apcragg

Those would be OCXOs. TXCOs are just temperature compensated.

Funny timing that they are announcing their first product days after Matt Levine highlighted their lack of a public product or direction in the Money Stuff newsletter.

AAL578 flew by Tom's River (Bay Shore area, where the photos were taken) around 20:43 on December 8th which is right when the photos were taking, on a heading that would result in an observing on the ground looking at the port side of the aircraft, just as seen in the picture.

6 and 7. If you squint and lean on a bit of confirmation bias, photo 9 looks like a commercial airliner with the Alaska Airlines livery.

The photos I've seen posted look very obviously like commercial airliners and helicopters with their navigation lights on. You can even make out the American Airlines livery on the tail!

https://www.app.com/story/news/local/new-jersey/2024/12/11/d...

They almost certainly had flight spares but with two weeks until your launch window, there is zero chance you are deintegrating multiple systems, swapping in the spare, reintegrating, and re running your acceptance test campaigns. And that is assuming that they damaged a subsystem. Back powering the entire spacecraft could have wrecked your power system and anything connected to it. You'd have to disposition every part of the system that was touched. It's much more involved than just swapping in the spare and sending it.

Marc Reisner's book Cadillac Desert talked about this as far back as 1986.

Absolutely! I enjoy my daily routine and all of the nuances associated with it (whether that's just the result of addiction is a different conversation). I was just suggesting that the parent comment doesn't need to use coffee for their caffeine fix if they don't enjoy it.

It sounds like you'd be better served by caffeine pills then. No need to bother with a delivery mechanism you don't enjoy when there are easier solutions out there!

The UC Health system serves the general public through direct services and their research and teaching functions.

Efficient doesn't really mean anything without an thorough understanding of the local energy grid. Distributed solar mixed with wind and some gas peakers? Sure, probably better from a GhG perspective to use restive heat, even if it isn't cheaper cost wise. Running your house on a coal heavy grid with long transmission lines? Yeah, gas is probably better in the short to medium term unless you can get a good deal on solar panels and storage.

All of that's kinda moot though since modern heat pumps are insanely effective, relatively cheap to install, and work down to sub-zero Fahrenheit temperatures using only air-source exchangers.

That's very much not true about heaters. The most common systems in the US are gas, heat pumps, and oil. Resistive heat is nearly always an emergency backup in places that get meaningfully cold for any amount of time.

"sure, my house's foundation is made of cardboard, but have you considered that the empire state building could also be destroyed in a large enough earthquake?"

Pistachios and Almonds use 4x less acreage than Alfalfa, hay, clover, etc. These feed and grazing crops use almost exactly equal acre-feet of water per acre as pistachios and almonds. It's a convenient direction to finger point at if you want to distract from the impact of animal feed agriculture.

https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/PDFs/2020_Ag_Stats_Review...

For sure! Even Buy-and-dry schemes seem to be struggling with political backlash and those landowners are being fairly compensated in voluntary transactions. It's not going to be pretty when the junior water rights holders are cut off for good.

There is plenty of water in the south west, we just use most of it to grow animal feed in the desert. Even worst, much of that water is subsidized by the US Government which allows farmers to grow that animal feed in the high plains where it would be economically infeasible otherwise. We have engineered this problem to the benefit of a small number of ranchers and farmers and seem determined to blame it on everybody else.

I'm also not convinced that they're even out of Far-field. That looks like a roughly 5m dish, which at 10GHz is still in the radiating near field at 1km. I wouldn't be surprised if the main lobe is entirely incident on receiving aperture. That's a neat demo but it does not demonstrate truly radiating power between two distant points. They've essentially built a fancy a wireless cellphone charger.

60% is also almost certainly not total system. A portable antenna like that by itself, with no path loss or other losses, would likely have an aperture efficiency of about 60%. A planar patch antenna like the one used to receive would be similar.

Less that its so common, more that a small percent of people cause all of that pollution. They usually convince themselves they are being environmentally friendly because "I just use the wood I already have from my land!!" And the rest of us suffer their refusal to use a modern heating source.

The stoves just put off a lot of particulate pollution. Stoves don't completely combust the wood or do so at the wrong temperature which results in much more pollution than burning an equivalent energy amount gas.

As someone who suffers through winter smog caused by people in my county heating their homes with wood, please please please use a modern efficient heating source instead of this neopasotral quackery.

Both of those lines have no citation so while I wouldn't doubt it, that page seems unreliable.

The USSF hosts Hack-a-sat at DEFCON! See here for details! https://www.hackasat.com/

That doesn't sound like a scam? Frustrating if you're shopping, but not a scam.

The author blames this on management pressure and deadline acceleration but it seems to me that they made an incredibly obvious and negligent mistake and is trying to pass the buck.

I bet this is the first use of large scale desalination. It already takes huge amounts of power to pump the water over the mountains to L.A. so reducing that load could make the desalination power requirements more palatable.

Not to mention that we'd need to pump those millions of acre-feet uphill into the various agricultural regions. Some are lower lying but if California is serious about its GHG targets, it won't be building the massive power stations required to pump all of that water in addition to desalinating it.

Yeah and on top of that many of them had their loan interest federally subsidized to build out their private infrastructure. The original 160 acre limit per farm of the 1902 Reclamation Act at least made sense in this context. Despite that, many of the multi-millionaire farmers flaunt that rule entirely even with it being raised to 960 acres in 1982.

Sure, but it will help some. There is no silver bullet for solving our water resource problems. It is going to take a massive patchwork of partial solutions to even approach something resembling a solution. Balking at small changes is a sure way to ensure that we never make progress. In the post-script of the 2016 update to the book, Cadillac Desert, Mark Reisner makes the point that during the time L.A. County's population increased 40%, it's water usage remained constant due to it's water conservation efforts. That is huge not just for water resources but also CA's greenhouse gas targets. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to pump water from the Delta down to southern California and over the mountain ranges that encircle Los Angels.

Given how many of them receive absurdly subsidized water from the Bureau of Reclamation, I'm going to say no. Take Arizona, where the already subsidized (though not nearly as much as some BOR water projects) cost is ~$200 per Acre-foot from the Colorado River (via the Central Arizona Project) compared to the $2200 per Acre-foot price of Desalination water.

Desalination plants are vastly more expensive than current water conservation solutions. Solving a problem with tech is sexy, especially on HN, but simple programs like canal lining and drip irrigation are much cost effective for now. It's not a forever solution, but conserving water resources will take a patchwork of half-measures and incremental progress. There does not appear to be a silver bullet.