torpfactory

It’s available:

https://insideevs.com/reviews/420126/nissan-leaf-plus-highwa...

But for $43k you could also get a Model 3 SR+...

I think they are not trivial but relatively easy parts of the design. I’m sure they can design support structure to withstand whatever arbitrarily large earthquake you throw at it. The structure doesn’t need to be particularly light or compact so there shouldn’t be any design constraints getting in the way of strength. The heat transfer problem is much much harder and they’ve already solved that apparently.

Just for context, neither of two of the most common food borne bacteria (E. Coli O157:H7 and Salmonella) are killed by typical freezer or refrigerator temperatures.

The Governor of Georgia specifically disallowed mask requirements.

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

It has a manual accessible through the screen, but most people just google it anyways. I certainly did.

Not sure if everyone's familiar what is actually in the Model 3/Y.

- The main mode of use is 'auto' which uses as its feedback sensor the forward facing camera (I think only this location, but not 100% sure about that) located where the rear view mirror attaches to the wind screen. It covers ~75% of my driving without issue. I think there is a problem with that sensor location as the boundary layer gets compressed near the apex of the windscreen, resulting in better mass transport and a drier windscreen than the part the driver looks through. This camera location is thus a laggy indicator of rain because it tends to be one of the driest parts of the car. Personally my experience with the this feature is a good advertisement not to get full self driving yet: If you can only answer the question "Is it raining?" accurately 75% of the time with cameras, you've probably got a long way to go on FSD.

- There is a physical button on the end of the left stalk. You press it to get 'wipe once'. If you need to respond quickly to a sudden burst of rain or the driver next to you goes through a big puddle, you can do that without the touchscreen.

- The physical button push also brings up the wiper control on the touchscreen, which is otherwise behind one (non physical) button which is always on the screen. The touchscreen controls include manual control of wipers on/off/auto and wiper speed.

- There is also voice control which seems to work fine. As with many voice control systems, you have to say a specific phrase, which presents a discovery problem: how do users learn that phrase unless they're the kind of people who search out documentation on the internet. I'd also wager many drivers haven't gotten used to the idea of voice control of car features so they're not well utilized in general.

And for your consideration, my opinion: It works fine most of the time (because I just leave it in auto), but I occasionally need to tap the physical button to get an extra wipe. Sometimes when it is very lightly raining I need to manually set the speed since the feedback system doesn't seem to do a good job in that scenario. The touchscreen feels pretty accurate and responsive, so I've never had trouble hitting the button while in motion. I think Tesla should release a software update to let the user 'double tap' the physical button to force the wipers 'on-high' for the rest of the journey.

We have a friend who is an ER nurse at a hospital on the Central Valley. She had a nasty interaction while buying takeout at a bar in Winters. Another patron said “we don’t need any mask wearing cowards in here” and then proceeded to get physically confrontational until her friend said “are you really going to beat up two nurses over wearing masks” and then he backed off.

What a world we live in.

Same thrust but less mass as the fuel burns up.

That Michael Moore film is pretty terrible and doesn't contain the best available and most recent science. I wouldn't consider it a reliable source.

Wood pellet burning is a temporary distraction and distortion caused by regulation that allows it to be counted as "renewable". I believe you can make a reasonable argument wood burning is carbon neutral. Unfortunately, land used for growing forests of fuel represents a terrible opportunity cost - you could grow food or let the forests absorb atmospheric carbon, provide animal habitat, re-wilding, etc.

However, there is no long-term future in which wood pellets are used for much other than limited residential space heating. Cutting down a forest, processing it into pellets and shipping them half way around the world isn't going to be the cheapest option for bulk power production.

Don't let the foolishness of wood-burning being counted as "renewable" distract you from the broader story of the quickly improving value proposition of solar, wind, and (soon, hopefully) battery storage.

Well considering the progress of Falcon 9 and Dragon relative to the rest of the aerospace world, I’d say they are the adults in the room.

Their development methodology is specifically set up to test a lot of hardware and fail a lot in a bid to go faster than a more modeling or analysis heavy approach.

But if the link is optional (i.e. no storage), it's unlikely the timing works out often enough to justify the increased complexity or cost. (E.g. if the time overlap of water heating AND fridge cooling is 25% (which seems pretty high to me), you'd only get that percentage of the energy savings.

They even beat natural gas on operating cost for many installs these days:

Gas Furnace: 1 Therm = 29.3kWh, Cost $1.5 (at least where I live), Furnace efficiency = 95%. Cost per kWh heat delivered = $0.053.

Heat Pump (COP=5, EER=17): 1 kWh = $0.14, COP =5, Cost per kWh heat delivered = $0.028.

Heat pumps are quite a bit more expensive to install though.

The big issue is timing: hot water, fridge use, and home heating would need to be well synchronized to take advantage of this. I.e. you don't necessarily want to make your fridge colder just because you happen to be heating water. The fridge and temperature is set so your lettuce doesn't freeze and your hamburger says solid. Your water heater turns on because you took a shower. You would need to store the thermal energy (a block of ice, perhaps), but this adds complexity and cost.

