bearbin

Voting for a anglo-FRENCH design above the union flag! No contest there (despite the Concorde being a great bit of kit).

The New Covent Garden Market itself is currently in the middle of a multi-decade redevelopment, they've slightly reduced the footprint and sold off some land for development, and the remains (still a massive area) is being _very_ slowly converted into a more modern design - sadly not really a market where you can actually go on foot to buy things, but a co-location area for lots of wholesalers to warehouse and deliver from.

Instead of wood _or_ plastic, you have wood _and_ plastic in one board! (Or rather, paper mixed with some sort of formaldehyde resin)

The TV license is certainly bit ridiculous, but being legally blind doesn't necessarily mean you can't see at all, just you fall below the legal threshold where it's judged that poor sight will interfere with your day-to-day life. Lots of people registered as blind can still watch the TV just fine even if they won't be able to see the detail.

The whole concept is unfixable. Once the fibre comes out, it's not going to go back in. It's that deadly combination of fragile and cheap. Just unpack a new drone and off you go. Don't spend a week (and 10 casualties going into the grey zone to collect it) winding it back up only to find it's broken in the middle.

The drone moves, the base station doesn't. The spool goes on the thing that moves, so it just has to unspool to move further. If the spool was on the fixed position, the drone would have to drag thousands of meters of fibre behind it, needing more powerful motors and creating a risk of snagging/snapping.

There are!

https://www.omenie.com/pipistrelle.html

For datacentres that require air conditioning as opposed to natural ventilation (most of them) a very popular approach is to use evaporative cooling towers [1] in combination with W2W chiller units [2]. The chillers cool the internal water circuit and heat the external water circuit, the excess heat is dumped to the environment by evaporating water in the cooling towers.

Of course it's possible to use air-cooled equipment and this is more common in cooler climates or smaller data centres, so it's not a rule of nature that cooling servers wastes water but it's certainly a very common outcome.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiller

There's a physical product that implements the same idea [1]. I'm not sure how it actually works (presumably there's a patent somewhere, is there an alternative solution?) but it's quite a magic feeling to hear the fire alarm go off and the doors independently close by themselves. If you're in a building that uses these, you can test yourself by playing a recorded fire alarm sound - they work on quite a few different ones (and it really doesn't have to be that loud!). They also have a surprisingly long battery life, ~10 years I think so the detection mustn't take much power at all.

[1]: https://www.fireco.uk/products/sound-activated/dorgard/

An interesting construction detail of the cheap modern microwave is that it only operates on one half of the mains electric waveform: microwaves use a single high-voltage diode which acts both as half-wave rectifier and voltage doubler. Thus the magnetron only operates for 10 ms in every 20 ms.

In theory 2.4 GHz communication protocols can easily time their transmissions to fit in the gaps left by the microwave. 50% bandwidth loss but no other effect.

This obviously isn't foolproof in practice, when 2.4 GHz was a thing I remember my WiFi dropping off whenever somebody was nuking some food. But perhaps this might have been a quirk of my Panasonic inverter microwave - which obviously is not the simple standard circuit.

I think GP means "enclosed".

dent, crush, lid or seal failure (which can't be cheaply/practically made of steel)

Somewhat of a meta question for @luu - how did you come across this post today before you resubmitted to HN?

I ask as I ended up searching for this article earlier today and thought about resubmitting (but ended up not doing so). It just seems a strange coincidence, unless there's something we both saw that made us think 'evil bit'!

For context, when power grid engineers talk about relays, they're not talking about physical switching of the electricity itself, but instead the control and monitoring system for the grid. Traditionally this was done using specialised electomechanical devices (like the common electronic relay, but with special functions/construction).

The relays control actual power flow on the grid indirectly, using devices like breakers, tap changers, etc.

This article is talking about the digitalisation of relays, which basically means microprocessors or adapting industrial PLCs to do the same basic functions as the electromechanical relays but better (smaller, less maintenance, advanced features like fault localisation, remote control, etc.).

