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvinyl_chloride.

Divide both sides by 1 million and you get 40 volts per micron. OK so you need 1/3 of a micron to insulate enough for 12V and you need 1.25 microns for 48V. Now let's have a reasonable safety factor of say 10 or so and we're looking at 3 microns vs 12.5 microns. The only wire I can think of that might have insulation that thin is enamel coated magnet wire for the inside of motor windings. But even that is probably thicker.

Any kind of plastic insulation is going to be significantly thicker than this just to be able to be coated onto the bare copper wire and stick.

You're not wrong that the insulation needs to be thicker as the voltage goes higher. But you're unaware of just how ridiculously over-insulated everything already is due to other constraints of manufacture.

Not if you buy older cars. Pre 2010 seems safe enough.

NASAs "do stuff" budget is super small because their "keep all the experts on staff" budget is insatiable.

It's not entirely bad though, I'm sure lots of those folks are doing good and important stuff. But I don't think the balance between employment and building things is quite right. At least to my tastes.

This was phrased poorly if I understand the meaning.

"If there is limited use, roads are more efficient than rail"

That's probably true as roads tend to cost less per mile than rail and you don't have transfer problems.

When heavily utilized the opposite is true: rail is more efficient than roads.

Okay what's the safe dose of micro plastics? What's the evidence for that dose being safe? Do we have 100 years of data?

The reason we know there isn't a safe dose of lead is a lot of study.

Every month there's a new study about some crazy micro plastics things where they got found in some new place. We're in the early days of figuring out how bad it is. We don't really know yet.

The dose makes the poison.

I'd choose micro plastics vs an equivalent mass dose of lead.

If it was 1000x the amount of micro plastics vs lead it's maybe less obvious which is the less bad poison. I'd have to do some research at that point.

I think framing it this way it's obvious that lead is worse than micro plastics. But when you go from lead soldered copper pipes to PEX I don't know what the doses you get from each are.

I'm assuming they already have done so for years and that the cost is already baked into McDonald's prices.

As someone who doesn't eat there often it doesn't really affect me. Am I glad there's a cartel in general? No. Am I worried about commodity grade beef prices? Not really, it's not a significant part of my diet for a variety of reasons.

Poor McDonald's, getting stomped on by someone else with power.

I kind of like that someone is doing to them what they did to customers re: shake machines.

Well I mean folks in the developing world now have mobile phones which is really changing the way things work. It doesn't immediately install a new government and raise everyone instantly out of poverty but it's likely a big improvement to quality of life.

I'm sure it's not all upside either. But I suspect that this is one case if trickle down actually working.

Biden has 3.5 years to adjust the policy and only now have the numbers gone up? It's probably not strictly partisan.

The most efficient seasonal battery is probably synthetic hydrocarbons. By the time you get to propane (3 carbons) the pressures for liquid are super super reasonable (400psi including a giant safety factor) and there's zero embrittlement.

Further is that vehicles can use propane so you don't even have to idle the plants during the winter so long as there's some PV from the southern states. They might be running at 100% capacity in summer and 40% capacity in winter but that's way better than 0%. It's a lot easier to keep people employed to operate the plants if they're needed year round.

People have been pointing to a few high activity hurricane seasons as proof positive that it's climate change going to ruin everything. One gets the feeling that there's some kind of maybe linear-ish correlation.

The idea that a lower activity hurricane season also confirms it is challenging to understand. I get what you're saying which is something like "it's unchartered territory so all bets are off"

But at the same time we've had cycles in hurricane activity over the last 100 years we've kept good records and some years just aren't as bad.

If we were dealing with the kind of science I'm used to this wouldn't be confirming the predictions, it would be discrediting them.

Recommendations are optional. There is no enforcement. I might not be able to find a doctor to give me a surgery I want. But rarely does a surgeon force upon someone a surgery they don't want.

An obvious counter example is electroshock therapy or a lobotomy. Typically there's some due process there before a doctor just does something against patient wishes.

People don't like the vaccine debate for many, many reasons. Sadly a lot of the discussion is people talking past each other and refusing to acknowledge that the other side does have a point about assumptions that are damaging to their own position.

Would love to know more about this. How would that happen? What's the process to bring it back up so fast?

The video has a lot of good info and seems compelling. During the Texas freeze many power company officials said the exact same thing, if the Texas grid went down it would have taken weeks to bring everything back online.

The "turning the grid up to 11" attack isn't really possible. I know it seems like it is, but the inverters will only advance frequency so much before they back off, the inverters will only increase voltage so much. Etc. Sounds scary, isn't practical.

Turning everything off when the panels are at peak output? That lets frequency sag enough that plants start tripping offline to protect themselves and the grid and it'll cascade across the continent in just a few minutes. Then you have a black start which might take months.

There's an excellent video on how catastrophic a black start is. https://youtu.be/uOSnQM1Zu4w?si=x0dA7X7-19CJm6Kf

I found I was able to get a fiber shear and end maker for less than $100 or so.

https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2020-08-09-fiber-link-ho...

Optical Fibre Cleaver SKL-6C Cable Cutting Cutter optical fiber CFS-3 stripper Leather wire stripper FTTH tool https://a.co/d/6dcvR0l

Typically if you want to DIY something you first start with the smallest prototype possible and work your way up from there.

This demo cell isn't super interesting on its own but to validate the chemistry it's super helpful. Once you got that done you'd then work on a stack of cells, say 10 or 20 or 40 to get up to normal system voltages.

Once you have that working it's just a matter of making the tank as big as you want for your storage. Provided the initial chemistry is reasonable you could probably use a pair of IBC totes and really go somewhere.

I think sugar consumption is a symptom of a deeper problem like food not actually being nutritious anymore and glyphosate on everything chelates what nutrition you do actually get.

It's really hard to have self control and just not eat despite being hungry when even the "good" options aren't satisfying unless you know to buy organic.

I'm not saying self control isn't a problem too. But saying that's the only problem is to kind of gloss over how primal the instinct to "not starve" is. The modern food environment makes it possible to feel like you're starving while you're obese because while you have plenty of calories you don't have enough protein or minerals or anything important.

Oh wow! Thanks for the info. I'm glad to hear it's not crazy everywhere out there.

How so? Would the Federal regulators have done a better job of making CenterPoint invest the right amount of money into tree trimming and placing lines underground?

California is under Federal regulation and has significant problems where PG&E hasn't invested enough in reliability.

If California just breezed through every natural disaster with no power outages and lower than Texas energy prices it would truly be a no brainer.

But Texas has retail power rates in the $0.10-$0.20/kwh range. From what I understand $0.20 would be an absolute bargain in California and that $0.30-$0.50 per kwh is more what folks out there pay.

It's not so compelling in that case. Of course I could have missed something. Please do let me know if I have.