skosch

I'm more curious about the Conservatives' response to this, actually, as talking about waste has been one of their favourite diversion tactics whenever the environment (read: climate change) comes up. Will they vote for this?

Indeed! Thanks to tireless lobbying, there is now a bipartisan-sponsored bill before the House: https://teddeutch.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Documen...

This is the one mechanism that actually has the potential to turn the entire economy around without directly making politicians look bad, so it has a nonzero chance of passing.

The best thing you can do for the climate today is to call your representatives about this bill, or better, send handwritten letters or letters to the editor.

Fasting has lots of well-documented benefits, but your claim sounds pseudoscientific. A water-fasting proponent would probably encourage us to drink water to "flush out toxins".

What toxins, exactly, are being "drawn out" here? And if it's true: is drawing lots of toxins out of fat cells into blood and surrounding tissue a good thing? I'd love to see some sources.

I recently walked into a Casper store to check out their new night light. The sales girl came over in her silly sleep scientist outfit to demonstrate the shake-to-dim feature. "Neat, right? That way it won't disrupt your REM sleep while you go to the bathroom at night."

The bit of heat produced in a power line isn't a huge deal. The more important applications will be in electronics and electromagnets. For instance, it would make nuclear fusion reactors cheaper and easier to build.

That worked for me on Linux FF 66. Thank you.

They're all wonderful, established technologies and all very capable of making concurrency relatively painless. At this stage, you should go with whatever you would be most productive in: do you already know one of the languages? If so, go with that one (always be shipping!). If not, how much do you like the syntax of each? How much do you rely on static types? How mature are the third-party libraries you're going to be relying on?

I've been building software using the exact stack described in the linked article for the last three years. I don't think about my backend very much, it mostly just works. Most of the work is on the front end. Elixir/Phoenix/Absinthe have been almost completely frustration-free. I'm sure Rust and Kotlin are great too.

China already has the largest carbon trading market in the world [0]. Perhaps it's not aggressive enough, but they're significantly more ambitious than the US, and their population isn't nearly as wealthy to begin with, so it'll hurt them more. Either way, we can chose to invest now, or pay the price for this silly game of chicken later.

Besides – how do you suggest we get China and India to cut emissions without doing the same, if not more, at home? Perhaps Border Adjustments [1] can alleviate some of your fears; they would protect domestic industry. All of this has already been worked out to stupendous levels of detail by legal scholars and Nobel-prize winning economists [2] – your armchair criticism just shows that you're decades behind the policy wonks. Leave it to them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_national_carbon_tradin...

[1] https://www.carbontax.org/nuts-and-bolts/border-adjustments/

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/business/economic-science...

Carbon pricing, carbon pricing, carbon pricing.

It's the one thing virtually all economists agree on as the most efficient way to catalyze large-scale change (although we'll still need regulation and sequestration as well).

Politically, the most realistic way to get this done without a huge public backlash is via a revenue-neutral carbon fee and dividend. There's a bill before congress right now [0]. Canada implemented a variation on this at a federal level recently.

One of the most active groups supporting this kind of legislation is Citizens' Climate Lobby – if you care about this issue, please consider joining.

[0] Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act: https://teddeutch.house.gov/uploadedfiles/deutch_014_xml_116...

This made me go "huh, then how do they know their sensor is working at all?"

The answer is that the sensors are two spectrometers that detect all sorts of gases, not just methane:

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_and_Occultation_for_Mars...

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

Read the article – it's bacteria that produce the smell humans perceive as "sweaty", but it's not that smell that attracts the mosquitoes, but rather acidic compounds that are already present in our sweat.

I have found that book to be an impressive example of poor scientific writing – one long, convoluted, intentionally obtuse sentence after another, as if the author was constantly trying to make the reader feel like an idiot.

I have found some more technical articles (e.g. [0]) very useful, but if anyone knows of a comprehensive introduction that takes more of an experimental psychology angle, similar to Surfing Uncertainty but less frustrating, I definitely want to know about it.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002224961...

Right – but then consider what its popularity might be today if AfD-aligned content had been banned by Facebook and other platforms from the start. Parties like the NPD have been around for ages, but unlike the AfD they were kept out of the Overton window and never managed to grow to significant numbers.

> It just makes it fester somewhere else that isn't as visible.

Is that true? Would we have the anti-vax movement if it weren't for Facebook & co.?