Interestingly, some power grids have resisted digitalisation out of concern that new electronics will have unknown fault characteristics that could lead to blackouts. Take this in contrast to railway signalling, which has if anything a more severe fault condition (would you rather be in a train crash or a blackout!) yet digital signalling was enthusiastically adopted by almost all systems.

At least for mains electricity, there is a good argument for using the derived W and the doubly-derived Wh (J / s derives W, W * s, derives Wh). It makes sense because electricity is not (for practical purposes, historically) stored by consumers, only consumed at the time of use.

For virtually all applications, the instant power is of overriding utility: power is how bright your light bulb is, how fast your hairdryer dries, how large a wire is required when building your house. (Since Voltage is constant, this could even be given as Amps!). In addition, most home appliances don't have a meterable output aside from operation time: if your run your lightbulb for an hour, you get an hour of light but that's not really something you can measure. If you run your bicycle for an hour, you've gone somewhere which is a distance you can measure!

Accumulative consumption of electricity is not really important for anything save for billing, so if you all you know is Watts and hours, Wh is a useful unit.

For transmission and distribution networks, even the Watt and Wh are relegated to secondary position, the VA (volt-amp) and VAh are more useful (since Vrms x Arms != Wrms, due to power factor/phase shift). For one bit of infrastructure, the Amps are the most important operational consideration (as V is approximately constant) and reporting as VA is useful to compare with other equipment running at a different voltage.

AN-8 is kerosene, similar to JP-8, but with a lower freezing point specification.

https://erdc-library.erdc.dren.mil/jspui/bitstream/11681/243...

You can't. Starlink satellites are in LEO, not geostationary orbit.

This is definitely an interesting take on tunnelling, but I struggle a little bit to see how this would be either faster or cheaper than conventional methods.

First off you have to buy a load of strong and mechanically complicated robots (expensive), and then many small tunnels to put them in. Drilling these small tunnels won't be that much faster, and certainly no cheaper than one big one, assuming they're using conventional microtunneling equipment (required for the accuracy).

Also, what happens if a robot breaks down mid operation? Are you going to go fishing, or try and send in a human to dig it out? Worst case, you can't do anything and have to revert back to manual digging the whole way. You really don't want a timeline to blow up like that in a real project!

This system has the big advantage that everything is modular, so a bigger tunnel just requires more robot mini-tunnels. Economies of scale should make everything a bit cheaper, especially since the robots and mini-TBMs would be reusable.

Getting geology before you tunnel is also a benefit, but if this was so good, surely tunneling contractors would already do this by sending just one micro-TBM ahead of their main one! What can this system actually do if bad geology is detected? Not much...

Fundamentally the robots don't really solve anything except overcomplicating tunneling. You still have pretty much all the expensive parts (materials, spoil removal, planning, investigatory drilling, sinking shafts, etc) but now with the additional costs and uncertainty of having loads of robots too.

If you asked me to design a lining-first tunneling method, I'd completely ignore robots and try and use existing technology first. Take horizontal directional drilling equipment, make it cheaper and just directionally drill a ring of wells. Pierce the casing at a regular interval, and then fill the whole thing with high pressure grout. No robots needed and this happens everyday, just vertically rather than horizontally.

Well, that issue explains a lot. The data source went missing, so the website just made up some data and used that instead!

That whole website is a nonsense, what's the point in visualising imaginary data and pretending it's real...

The visualisation on that site is good, but it's sadly plauged with data errors. The UK data doesn't seem to correspond to any other source I can find. I think it might be delayed by 24 hours, but even that doesn't seem quite right...

Sadly, in my experience, the apple variety alone doesn't actually have that much bearing on quality (although a red delicious will always be lacking in the second of it's nominative attributes!).

