sparkman55

It's not clear from the (beautiful!) article, but 4 times as much water goes to agricultural use than to municipal use in California. People won't die of thirst in California, but crops aren't doing as well.

In particular, orchards spread through much of California's central valley. These are perennial plants (trees or vines), living decades in some cases.

If you've mortgaged the farm to plant acres of fruit or nut trees, you're not going to let them die in a drought. You'll fight hard for any running water you can get your hands on, and then you'll dig wells and suck as much water out of the ground as your trees need.

Groundwater has been (uncharacteristically!) unregulated in California, so aggressive ranchers or farmers can draw down the water table, threatening their neighbors' wells and causing a 'tragedy of the commons' situation and a race to drill. Sucking all that water out of the ground has all sorts of environmental concerns - as a result, California just passed laws to become the last western state to regulate groundwater usage.

The Android toolchain is also significantly less developer-friendly than the corresponding iOS toolchain.

Plug in an iPhone, and (after jumping through the byzantine code-signing system) you'll be able to deploy development code to it (from an OSX environment). If your app runs on one iPhone, it probably runs well on another, barring some screen geometry concerns.

Plug in an Android device, and you might need to search around to find a manufacturer-specific toolset, and/or navigate secret menus to enable debugging (like "click this menu item that doesn't look like a button seven times"). You might also have to worry about ancient devices that can't be updated to a modern Android version, and have egregious platform bugs. Comparatively, it's a mess.

If you visit Bellingham, you'd do well to visit one of the best brewpubs on the West Coast: Boundary Bay Brewery, home to award-winning IPAs (often available from the cask) and a surprisingly-solid menu.

With a university and proximity to Seattle and Vancouver, I'm not too surprised to see a nascent techie scene. A little stimulus would be good for the local economy, which has been quite depressed.

When I flick my fingers up, I expect a smooth vertical movement of the view pane, exposing new content at the bottom. I can scroll fast and far if I want to scan for interesting content, and scroll backwards if I might have missed something. Every other web page does this, except this one. It subverts the conventional affordance of the scroll wheel / two-finger scroll.

The recent NYTimes article about ISIS in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers ( http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/03/world/middleea... ) is a much better treatment of the scroll.

If I'm going to be subjected to lengthy animations between slides, I generally expect arrows left-and-right to click on.

The whole 'scroll to begin' language on an otherwise beautiful page is a usability smell. See http://www.harmoni.ca/blog/affordances

Yikes, what did they do to the page's "scroll" function?

Do people actually find that usable? It definitely made me think the page was broken at first... The slideshow seems like a 'play' (right-arrow) much more than a 'scroll' (down-arrow).

Is this a metaphor for Dyson vacuums in general? (Technically-clever, shiny, but not necessarily the most effective)

There's a really cool snowblower train that plies Donner Pass between Sacramento and Reno:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItdRfvYHPAY

Rinse - https://www.rinse.com - San Francisco, CA

Rinse is a technology-enabled dry cleaning and laundry delivery service. Our customers use a mobile app, our website, or SMS to schedule a delivery, and then we use sophisticated software and processes to 'level up' what is still mostly a pen-and-paper industry. We've been growing exponentially for a year now; if you live in SF and haven't heard of us, you will soon!

We're hiring a senior software developer to solve problems ranging from the capacitated vehicle routing problem to image processing to linux kiosks. We're primarily Django + Bootstrap.js with a healthy dose of Celery + Heroku + Ubuntu. Big bonus points if you have history in the industry!

We're also hiring a Customer Experience Specialist. No technical skills are necessary for this role, but you'll need well-developed empathy and solid written and verbal communication skills. We have absolutely stellar customer satisfaction and retention statistics, and we aim to keep it that way! If you want to join a rapidly-growing startup in San Francisco, but aren't an elite hacker, here's your chance!

If you have any questions about either of these roles, please do not hesitate to email me directly at sam <at> rinse.com

A number of people live in (beautiful!) Santa Cruz but commute over the hill to work in San Jose or elsewhere in Silicon Valley. It's a long commute on a treacherous but crowded mountain highway, so it's no surprise that they need to wake up early to beat traffic.

Frankly, it's a pretty terrible sport hunting rifle. The round is too small for most big game, and the cartridge is too powerful for most small game.

The mainstay of sport hunters is actually the 12-gauge shotgun.

Hunting isn't really a good justification for the proliferation of AR-platform rifles, and is definitely a non-sequitur when discussing the armament of our police force.

