logfromblammo

Not unless you could somehow bang three of them together at once to get to C-12. That seems unlikely with current technology. We can't even get C-N-O cycle fusion in the dinky little star we live next to.

So that's at least 20 years away from being 20 years away from being 20 years away. And you could just make more alpha particles, anyway. It's not like the universe is short on hydrogen.

Before checking every time, I only read the ingredient list occasionally, usually at home when eating it. I started to notice things, like this progression:

Ingredients: peanuts.

Ingredients: peanuts, peanut oil, salt.

Ingredients: peanuts, hydrogenated vegetable oil (one or more of: peanut oil, palm oil, rapeseed oil, soybean oil, cottonseed oil), salt.

The company might run up against a supply problem, where they have to choose between a bad batch of peanuts or nothing at all, and they choose to remain in business by "remediating" that bad batch. But maybe their sales actually go up, so instead of going back to basics, they keep doing the same thing, but with cheaper oil. I get it. I don't like it, but I get it. You can make more money by trying to eat Jif's or Skippy's lunch than by catering to purity snobs.

Repeat similar scenarios for other brands of other products, every year, across the whole grocery store. Products try to stay competitive by masking inferior base ingredients with added fat, salt, and sugar, then go on to game the ingredients list, to obfuscate the fact that they replaced expensive ingredients with cheaper ones, while simultaneously reducing the package weight and upping the unit price. Those oil palm farmers don't need to worry; peak capitalism has their back. Palm oil use will continue to increase, because the marginal cost of production currently makes it the cheapest of all plant-based oils, at least until oil-algae farming technology matures.

I have been checking every time for several years now.

If, for instance, the jar that says "peanut butter" on the front does not say "Ingredients: peanuts" on the side, I put it back on the shelf and pick up the next one.

You can't trust brands any more, and it makes shopping an arduous and time-wasting chore. Not to mention the stupid little games manufacturers play with the ingredient list for obfuscation's sake, like adding three distinct kinds of sugar so "sugar" doesn't show up as the first ingredient. Or adding 12 different kinds of filler to a crab cake, so that "crab" shows up as the first ingredient.

There was a time when I would have been interested in how such a system came to be, but now I think I have been around long enough to guess that someone was protecting their job, and then either got fired anyway or became technical-architect-for-life.

The ideal is for the company and the candidate to have an equal investment in the process.

If I spend two hours coding some toy project, I expect the company to spend two hours talking to me. Either interviewing or constructive feedback relating to their rejection.

A company that wastes 1000 people's hours and then ghosts 990 of them should be embargoed by some kind of a computing and technology service workers' union. (You know... the folks who can herd CaTS.)

If the company feels justified in wasting a lot of your time in order to save a little of theirs, before the interviews even start, imagine what they will do after hiring.

Yes. The problem with working backwards is that some optical calculations have probability elements. A photon that hits a half-silvered mirror has a 50% chance of (specular) reflecting and a 50% chance of transmitting.

So for ray-tracing, you calculate along both paths and give 50% weight to each. Every time a ray hits a triangle in the scene, the material properties determine how the various components sum up to determine the color of the pixel.

You mentioned markov chains which were trained earlier. Tell me more about that.

My cousin's boyfriend's sister went up to the waterfall, and when they found her body 12 months later--after delivery phase--she had been completely burned out from the inside. And there was this thing... that nobody wanted, that didn't work right, just sitting there next to her. Nobody wanted to touch it. So some guys from the federal government came and picked it up with tongs, and said they'd put it in the Source Control Repository facility out in New Mexico, so it couldn't hurt anybody else.

> "inherently adversarial"

Given that the employer-employee relationship--or indeed any vendor-customer relationship--is already inherently adversarial, and its power balance is skewed in favor of the employer for everyone but the most highly-skilled of laborers, one might naturally expect that laborers might cartelize to improve their bargaining position.

The "us versus them" binary arises as a consequence of typical corporation management structure. One of the best ways to avoid it is by giving the employees an actual stake in the success of the company as a whole. Pay them in stock, or give bonuses based on meeting the company goals. Employees with zero stake are more likely to find any lever they can use to pry more of the value that they provide to the company out of its owners.