What I've found is a much better predictor of a good apple is freshness. An appple straight off the tree is going to be excellent, but a local apple in season will be just as good. Find out what the apple seasons are in your location, and just buy the fruit that's fresh.

I've never had much luck buying imported apples from New Zealand or anywhere in the southern hemisphere, and varieties suitable for long storage may look good but won't taste it once they come out of the storage bin. So I now only buy apples for about 7 months of the year, when they're actually good. There are lots of other fruit for the rest of the year, and it's such a treat when they come back in season again.

Why care? Stars don't mean anything, save for the few people who organise the software they use by starring it.

Certainly it's not a community owned by the maintainers. I don't own a connection with the people that upvoted this post, and stars mean exactly the same (effectively nothing).

Other commenters have talked about labelling. Maybe labelling of real life data is something they're trying to do; but from my experience with hCaptcha the challenges are _NOT_ real life data. They're AI-generated images which bear a passing resemblance to the targets but if you look closer nothing adds up at all.

Here are a couple of examples:

https://bearbin.net/images/captcha/1.png

https://bearbin.net/images/captcha/2.png

https://bearbin.net/images/captcha/3.png

https://bearbin.net/images/captcha/4.png

As the author, yes. Some parts of the city are innately commercial spaces, and commerce requires advertising. But let it stop at colourful shop signs (even neon is fine, in a shopping centre!), signwritten vans for trades and deliveries, or the circus' sign on the fence of the public park. The badverts are the billboards covering up entire buildings; the LED pedestals that block your way as you walk and distract drivers; and the incessant advertising for unethical investment companies on public transport.

Electrification really is coming along apace! First california bans petrol lawnmowers and generators, now New York bans gas heating. I wrote a blog post on the first topic recently [1] but I guess there really is an impetus for rapid change now. Not that banning new users of gas in one city is going to fix the climate, but it's a start...

[1]: https://bearbin.net/blog/2021/california-is-not-taking-your-...

Ah, uMatrix saved me from that... Reader mode seems to work well on Firefox to stop the redirection as well.

Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20211117171239/https://overemplo...

Is this a window into the brain of the search engine? If it is, these are an exceedingly odd set of results to mark as the most relevant!

Sadly Google does't exhibit the same behaviour, although Bing does (with identical results, highlighting just how much DDG still relies on Bing's whitelabel).

Seemingly as part of the same push, the UKRI announced funding for an open research project I've worked on before: Dr Alex Freeman's Octopus [0], a more radical software platform that splits research projects into smaller components. It's good to see that the openess of research is finally getting to be a priority of the funding bodies.

[0]: https://science-octopus.org/

Anecodtally, street cleaning hasn't changed that much over the pandemic, with the streets being just about as dirty as normal.

That said, over a longer period the main roads near me have been getting quite badly deteriorated due to a lack of responsive maintenance (filling potholes, repair after utility works) and a lacking capital budget for resurfacing. TfL (who has responsibility for maintenance of main roads as well as the city's public transport) has had its overall budget reduced and as road maintenance is not an important issue politically or from a revenue-generation perspective that budget has been reduced to a low level.

During the heavy rains today, I took a walk down the Camberwell New Road (a major road of 2-4 lanes) and the road was completely covered with water in several places, in others the water covered the bus lane, although in some stretches the water was clear.

The sewers were not overwhelmed by the rain, evidenced by the drains that were flowing well and draining, however around 70% of the drains were blocked, 20% by leaves and dirt which I could clear off but 50% blocked internally by silt. A normal maintance schedule involves cleaning the silt out with a lorry-mounted vacuum cleaner several times a year, but this seems not to be done! One drain was blocked by silt after a burst water main about 3 years ago and has not been unblocked since, despite backing up every time it rained and being reported to TfL through their road defect site many times.

However, not all flooding can be blamed on blocked drains, as some sections of the road are incorrectly pitched or have no drains at all and will always pond during rain. This would properly be remedied during heavy resurfacing, but that is also long overdue.