msandford

From that website:

The all-hazard siren system can be used for a variety of both natural and human-caused events; including tsunamis, hurricanes, dam breaches, flooding, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, terrorist threats, hazardous material incidents, and more.

I always thought you wanted to minimize, not maximize, the unsprung mass. So putting giant hub motors on would kind of defeat the goal, no?

Calculating trajectories is easy. Getting good data points is hard. Two pictures using a telescope on back to back nights is probably the smallest reasonable sample one could get. Take another picture the 3rd night and you've just doubled the size of the arc.

Wait a week and get another sample and your arc is now approx 5x as long. Wait a month and get another and now your arc is 30x as long as the original. More observations shrink your error bars.

There are systemic errors here for sure. Two kinds, really:

1. Limits of resolution of telescopes 2. Short sample lengths

You absolutely can't do anything about error type 1. You can fix 2 by getting more data. But there's no point in getting data on asteroids that have absolutely no possibility of hitting. So only asteroids that have some probability with limited measurements get enough better measurements that are high quality in order to find out where they're really headed.

All of these measurements of trajectories are completely uncorrelated, so you can't use the priors to adjust probabilities. I mean you can do whatever you want, but we haven't been hit by a big asteroid yet since we've had telescopes and tracking databases.

If we made adjustments based on priors we'd have to discount all collisions down to 0 irrespective of the trajectories. Seems absurd, so there must be something else going on here.

You seem very certain that fertilizer is required. Given what we know of agriculture today, that seems reasonable.

But something, somehow grew 4-8ft of deep topsoil on the prairies in the US that are now prime farmland. Haber Bosch wasn't around 300 or 3000 years ago, nor were people tilling and planting. How did these plants get enough nitrogen to thrive?

How do current grass fed beef ranchers grow enough grass to grow cattle today? Surely they aren't fertilizing the grass.

Some folks say that there are free living nitrogen fixing bacteria that can live in the soil, provided that they're getting sugars from growing plants. It seems reasonable.

I don't think you understand how this works at all. You might read up on this here if you want to learn more. https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/8450/how-is-th...

If you just want to argue with people, feel free. But based on how this conversation has been going it doesn't seem like you want to learn.

Right! Yes absolutely!

It's wrong because the measurements are suggestive of possibility, rather than certain of it.

If we observe an asteroid that with two poor measurements is determined to be headed away from Earth, that's the end. Look no further.

If we observe an asteroid with two poor measurements that has some significant chance of hitting, more and better measurements are made. Then very often those better measurements show it was never actually going to hit anyhow.

But we never would have known without the better measurements, and we never would have devoted more time to making better measurements without a reason to do so.

A 3% chance that never occurs is because that 3% is based on data that's at the limit of what the telescopes can provide, not based upon bad math.

Imagine you see a car 1 mile away as you're preparing to cross the street. 1 sec later, it's a bit closer. You wonder "will this car hit me?". It's hard to say since the car is so far away and your measurements of its speed are so poor.

You wait 5 sec and it's still only imperceptibly closer. You realize there is no way it could possibly hit you. You cross the street unconcerned.

They may want big, but big doesn't have to be heavy. We could have big and relatively light vehicles. Most of a cars volume is air.

But big is higher drag and higher drag is less mpg and the only way to be allowed less mpg is heavy as per EPA rules.

Wholesale electricity in Texas is often $50/MWh or less. Consumers are paying $0.12/kWh delivered at retail.

It could well be that even with these price spikes the energy retailers still have enough arb during the normal times to cover these wild times. If so it seems like markets are working insofar as consumers are paying lower average prices.

It might be that occasional price spikes are more economic than building new generation capacity.

You might look at what AEA has to offer. They have a lot of experience with helping plants perform at peak photosynthesis even if the environmental conditions aren't ideal. www.advancingecoagriculture.com

There's two ways to look at this that others commenters have hinted at:

1. The institutions are tremendously capable and trustworthy, and somehow people aren't trusting them as they rightly deserve. Then this lack of trust is a big, big problem! It's a mismatch and we need to figure out why people aren't trusting these otherwise great, selfless, highly competent institutions.

2. The institutions are incompetent, looking out for their interests vs the public, and doing things that otherwise make them untrustworthy. In this case, the lack of trust isn't a mistmatch between deserved trust and realized trust, it's the realized trust being in line with deserved trust.

Everyone might have their own take on if we're in a case 1 or case 2 scenario. I personally think it's more of a case 2 situation at this time.

Trying to identify your priors about what you expect as a baseline level of competence from a big org just based on them existing at all and having an authoritative name might help you learn something.