There's a point in space that represents the lens of the observer's eye, and a rectangle in space that represents the viewport. This rectangle is divided into pixel-equivalent square areas. For each area, a sampling of one or more rays is drawn from the lens point through the bounds of the area, until it encounters a surface of the scene. At that point, the material rules of the surface might generate another ray for specular reflection, a cone for diffuse reflection, another ray for refraction, and also add the emissive light value from that material. If the specular or diffuse reflections encounter a light source or ambient light, they add some of that light to the pixel-equivalent.

The diffuse cones send out a sampling of rays and attenuate the light from the light source, based on how many of those rays hit it, instead of some other object.

Instead of drawing light onto the scene and calculating how much passes through the viewport to the lens, ray-tracing cheats by working backwards, because photons traveling backward in time follow exactly the same rules as those traveling forward in time. Every photon that can travel backwards in time from the eye to hit a light source must have emanated from a light source with exactly the right direction and polarization to enter the eye. So the only photons calculated are the ones that contribute to the scene as viewed by the eye.

Because they would lose the job to someone who can legally work for less.

The location is an asset. But it's one whose value is largely dependent on the value of other nearby locations, and its connectedness to them. As that is something the owner cannot do much to influence individually, that's more a speculation than an investment.

I don't think the US will even be able to start on a tear-down-and-rebuild attitude until there is already a sufficiency of housing. As it is now, it appears to be in a cycle of new development, then decline, then revitalization, where redevelopment only occurs when property values in a place have already collapsed, and ruined those who weren't able to move before the wave hit.

One could halt immigration--or at least the kind of immigration that most anti-immigration people complain about--in a naive and oversimplified fashion by raising the minimum hourly wage of noncitizen permanent residents to the median annual household income divided by 2000 (~$32/h), raising the minimum hourly wage for temporary residents with a work-permitting visa to 125% of that (~$40/h), and raising the minimum wage of persons without any official immigration status to 150% (~$48/h) of that. In order to get a job that pays less, a person would have to show their visa, residency card, or proof of citizenship. For jobs that pay more, who cares, as long as they support local business and pay taxes?

Don't deport anybody. Don't build a wall. Just make any businesses that hire at lower wages, without first verifying citizenship or immigration status, pay the workers all their back wages.

The economics shape and are shaped by human behavior.

Superman (1978), starring Christopher Reeve.

It involves Superman traveling at faster than c to save the day, rather than breaking a promise made under duress, which makes flunking ethical calculus into a super-vulnerability.

Movies based on comic book characters have come a long way. And even movies based on DC characters have advanced slightly.

The house that the owner lives in is not an asset. It's a durable consumer good.

Wanting your home to appreciate in value forever is like expecting your 20-year-old car to sell for more than its sticker price. It really only works for art installations, created by a collaboration of architect, engineer, and builder, with some living space inside.

Framed in these terms, most families do not have any significant assets, and a hefty chunk of their resources dedicated to maintaining their gigantic shelter-providing consumer appliance.

Not exactly. They put the parking in the back. Or the center. Or whatever. Somewhere you can't see it right away.

It's different. Better! Because this way if you put the strip malls across the street from each other, it's like one double-wide strip mall, instead of two separate strip malls with a double-size parking lot in between.

I guess it's not strictly necessary to keep the car traffic between the malls, but that way, you can reduce the speed limit to 15 mph and then still hit pedestrians trying to cross. Fun!

This sort of development is crying out for a big parking garage near the highway, and an automated train to shuttle people between the parking structure and the walkable/bicyclable city core.

That, along with commercial-under and residential-over vertical zoning, is the bridge we need between traditional suburban sprawl and walkable cities. You can't walk around if you can't get there, and you won't want to stay if you can't leave.

Airliner aircraft burn more fuel closer to the ground, at takeoff and landing, and less fuel at cruising altitude, where the air resistance is less. On shorter trips, the proportion of the trip spent at lower altitudes is greater. Some flights might not reach optimal cruising altitude at all.

One can adjust the flight profile for maximum fuel efficiency, but this tends to be uncomfortable for the passengers and crew, and it takes longer to reach the destination. Most US passenger airlines don't do that, but military and cargo carriers will.

