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st26on Utah expands public transportation with rapid bus transit, free until 2021

"Free" is really handy for keeping the service fast & on time though. Not required to be sure, but each rider digging for change takes time. My local bus rapid transit is nominally not-free, but tickets are not checked. It's impressive how fast it is, and that is part of why.

st26on False Advertising for College Is Pretty Much the Norm

There's a presumption, I think, in this scheme that if loans for art majors are less available or attractive, the cost of an art degree will decrease. In which case you'd reach some equilibrium where the loans are not very good, but the cost is not very high, and people would still get art degrees.

st26on False Advertising for College Is Pretty Much the Norm

Purely anecdotal, but I have a friend who went to veterinary school. The school had a literal class teaching all vet students to use IBR forgiveness to get their debt discharged.

It's not quite as abusive as what could have happened when student loans were dischargeable in bankruptcy- it takes 20 years and you're taxed on the forgiveness- but I thought it was quite perverse that the institution charging towering sums of money is teaching the students in blanket fashion how to avoid paying it off.

st26on Energy Saved, Sleep Lost: The Unintended Consequences of LED Lighting

Yes, this is my preferred approach.

Although, care must be taken, as many nominally warm LED's still have a huge amount of blue emissions. For example every Philips colored LED bulb, including red and orange, have a big spike of blue. The only exception is the yellow bulb, which is sold as a bug bulb... In other words, the engineers only chose to control the blue emissions in the one bulb; everything else is default full of blue.

st26on Energy Saved, Sleep Lost: The Unintended Consequences of LED Lighting

What exactly did the study say?

Exposure to blue light suppresses melatonin levels. Melatonin is previously understood to regulate sleep. Ergo, while causation between blue light exposure and sleep quality is not proven, we at least have grounds for suspicion.

What understanding am I missing? What "facts" are being misused?

st26on Energy Saved, Sleep Lost: The Unintended Consequences of LED Lighting

Where's your numbers for that? My local muni operates about 10,000 street lights. If HPS averages 400W apiece, that's 4 megawatts, run for maybe 10 hours a day, at $0.10/kWh that's $4,000 a night...

Now if by "years" you meant "two years", then fine, I can believe it- but two years is still a fantastic payoff period.

Don't forget HPS burns out pretty regularly too. Tactic my muni is using is simply to replace burnt-out HPS with LED instead of repairing it. Lo, after a few years we're probably half LED.

st26on Energy Saved, Sleep Lost: The Unintended Consequences of LED Lighting

Somewhere along the line more light became (in the minds of the public) linearly associated with greater wealth, security, and prosperity.

It's cheap now but the perception remains.

st26on Energy Saved, Sleep Lost: The Unintended Consequences of LED Lighting

Given we already know it disrupts melatonin (as well as noctural wildlife), this feels like one of those cases where the burden of proof is on the proponents, before we roll out millions or billions of dollars of LED streetlights around the country.

You know who really stands to benefit the most? The companies that get to sell us blue equipment, and then next sell us replacement blue-filtered equipment when we prove night time blue light is a problem.

The cities that have already installed 5000K or 6500K (aka "daylight") lamps will be the natural experiments.

st26on The Stock Market Is Shrinking

The Elon Musk style private founder is not really a new thing. Plenty of companies have been started & run privately, and in Elon's case there is a strong argument for that- it gives the founder more control of the company which can be necessary for the success of a risky business.

Dell's privatizations comes to mind. It was taken private temporarily, not to hoard all the gains, but to allow a single stakeholder to call all the shots and attempt a turnaround. Now it's going public again.

st26on The Stock Market Is Shrinking

I think the point is if early-stage growth was still part of the stock market, index funds & the like would all perform better for it. The argument is by removing early-stage growth from the market & conducting it privately, the entire open market as a whole is less lucrative.

Even more simply, just imagine how the market might look different if you could invest in a VC. You don't pick startups, you pick a VC- kind of like picking a fund today.

st26on Pilots who risk their lives flying tiny planes over the Atlantic

Your parent mentioned these were planes for a commuter airline. So they were probably pressurized.

st26on Consumer DNA tests revealing misattributed parentage

Although with genetic diseases and child support, genealogy/paternity still matters.

st26on Cheap FPGA Development Boards

A good example of their application is low end oscilloscopes. The heart of the machine is an FPGA running the sampling, DSP, and all the channels. It's very parallel, does a good amount of compute, and also provides lots of arbitrary IO. It's too expensive to spin an ASIC for such a low volume product. A serial processor is orders of magnitude too slow. Not familiar enough with DSP to know why not DSP, possibly too specialized.

