leguminous

Maybe someone with more local knowledge can correct me, but I am under the impression that most homes in Sweden, Finland, and Norway are made out of wood.

They, like Canada, have a convenient source of wood in the boreal forests.

My apartment building forced us into Charter/Spectrum "community wifi" and it's obnoxious. The speed is actually decent but they screw around with the traffic.

* Everyone is NATed. There's no option to upgrade to a dedicated IP address if this is a problem. STUN works, but some things don't. Nintendo Switch online play doesn't work and I haven't dug in to figure out why. They know it doesn't work and have said that they won't fix it.

* They intercept all (UDP/53) DNS queries. You can change your DNS servers and it won't make a difference because they will spoof 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 or whatever in response. They'll even spoof root servers, so you can get strange things like a "root server" serving you an A record for pages.github.com.

* Of course there is no IPv6 support.

* Everyone is on the same ESSID with the same PSK. I suspect someone could sniff their neighbors' traffic if they were motivated enough.

It would be nice to have some competition here.

I find it fascinating that many of these instruments did not exist in their modern forms until around the same period. Playing clarinet in school, I had never really considered that our instruments weren't necessarily the same as the ones a piece had been composed for.

* The development of airtight pads for the clarinet in 1812 allowed manufacturers to add more keys, culminating in the modern Boehm system in 1839. The earlier clarinets looked like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3NCGSvKHCQ

* Between around 1800-1850, the piano gained the cast iron plate, stronger steel wires, and the double escapement action. 88 keys weren't common until the latter part of the century. Earlier pianos (fortepianos) looked like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ef95BZfYcw

* Antonio de Torres is credited with developing the modern classical guitar starting in the 1850's. Steel string guitars were developed later, and were made commercially by Gibson and Martin starting in the 1920's.

I also played the clarinet in school, took piano lessons at home, and am currently learning guitar. Great choices!

> Mouse, keyboard, screen. Those are the things that should run at high priority. Everything else can - quite literally - wait.

I might add audio to this list.

The same thing happened to me. And I was trying to sign up/log in to Instagram through Facebook. Why am I allowed to log in to and use my Facebook account but not allowed to sign up for Instagram using my Facebook account? If they thought I was a bot or fraudulent user then surely they'd have the same concern about my Facebook account? It doesn't make any sense.

The doctors in my fiancée's department (ophthalmology and optometry at a major state university) have been officially prohibited from wearing masks, even if they provided a mask themselves. They are right in front of all of their patients' faces.

There's the one true plug system, IEC 60906-1:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60906-1

It's also a fascinating example of standards proliferation (https://xkcd.com/927/).

The article focuses on China, but people in America are buying some of this stuff, too. Some (mostly boutique) American guitar manufacturers offer mammoth ivory parts.

It's kind of depressing how many ethically challenging materials are used in musical instruments and how little buyers seem to care about it. Or rather, how little buyers seem to care about the ethical problems--exotic (and often endangered) materials are seen as highly desirable.

> Until this year only Tesla had that tech

The Chevy Bolt (released for the 2017 model year) has a battery cooler and heater. If I recall correctly, the Volt (even older) had a similar system.

Grease spots from food? I can usually get those out in the wash. I apply detergent directly to the spot and rub it in a bit. Then I let it sit for a while (a few hours, overnight, whatever) before putting it into the wash like normal.

Modern detergents are amazing. I once spilled cooking oil directly onto some cotton shorts and they came out fine.

Economists love carbon taxes, in general. Economists on both sides of the political spectrum largely seem to agree that a carbon tax is a good idea and could be an effective way to limit climate change.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/economists-statement-on-carbon-...

It seems to me that economists are on board. It's politicians who aren't.

> There's yet to be a popular race (6 majors, olympics, world championship, even regular "city marathons" etc.) where there's an overall female winner [...]

It wasn't a major city race and probably had a lot of casual runners, but I ran a half marathon earlier this year with around 20,000 participants. A woman won the overall in 1:18:30.

The people who are good at this are just so much better at it than the average person. A fast woman, even if she isn't faster than the fastest men, will still be faster than 99.9+% of them.

They still have intakes and radiators, maybe just not quite as large. Plus it seems to be stylish to put giant grilles and even fake vents on some cars nowadays.

Here's a great video showing the Chevy Bolt's cooling and heating systems:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_ILkLUE3Zxc

This channel has some awesome, in-depth videos. There is a whole series going over the Bolt's components, including the drive unit and battery.

I find Turkish lentil soups to be pretty easy to make:

https://ozlemsturkishtable.com/2010/11/hearty-red-lentil-sou... https://ozlemsturkishtable.com/2010/09/hearty-and-spicy-red-...

If you don't use chicken stock there isn't much of an umami component. That doesn't really bother me, but Better Than Bouillon or just a bit of Marmite can give it a little umami boost.

Indian dals can pretty easy as well (if you consider them to be soup). The simplest don't need much more than cumin and mustard seeds, which I wouldn't call exotic. There are a huge variety of them and obviously they can get much more complex.

On the slightly more complex side, I also like vegetarian chili and Tuscan white bean soup. I think chili tastes better using whole dried peppers, but if you have chili powder you can throw it together much more quickly.

My guess is that Canon is afraid of cannibalizing sales of their cinema cameras, like the C300.