That aside, some portion of the fuel is spent continuously keeping the weight of the aircraft aloft, and with ground vehicles, the equivalent expenditure is the rolling resistance of the tires. Furthermore, an airliner plane tends to carry all the fuel it needs for the entire flight on takeoff, which translates to additional weight, whereas the ground vehicle can refuel enroute at a truck stop or gas station. Some aircraft can refuel in flight, but another plane has to carry it up there and maneuver it into place. A train on electrified rails need not carry any fuel at all.

So to some extent, it depends on the ground vehicle and the aircraft. In a contest between an ultralight or powered paraglider and a heavy pickup truck towing an RV trailer up in the Rocky Mountains, the flyer might have a lower footprint. But for a trip over flat ground, such as Chicago to Indianapolis or Cincinnati to Cleveland, in a medium-sized hybrid ICE+battery sedan, driving at or below the posted speed limits on US Interstate or Autobahn-like restricted access divided highways, I think the car will win against anything other than a solar-powered lighter-than-air craft.

I haven't done the bar napkin math, so I could be wrong.

In the US, we would probably drive our own cars anywhere within a 250 km (150 mi) radius, which costs about $170 in fuel and vehicle maintenance, and takes about 2 hours each way.

Tax flying in the EU, and people will likely take more trains. Try it in the US, and you're just pushing people back into their cars.

No amount of salary makes you upper class when the class boundary is defined by having passive income sufficient to meet all expenses.

A salary of 2x expenses will put you in the upper class within 22 years (with average market returns), and passive income will fully replace the salary within another 8 years, but until then, that's still middle class.

Basically, if you can afford to invest 1/6 or more of your income, you can make it to upper class within your lifetime, and still have time left to enjoy it.

They are.

I would personally define desalination efficiency of 100% as a perfectly-reversible reaction that establishes an equilibrium between fresh water and oceanic salt water.

Since adding sea salt to fresh water until it has oceanic salinity represents a theoretical maximum of 0.810 Wh/L (a maximally efficient osmotic power plant, situated where a river empties into the ocean, could get about 0.75 Wh/L). So 100% efficiency would be adding 0.810 Wh to one liter of seawater to get one liter of fresh water back. 100% is an unachievable goal, thanks to the laws of thermodynamics.

So to figure your solar desalination efficiency, from a solar panel that receives X Wh/m^2/day of insolation energy, you divide by 0.810 Wh/L to get L/m^2/day. Whatever fresh water you can produce per day, divide by that number to get your efficiency.

An MIT roof gets mean 4.59 kWh/m^2/day of solar energy, so 100% efficiency for them would be 4590/0.810 = 5667 L/m^2/day. By the numbers given, their process is about 2% to 3% efficient (by my definition).

They could be a lot more efficient if they didn't have to overcome the huge heat of vaporization that water has, which is exactly why reverse osmosis is so much more efficient than multistage flash distillation. They are stacking so that the evaporation energy can be recovered from the condensation, which deposits the same amount of energy on the next layer, but it's better off all around to just never evaporate in the first place.

The era of the movie is 2500 AD. To add nearly 3 oceans worth of water in that time frame by cometary bombardment would boil the existing ocean.

The only hard sci-fi explanation is that someone towed Europa to Earth and slowly lowered it down via a cable or pipe. Terraforming by an alien aquatic species. Hyperintelligent space whales.

Given the increasing popularity of 500 mL and 1 L units of bottled water, and the ubiquity of the 2 L HDPE beverage bottle, I think it would have been safe to measure the potable water output in liters. About the only things still sold by whole gallons any more are milk, water, iced tea, and lemonade, in the 1 gal jugs, or water in the 5-gal water-cooler jugs.

I'm more confused by the efficiency numbers exceeding 100%, which seems wrong. A theoretical efficiency of 100% would find the solar irradiance energy of 1 m^2 and then find the volume of fresh water per hour that produces an equal amount of energy when its salinity is increased to the mean salinity of seawater (about 3.5%). So if you can get 5000 Wh/m^2/day from insolation, and the energy difference between salt and fresh water is 0.810 W * h/L, 100% efficiency would be a 1 m^2 area producing 6173 L/day of fresh water. You're just dividing the daily energy of sunlight on your panel in Watt-hours by that 0.810, to get L/day.