This is addressed later in the article. The whole formula is: "3 numbers were inaccurate. I feel frustrated because I keep having to [deal with the consequences]. Would you be able to [double-check all calculations from now on]?"

I just wanted to answer the question. The limiting factor is indeed the sunlight and how much of it is absorbed – thus my comment that 85% is nothing special.

Back-of-the-napkin:

> 90-nm ultra-thin

I don't know the density, but let's say 2g/cm³. That means a 1cm² piece of this film weighs 18 micrograms.

> 30°C to 150°C in 30 seconds

If by "sunlight" they mean 1000 W/m², which is generous, then our 1×1 piece would catch 0.1 W. Over 30 seconds, that makes 3 joules.

3 joules to heat 18 micrograms by 120 degrees – that's a specific heat capacity of 1.388 joules per gram and K (a bit more if the density is lower than 2, a bit less if it's higher). So: a bit more than typical metals, probably, but not by much.

I didn't mean to come across as cynical — it's still a cool discovery, and it might turn out to be useful in some surprising niche context. The researchers do speculate that it might be

> suitable for a wide variety of uses, including desalination of seawater, color displays, photodetectors, and optical components for communication devices.

So: time will tell!

This is cool, but at 85% absorptivity it's no better than coatings you can already buy. Absorber plates in glazed solar water heaters you can get in your hardware store today have numbers in the 90s.

Edit: I recommend a look at the original paper instead [0]. The significant feature appears to be the ability to absorb light at a wide range of angles, rather than simply the absolute absorptivity.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-019-0389-3

Interesting, that's how I remembered it too!

However, Wikipedia says: "While many reviewers compared Elliot Carver to Rupert Murdoch, Feirstein based the character on Robert Maxwell." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_Never_Dies)

We can acknowledge the suffering caused by the bear.

Perhaps the overall utility of having a happy bear in your ecosystem beats not having a bear, or a starving one. Since we can't know for sure, the precautionary principle tells us to just let the bear be a bear. But it still sucks for the salmon, and therefore a human capable of forgoing the salmon clearly should at least consider it.

> so they probably have an evolved way to deal with the psychological burden of this.

I like that idea, but I don't understand how natural selection would favour animals that are less stressed about predators. Are you implying that the gazelle actually enjoys the thrill as it is running away from the lion?

> Kind of similar to the way how behavior of cellular automata changes between the predictable patterns and chaotic ones.

Hm, reminds me of Permutation City. That's an interesting parallel I hadn't considered at all.

> this doesn't need to assign consciousness to simpler computations (rocks, buildings, simple cells).

That necessarily follows, I think. The quantum processes in a rock are also a form of computation and, therefore, inhabited by some rudimentary form of experience we might call, dunno, "rockness". I don't see an easy way around it. Perhaps at absolute zero all experience stops?

I have no answers, but your questions are precisely why I find this fascinating to think about!

Self-aware consciousness is a pretty high bar, but how about the ability to experience suffering? The ability to experience reward? That question very quickly turns into "what is experience", or rather, "what isn't experience".

I don't find any of this intuitive, nor do I have answers to the ethical questions that follow (besides not eating animals, which I already don't). But I find it revealing how most people will fight tooth and nail to maintain that there is some magical threshold separating dead matter from precious, conscious life, without having given the topic much thought at all.

Absolutely, and why stop there? Neural nets just add up numbers – other physical systems do that, too.

I like how quickly this line of thinking leads to panpsychism.

Alright, so your dog has some level of cognition – sensations, emotion, joy, pain. Perhaps less complex than a human, but nevertheless nonzero. Because whatever computations happens in its brain feel like something from the inside.

How about a frog? Less, but still nonzero.

How about a worm? Less, but still nonzero. But hey: we can already model a worm's nervous system [0]. And if consciousness is just what computation feels like from the inside, then torturing the model worm creates real pain (or the worm-equivalent of pain, whatever that emotion is).

Something interesting to think about.

[0] http://openworm.org

Environment :)

Several years old, but still awesome.

Does anyone know what the "Trace" algorithm does? I can't find anything on Google.

Your heart is in the right place, but what you advocate isn't currently palatable to anyone, left or right, on the political spectrum.

Instead, push for a fee-and-dividend model – not entirely UBI, but similar in spirit. It's what most economists support, and it has enough bipartisan support [0] that there is actually a bill before Congress now that has a chance of passing.

[0] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/climate-solutions-caucus/