Most people use an infrared thermometer 'gun' for this. You can buy them at Home Depot...

Another card reader that plugs into the audio port.

I'd like to include one of these card readers into my own mobile app; has anyone had success using an SDK for integration? CardFlight seems like it would work, but it's a bit expensive...

Right now, the lethality of this outbreak of Ebola is around 60%, so an infection is definitely not certain death, particularly with the supportive care possible in the U.S.'s best hospitals.

When you've already dedicated yourself by traveling across the world to help people fight a highly-contagious disease, it makes sense that you'd be first in line to test a serum (which, while experimental, uses a method that has had great success in the past).

You're right, panels are generally ganged together in battery to avoid the 'thick copper cable' problem.

However, the individual panel assemblies do run at lower voltages (individual cells run at the band gap of the semiconductor, 1 or 2 V).

It should be noted that placing the panels in series has a significant effect on panel performance when some of the panels are shaded (The entire string outputs at the rate of the shaded panel), so it would be much better to place panels in parallel when possible.

Each element on an electric stove is roughly 2 kW. Let's say you have a 4-burner stove, and they're all on. That's 8kW of power.

Let's say we run your 'simplified' household at 48V (the highest voltage commonly used in boat/cabin DC systems). To run 8kW on 48V you need 167 Amps. For 167 Amps you need something like 2/0 wire. That's really thick and heavy cabling!

Can you imagine replacing all of the wiring in your walls with this stuff?

http://i1194.photobucket.com/albums/aa378/chance1525/Mobile%...

If inverters were smaller and more efficient, they could be placed on a per-panel basis ("string inverters" or "micro inverters") for significantly better performance, particularly when some of the panels are shaded. See this paper:

http://tec.appstate.edu/sites/tec.appstate.edu/files/micro%2...

(EDIT: The above point is valid, but I was wrong about cable sizes improving when using micro inverters!)

The Devil's Slide Trail, a brand new park along the coast south of Pacifica (south of San Francisco), has an example of one of these emplacements.

http://parks.smcgov.org/devils-slide-trail

This airliner was flying at a nice cruising altitude of 10,000m - the man-portable surface-to-air missiles (MANPADS [1]) that the systems you linked to can't easily lock-on to planes that high (only about 6,000m according to the wiki), because they rely on infrared tracking of the plane's engines and exhaust. The defensive systems you listed work by shooting out flares that confuse infrared tracking systems, I believe.

It's more likely that this plane was shot down by a radar-guided system like the BUK [2], at least one of which was captured by Ukrainian separatists recently.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MANPADS

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buk_missile_system

(Since I can no longer edit my post:) The link has been updated, and they are now for sale in the U.S.! $129.00

Cool stuff!

They cost 91€ plus shipping, and cannot currently be shipped to the U.S. http://www.digitalsundial.com/ordering.html

They are apparently tuned for a particular latitude, so they won't work in the tropics either...

Of course, you can also share a taxi... it may be an indulgence to hop on a taxi alone as part of your daily commute, but it becomes much more convenient, private, and cost-effective when in a pair or small group.

These taxi data do not seem to capture taxi capacity factor / number of seats filled.

Point-to-Point (Fixed) Wireless is actually also an attractive solution in rural / semi-rural settings as well.

If the distances are moderate (with line-of-sight) but demand is too sparse to warrant the cost of running coaxial / fiber (and distances are too far for DSL), a common alternative on the high end is fixed microwave, and on the low end Verizon LTE.

A good example is the Ames, Iowa area, where an ISP has set up a tower with good line of sight, and a bunch of directional antennas both on the tower and at customers locations. This setup provides great service out to ~15 miles or so, enough to cover the outskirts of this small town.

Some issues with this setup: storms cause 'rain fade' which blocks the signal, and the wireless spectrum does not scale to too many users. Also, there's a finicky antenna on the roof that can become misaligned in storms.

If you are actually taking about the icon/logo for the app, you'll probably want to spend some time working on it. It's the first thing that a user sees, and so can have a surprisingly significant effect on engagement. You'll also want it to be unique enough to stand out amongst other apps, but not so ugly as to encourage the user to delete it.

I'm definitely not a designer, so I use a professional designer for real (consumer) projects. For just an app icon, creative talent is actually pretty cheap - e.g. fiverr had 225 listings for 'app icon.'