The units in the article are all wrong anyway. They say "a rate of 5.78 liters per square meter", but there is no time factor mentioned whatsoever. An MIT roof gets mean 4.59 kWh/m^2/day of solar energy, so 100% efficiency would be 4590 * 1000/810 = 5667 L/m^2/day (1 m^3 = 1000 L). If the number given was per day, that's 0.1% efficient. If it's per hour, that's 2.4% efficient.

Given the agricultural issues in that movie, perhaps the purification device was intended more to collect and concentrate the urea than to purify the water.

But that assumes the scriptwriter would have thought of that, which may be a stretch, given that Earth has insufficient water to cover all landmasses to a depth of 7 km. That would require about 3.6 billion cubic kilometers more water than already exists in the oceans, and there are only about 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of water on Earth to begin with, . Certainly there isn't that much locked up in glacial ice. That is only 26.5 million km^3, which is enough to raise sea level by a maximum of 52 m, far short of the 8 km it would take to cover everything but Mt. Everest.

Anyone who would skip that bar-napkin math was probably only putting that scene in specifically for the gross-out factor. It's just like Mad Max eating the can of dog food. Which is an apples-to-apples comparison, because Waterworld was written specifically to be an ersatz Mad Max.

I worked in a place that called it "spiral". Because they did the phases of waterfall over and over again, until finally drilling down through the roof of Hell.

Yes, it was horrible.

Yes, it got worse when they added the mandatory omnibus all-hands standup scheduled for 8:45-9:00 every morning, that always somehow lasted until at least 9:30, because everyone was continually justifying their existence.

And it was redundant with the spreadsheets that recorded the time spent on any particular task, down to the second.

That's what I was thinking of. They laminated a reflective material under a thin sheet that had a particular absorption spectrum, with a thermally conductive bond, and put fused silica on top of it to protect against weather.

Laser-etching of normally reflective metals makes the material less complex. For one, you don't have to match thermal expansion coefficients any more.

The night-sky radiative cooling concept is thousands of years old-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhchal --but we have better materials now. India and Persia made ice by filling shallow trays with water, insulating them underneath with straw, and exposing the water to a calm, clear, night sky.

They might want people to be afraid that if they don't pay their bills, they might die. Since the threat of debtors' prison is no longer viable, I guess.

Moves like this erode my opposition to nationalizing the entire US health-care sector. If they're going to cartelize or confederate, patients--which is to say everyone in the country that lives and breathes--will also want a seat at the table.

From a more generous perspective, this may be a tool for price discrimination. Hospitals will charge based on what they think the patient can pay, rather than the actual costs of providing the care. When you receive care, you will be billed for a number that is calculated to make you sigh, flinch, or wince, but not call a bankruptcy lawyer.

This is a symptom of illness in the system, and leaving it untreated seems like a bad idea.

Materials that are perfectly black in visible and near-infrared light, and mirrors in thermal infrared would be naturally warm. Materials that are mirrors in visible light and perfectly black in far infrared would be naturally cool.

If you paired those materials, you could collect solar energy on the hot end, and radiate thermal energy into empty space on the cool end, and put a Stirling engine between them. Then you have a heat engine that does not dump its waste heat into the atmosphere. At the theoretical limit, that means your passively-radiating cool end can approach 3 K, instead of 300 K.

So you take a huge polished stainless steel dome, and etch the outside to be black at visible and near-infrared wavelengths, from 200 nm to 8000 nm, and you take some smaller domes, etch them to be black between 8000 nm and 14000 nm, and put them at the focal points of some parabolic reflectors, all in the shadow of the first dome, aimed at empty space. (8000 nm to 14000 nm is the "infrared window", where the atmosphere is mostly transparent to those wavelengths.)

Or absorbs at visible light frequencies and reflects at lower thermal infrared frequencies.

Until the object starts to glow red-hot, it will have low radiative losses. Once it gets that hot--maybe 3000K--it will radiate very well, until cooling enough to radiate mostly at the longer reflective wavelengths.

> "...etching a full-color photograph of a family into the refrigerator door; or proposing with a gold engagement ring that matches the color of your fiancee’s blue eyes."

Yeah... they should have stopped at car colors.