st26on Cheap FPGA Development Boards

the development environment UIs look like a toddler was given access to VB6

But does anyone really use the GUI? I was always under the impression nobody, including Xilinx, really cared about the GUI because most commercial projects probably did things headless, invoking the toolchain directly. In other words, it wasn't really meant to be a full time development environment like an IDE.

st26on Cheap FPGA Development Boards

I think the main issue is that using FPGAs is actually doing hardware design, and most people don't want to do hardware design

Half the time FPGA's come up, people ask "which FPGA can I get that has an integrated ARM core". So I suspect you may be on the money.

st26on A Drop of 4 Degrees Made a Big Difference for a Garment Maker's Bottom Line

Putting it in terms of cost & productivity is very clinical, very inhuman, but it's also virtually unassailable. Nobody will argue "We should continue to treat people badly and make less money". So to me it seems like the gold standard result. You don't have to argue ethics, morals, or worry about people cheating. Because you've just made humane treatment of workers economically rational.

st26on Bay Area cities are cracking down on free food at tech companies

It's hard to imagine your local city bus is so unpleasant to be called a dystopian hellscape.

st26on The World Economy Runs on GPS. It Needs a Backup Plan

Presumably you are betting your sextant skills are better than the other guy's.

st26on The Source of Dr Seuss’ Lorax?

Those folks are certainly out there. If The Lorax doesn't fit in your worldview (e.g. "drill baby drill") you concoct some way to write it off.

st26on For One Last Night, Make It a Blockbuster Night

Is that really the problem? Everybody endlessly talks about how Netflix has failed to crack the recommendation nut for something like ten years now. Maybe a smaller, more curated selection will make a comeback, as the pendulum swings away from infinite selection (of mostly garbage).

st26on Finding Water in the Wild

You lose between 1-2L/hr of moderate exercise. To stay fully hydrated and performing well, you would thus probably want to drink 5-10L ish on those hikes, leaning towards the high side if it's hot and arid.

You certainly can get by with less, but that's not the point.

st26on The Joy of Missing Out

That's a really interesting perspective, thank you.

There definitely are some truly unrealistic standards out there, but the unhealthy or impossible are probably a small subset of the images we see these days.

st26on The Joy of Missing Out

Sounds like a real limiter on job & class mobility though.

I mean, sure, go ahead and charge the true cost. But I think artificially limiting mobility has a lot of downsides.

st26on Cancer and mobile phones

My example is pretty simple. An antenna does not radiate only 900MHz. It radiates a distribution, centered around 900MHz. The fall-off is rapid, but there is non-zero power at higher frequencies, and there can also be harmonics. It's just an example, but the point is there could be some hidden effect we're not considering or aware of. It would hardly be the first time we thought we had it all figured out, and whoa hey there, we didn't expect that to happen.

st26on American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

A business is also impacted when it doesn't have its very own stoplight to help people turn into the lot. Thus some cities wind up putting in stoplights every few hundred feet, in some areas.

Congratulations, you've just created an unsolvable traffic light network, and magicked all-day gridlock out of thin air.

This is a multivariate optimization problem. We need to consider the repercussions of heavily over-provisioning parking.

st26on American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

Folks on this board might be familiar with Valco, a mall which has been dying for thirty years. Smack in the middle of Cupertino, which no-one would describe as less-affluent or more-rural.

st26on Cancer and mobile phones

Do we know unequivocally that cell phone radiation never has the same effect as ionizing radiation, or that none whatsoever is produced? What if, just for example, while the average particle/wave is in the radio frequencies, there was some minuscule far-UV or Xray spectral components?

Certainly by first principals of what we know, cell phone radiation should be harmless. But there's always the possibility we don't know something important yet, and given cellular radio's omnipresence, I figure it's worth humoring that possibility.

As for power output, I'm not a modem engineer but it sounds like GSM -> 3G -> 4G has progressively reduced power requirements by improving SNR & playing other tricks. Whereas with 5G, on the surface it sounds like the plan to increase bandwidth & performance is "take 4G and jack the frequency & power", so it's kind of the other direction and then makes sense why so many people are asking questions compared to the rollout of 3G or 4G.

st26on Cancer and mobile phones

Well, they had to jack it up because the experiment (and the rats) would not go on for seventy years. And if the mechanism of action is anything like other types of radiation, risk is proportional to total lifetime exposure, not peak exposure.

st26on Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

Is ProGuard or similar widely used these days? Is it good enough?

There was a parallel trend of some really awesome apps clocking less than 4MB, which I attribute to good tooling. I wonder if Gmail, Facebook, et al have stripping & such turned off, or if they just have huge asset stores?

st26on Having Alzheimer’s at 38 (2015)

Yes, I don't claim the test is useless. But it was an unexpected moral quandary, as my spouse and I are not strict believers in either pro-choice or pro-life.