While it is a bit intimidating to roll your own, it isn't actually all that hard. Here's what I've done:

1) Download a few component SVGs from http://thenounproject.com . For example, if you want a star on your icon, search for 'star' and download the one you want.

2) Load all of these SVGs into Pixelmator, or an Adobe tool, or GIMP.

3) Resize/recolor/shade/layer the individual SVGs until you get something passable. Save it in a very high-resolution as a master.

4) Resize this master into all of the different sizes you need. I think Android has roughly five different icon sizes, from 144x144 to 36x36. If you're comfortable on the command line, ImageMagick does quick work of this resizing.

Good Luck!

It's not quite the same thing, but Palo Alto (suburban San Francisco) has been turning side streets into 'bike boulevards' that are inconvenient to drive on, and therefore safer to bike on. Roundabouts, signage and even bollards to block car through-traffic all serve to make these side streets quite pleasant bike corridors.

Yes! Caltrain is actually very accommodating to bicyclists, with no extra charge for bikes and special bike cars (that are often full at peak hours).

I personally bike about a mile to a train station in Palo Alto, and about a mile from Caltrain to the office in San Francisco.

However, San Francisco has some fundamental problems that make it less hospitable to biking than Copenhagen. It is notoriously hilly, and doesn't have the awesome protected bike tracks that Copenhagen has.

Yep, that's the gap. It's about a mile from the commuter rail to downtown, and the public transit options between are quite slow. It's no wonder that private transportation startups abound in San Francisco.

I guess I'm spoiled by the well-interconnected transit systems in many international cities; step off the (high-speed) intercity rail and downstairs into the core of a robust subway system, or walk to the bus terminal next door.

San Francisco once had such an intermodal transit hub in the Transbay Terminal; the city is seeking $2.5 Billion to rebuild it.

Until then, we'll have to rely on private transportation like the 'dollar cabs' described in the article, or San Francisco's very own Lyft and Uber.

San Francisco has a "Jitney Bus" that attempts to correct the horrendous hole in transit between the Caltrain commuter rail and downtown.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/A-One-Man-Traffic-Buster-...

There is also a startup called Chariot that is building a private bus line to downtown SF; this one has a surprisingly different appeal than the ones in the article in NYC: the existing public Muni bus line from the Marina to downtown is notoriously slow and crowded, so perhaps commuting professionals would be willing to pay a little more...

Rinse - San Francisco, CA https://www.rinse.com

Although the domain isn't sexy at first glance, Laundry and Dry Cleaning really are problems that would benefit from today's technical prowess. Modernizing laundry has real environmental benefits to water usage, not to mention the convenience factor of a delivery service. As humanity becomes more and more urban and less and less likely to have space for a personal washer and dryer, demand for efficient laundry service is growing.

Rinse needs to tackle interesting technical challenges as well. Of course, the routing problem as popularized by the Traveling Salesman Problem (except with multiple, load-balanced agents) is a challenge, but since we are also taking photos of the clothes we process, there are interesting data mining, machine learning, and image processing applications as well. This is in addition to the joys of rapidly scaling an operational system, while continually optimizing a consumer-facing product.

We're looking for skilled developers of all types to join us, including Web Developers and Full-Stack Developers. Since we haven't taken any VC yet, this is a chance to earn a significant equity stake (while still earning a competitive salary).

We're a Python - Django - Heroku - AWS - Postgres - Backbone.js - Sass - HAML - HTML5 shop currently, but since we're small, there are opportunities to steer us technically as well.

More information at https://www.rinse.com/careers/ or just contact us at jobs@rinse.com

It's definitely possible, but much more unlikely than going without a passport, for two reasons:

1) The expanse and culture of the U.S. favors driving cars, so most people learn to drive a car. A driver's license is most people's form of photo ID.

2) A puritanical history makes for strict age limits on alcohol and tobacco; young adults must show photo ID in order to enter many bars and clubs where alcohol is served.

These two factors mean that most Americans have an ID by the time they are 21. In fact, I don't know anyone who doesn't have one.

You can get plenty of resolution off an airplane. I have seen aerial imagery of sufficient resolution to do stand count analysis, which is basically counting individual green shoots of corn in the spring.

As another poster mentioned, though, spectral analysis shows problems in the leaves of the plant, where it is too late: if your plant is yellowing due to lack of water or nutrients, you've already decreased the potential yield from that plant. It's better to detect deficiencies in the ground.

Exactly! Heroku should be building that 24/7 operation so I don't have to. Isn't that the whole point of PaaS?