The big problem with MVP is that it is now simply one more corporate buzzword. Many using the term may have heard the 30-second description from a colleague and now repeat it freely. Like a game of telephone, what was said and what was heard about MVP keep changing. As such, it has lost most of its meaning and has no firm definition. It's an easy target for a piece like this, given the circumstances.

At least in my organization it had no useful definition. Usually the term MVP would be thrown around by management as reasoning for any number of decisions. Taking too long to understand a core technology limitation - my lucky MVP ball says just get it sort-of working and ship it. Regressing on performance to meet an arbitrary timeline - just make it MVP (in our organization this meant ship on time, no matter the content). Reducing cost by shipping completely untested designs - that's what MVP is. Not that any of these examples couldn't or shouldn't be viewed with the MVP rubric, but it didn't seem to mean anything in particular.

That’s the heart of the original argument I posed on this thread: we really should rush to market because the status quo is quite unsafe.

Speed is an important parameter: you can’t do freeway driving in a golf cart. IMO regular vehicles can be safe enough with appropriate supervision. It’s really once you get to the first runs without safety drivers where your backup goes away. Hopefully that will be only after your intervention rate is zero.

There is a different perspective that you could use (and I’m not necessarily advocating for it; hear me out):

Human driven cars are dangerous to the tune of ~36,000 deaths per year. Every year without the implementation of full self driving we pay some large percentage of that number in lives. Self driving cars won’t make it out of the lab without real driving on real roads in real scenarios. Taking appropriate precautions (a human safety driver, maybe two) and testing in the real world might save more lives overall than keeping the vehicles in a more lab-like setting for longer, and missing some of the complexity of the real thing.

When testing is scarce it is used as a clinical tool to help make decisions about treatment. For example: patient has pneumonia. If its bacterial pneumonia a course of the right kind of antibiotics will be very helpful. If its COVID, those antibiotics won't do anything, and the patient may not get the therapies they really need.

Once testing becomes more available, doctors use it to rule out COVID even on patients who aren't very sick, to help make sure they those patients aren't spreading it, instead of just making treatment decisions.

Ideally once testing capacity gets high enough we could start testing every contact of an infected person, or just randomly sample people.

Point of clarification: Are you saying that there's no way to disprove your claim of being a savior? Or no way to disprove the reaction was disproportionate.?

If you act early, it will always appear you overreacted. If you act too late, well...

https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000007076660/corona...

Yes, but it's not like the 1990 model was massively wrong or something. The (now historical) observations are riding the lower end of the predicted range from 1990, but even the low estimates still predict a 3C temperature rise by the end of the century. All models are wrong and some are useful. Even a 3C rise would be pretty bad. Just because some of the 6 or 7C predictions (high end of range) don't appear to be coming true we should just ignore the rest of the models?

Just a friendly reminder that the consensus estimates about climate change have been reasonably accurate. Not perfect but decent enough as decision making tools. See for example the IPCC report from 1990:

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

There have certainly been very dramatic (all overly well reported) warnings representing a minority of researchers which have not been accurate. These should not invalidate the whole lot of predictions.

One of the key issues in American politics is epistemic. Many voters on the right will not receive any information about just how badly the initial response was bungled. There is a relatively closed media ecosystem of TV, web, and social media which completely blots out truth with conspiracy theories, half truths, lies of omission, or whataboutism.

Many of these people really truly believe they are well informed and also believe themselves to be true patriots. How this dynamic can be changed is beyond me and it is deeply problematic.

My wife is an ER nurse. One of her coworkers recently went through a nasty divorce. Yesterday her estranged husband filed paperwork to get full custody of their child on the grounds that her mother (an ER nurse) could not provide a safe environment due to exposure to CoVID19.

At least in criminal law there is the concept of "necessity". That is, an illegal activity may in certain cases be legal, if it is necessary to prevent serious harm.

Since the manufacturer was unable to supply the part, I would argue that 3D printing it was most certainly a "necessity", at least until either patients stop requiring it, or more parts can be procured.

There are some civil law analogs such as being able to trespass someone else's property in emergency situations.

Yeah I think the issue is that you can be contagious without being symptomatic. I don’t want it on my conscience that I may end up infecting others, even though I personally will probably be fine.

Edit: spelling

My wife is an ER nurse. (West Coast but not California) Kind of wondering if I’m going to have to isolate myself from her just in case. She’s almost surely going to be coming into contact with patients soon.

Starting to get real for sure.

Well it really depends on what you want to do with your satellite. Are you trying to view earth? If so, then inclination and altitude matter, as they will determine what parts of earth’s surface you can see at all. Do you want to take pictures? Then you probably want something sun synchronous so the lighting is reliable. Need to do communication at high latitudes? You’ll want something like a polar orbit. At lower altitudes your orbit will decay faster due to aerodynamic drag.

It’s totally like riding the bus: you wouldn’t typically get off at just any stop and call it good.

Here’s a good YouTube on different types of orbits. Not sure if it covers everything but certainly entertaining:

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