Panasonic and Sony don't seem as worried about cannibalizing theirs, which might be a better strategy in the long run. Fuji and Nikon don't sell cinema cameras, so they have no incentive not to move fast on adding video features to their (previously) still cameras.

Most professional mics have XLR connectors. Condenser mics require phantom power as well (unless they are battery-powered) which a "normal" 3.5mm audio jack will not provide.

The article references energy efficiency regulations specifically. Is the energy code in California significantly stricter than the IECC?

There are nice aspects of energy codes. For one thing, potential renters and buyers have little insight into how efficient a house or apartment really is. Since landlords and builders aren't paying the utility bills they are incentivized to reduce upfront construction costs at the cost of higher utility bills (and environmental damage) going forward.

If these codes are effective then they might be worth the increased construction costs. I'm not necessarily saying that they are (I don't know, maybe California's code is filled with frivolous, ineffective details; the article doesn't really give any examples) but I think just the fact that they increase upfront costs doesn't actually mean they aren't a good idea.

There are vegetarian/vegan burgers available with fewer calories, often containing more beans or vegetables. They've been available for longer than the Impossible or Beyond burgers without gaining nearly as much public mindshare. A random example sold at my local grocery store:

http://drpraegers.com/our-food/california-veggie-burgers/ Ingredients: Carrots, Onions, String Beans, Oat Bran, Soybeans, Zucchini, Expeller Pressed Canola Oil, Peas, Broccoli, Corn, Soy Flour, Spinach, Red Peppers, Arrowroot Powder, Corn Starch, Garlic, Corn Meal, Sea Salt, Spices

They don't taste or feel like burgers, though. It seems that the products that taste like burgers (which require more fat and won't accommodate stuff like carrots and broccoli) are the ones that appeal to a larger market.

This is one of the nice side effects of the air-sealing requirements in modern building codes. The more airtight your building is, the fewer entry points there are for pests.

Just to clarify, because I assume there is a misunderstanding here: HVAC stands for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. I assume pretty much everyone in Paris has heat, since it gets below 5C in the winter.

Here's the original paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09730-9

This is all I saw to address the pressures required:

> Our higher operating pressures do not represent a barrier for applications because they can be generated by a small load in a large volume of material via a pressure-transmitting medium, e.g., using a vessel with a neck containing a driving piston, whose small area is compensated by its distance of travel.

Scanning the original paper linked by _Microft and rmbryan, it looks like the pressures the researchers used were very high, 0.25-0.5GPa. Maybe someone with more domain-specific knowledge can answer this: are such high pressures actually practical? My understanding is that one of the reasons R-744 (CO2) is not more common is that it requires high pressures, which means specialized equipment. But the pressures involved here seem to be an order of magnitude higher even than required with R-744.

You sometimes need to be careful, depending on climate and construction specifics, what sort of paints you apply to the walls in modern buildings. Using vapor-closed paints (or worse, vinyl wallpaper) will not allow the drywall to dry to the interior and can result in mold and mildew growth.

I don't know the characteristics of acrylic artists' paint, but there might be reason to be careful.

One thing I've also been wondering about is if repainting every other year, even with vapor-open paints, would have a similar effect. So many rental properties just end up with layers and layers of paint.

That's a 30-year old building in Atlantic City, though. The building itself will have depreciated since then, and Atlantic City isn't a very desirable area any more. The current prices won't necessarily reflect the original construction costs.

There are some actual numbers in this Fannie Mae commentary:

http://www.fanniemae.com/resources/file/research/emma/pdf/MF...

The average costs to build 1-3 and 4-7 story apartment buildings was $192.0/ft^2 in 2017, compared to $233/ft^2 for 8-24 story buildings. I assume the square footage includes common spaces. I don't know if they attempted to control for sample biases (e.g. if taller buildings tend to be build in areas with higher labor costs).

As you build up, the construction costs (and ongoing maintenance costs) per square foot of livable space can increase significantly, though. You need more engineering, more expensive materials, fancy cranes, extra safety procedures, etc. Plus more of the potentially livable floor space is instead taken up by elevator shafts and machinery.

Disclosure: I'm a software dev, but my fiancée is an optometrist.

There are already machines (called autorefractors) that can try to calculate your prescription. They operate on more complex principles than flipping lenses back and forth. They can provide a good starting point, but sometimes they aren't accurate.

A good optometrist can do a lot more than just give you your prescription, though. They should be checking your eyes for signs of disease, and treating things that they find. Seeing an optometrist for a checkup is preventative medicine, like regularly seeing a primary care physician or a dentist.

> In modern houses the solution is to have an airtight layer of plastic sheeting between the insulation and drywall [...]

In a building that will be air conditioned, putting plastic sheeting between the insulation and drywall is a bad idea. The problem is that any moisture in the (comparatively warmer) insulation cavity will condense on the (comparatively cooler) plastic sheeting, wetting out the insulation and causing mold and rot. They also prevent the wall from drying to the inside.

It works fine in cold climates that are do not install air conditioning, as I assume is the case in Finland. In the majority of the US, even up to the Canadian border, many new houses have AC.

https://www.buildingscience.com/documents/digests/bsd-106-un...

You can actually get your home Energy Star certified.

https://www.energystar.gov/newhomes

Some states have even offered tax credits for doing so.

At least in the US, blower door testing:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blower_door

A handful of US states have also made blower door testing mandatory in new homes, but we still have a long way to go. A few states don't even have state-wide building codes, much less efficiency requirements.