Yeah I mean they're not great, but for that much money one could buy a pair of the Honda 2000w inverter generators and run them on natural gas and cycle between them quite handily. Have the "on" generator and the "just off of the latest rebuild cycle" generator.

I've also thought that if one could figure out some of the power electronics a wrecked Prius engine just ticking over at idle would probably provide most of your off-peak power and charge batteries and then during peak times it could just ramp up a bit. I've never heard of a natural gas conversion though so it would be a long road I suspect.

You're missing that JJ probably doesn't have the many millions of lab tests for every talc batch sold to prove they're asbestos free. If they did they wouldn't be arguing they're asbestos free, they'd be proving it and suing the talc researchers for libel.

That's getting to the point that it could literally be economic to run a small generator on natural gas, or that plus solar plus batteries. It would take too many $500-$1000 electric bills to really pay down some personal infrastructure.

There's another reason that this is done. It's to separate the different copies of the characters. There are multiple of all of them in every park, but by keeping the sight lines contained like this there can be 9 Mickey's all over and you can never see two at the same time.

Failing to understand the enormous amount of methane infrastructure (natural gas) and the utility of reusing it is also a mistake IMO.

There's got to be tens of trillions of dollars in deployed methane infrastructure. To suggest that's a weak argument is baffling. Economics are real.

I never understood what all the people who were going on and on about "water intrusion" were saying, because it was never explained. But I think I understand now. Boring old A36 carbon steel is good for like 30ksi (30000psi).

The water pressure is only say 6ksi which is significantly less. That means that the steel is much stronger on its own, in every direction, than the water pressure pushing on it.

The epoxy in most epoxy composites isn't rated for 30ksi, it's generally less than 10ksi and perhaps even less than 5ksi. Epoxy on its own is capable of standing up to less pressure than the composite will see at 13000ft deep.

So the concern is that it's not if but when water manages to wiggle it's way past some of the epoxy between the carbon strands. Sure the bulk composite material can stand up to 6ksi, but if the glue that holds it together is weaker, well, the water can push it out of the way.

However deep the water gets it has reduced the effective thickness and this strength of your composite at that point, if it goes deep enough it shoots through and that's the start of a very quickly evolving collapse.

Yeah that's my mistake. I'm not arguing he's going to appear that way by throwing a coup.

I'm suggesting that lots of people act a way, and then they change for a job. If he wanted the leader of Russia job and had to act nicer to the west to keep it, well, that's a possibility.

It could also be he's read the tea leaves of massive sanctions and figures the west would support a softer, friendlier Russian leader, whoever that is. Still probably suicidal doing that kind of thing on speculation.

There are at least three categories of land. Land that can be mechanically harvested, land that can be harvested by animals, and land that's neither.

If we stop growing beef on the second category of land that's not suitable for combines but is suitable for bovines, well, that could represent a net loss of food.

Yeah I hear this and I'm not thinking about the limited upside, I'm worrying about the nearly unlimited downside.

It is limited though. They can't do worse than destroying all life as we know it. Not very comforting.

The great plains in the US were legendary for having multiple feet of deep, rich topsoil for farming.

Rich topsoil is that which has lots of organic matter in it, i.e. carbon.

There are people who say the great plains were built by roaming buffalo herds, grazing on the grasses growing there.

So if that natural system was able to sequester carbon it stands to reason that humans could mimic it and in doing so also sequester carbon.

I read what you wrote and I believe I understand what you're saying.

Interest rates in the early 1980s in the US went as high as 14% and the economy didn't shut down. Businesses kept right on doing business, despite the high interest rates.

That doesn't seem to be what your theory would predict and yet it happened in real life. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_funds_rate

If you remove the fed from the market and the interest rate is determined by available savings what happens to the interest rate?

Looks like it doesn't have any real climate control. Once you have a light, efficient vehicle like this the climate control loads start to become significant vs the actual transport.

Might work great where it's super mild all the time like Europe or parts of California. Probably not awesome in the US South.

If you don't know what fun is, having fun is the same as a ceremony. It's some dumb thing rubes do because "nobody knows why!"

How does this work? If you're rich you get to refuse to show up to prison? I never realized that just choosing not to show up was an option.

Seems kind of strange that she could (presumably) be in court and sentenced and not immediately taken away to start her time.

Can't be the Navy's fault, it's a Navy warship-to-be.

The folks in the article seem to have figured some of the longevity problems out.

Total global battery production seems to be 200-300GWh/year. If you want to buy approx 30% of total yearly output it's very unlikely you can negotiate your way to the head of the line. In fact, buying that much might raise global prices for batteries.

If I want enough solar panels and batteries to make my house off grid I can just write a check and the stuff shows up in a few weeks. But that doesn't scale upwards without limit. Eventually the limits on global supply kick in no matter how much you want it.