icegreentea

Even though some of these are pretty old, they look fascinating. The human imagination is really something. That skyscraper bridge would look so badass in real life!

I have a N5 (ya...), and I've found that somedays I'll be getting ready to go home from the office (where I sit like 20ft from a WiFi AP), and find my phone down to ~20-30% battery life - and a quick look at battery stats will happily tell me that my WiFi somehow used up like 50% of my battery. I have no idea whats going on with that... sometimes I can notice while I'm using the phone doing some pretty low power stuff (playing some music...) that the back will just start getting hot. Andddd there I go turning off my WiFi. I have no idea how much this is helping, but I certainly feel dumb having to baby my smartphone like this.

Thats because you have enough thermal mass and evaporative cooling capacity to withstand those temperatures for a short period of time - ie, very little of your body will experience drastically elevated temperatures for long - if at all. Remember that air (even humid air) is not a super great heat conductor - so while the air might be very hot, it's going to be pretty bad transferring that into your body, which in turn has a lot of mass to distrube heat over, and good conductivity to move heat away from contact areas. And that whole sweat thing works pretty well too (especially in a dry sauna).

Being submerged into a 90 degree water bath will probably rapidly hideously wound you and/or kill you.

I wouldn't use 'probably' at all. The level of proof submitted is incredibly light - it only inspects two and a half proteins - and doesn't attempt to inspect the relationship between its proposed mechanism (change in hydration shell density) and protein denaturation.

They show two graphs of protein denaturation curves showing maximum rate change in 50-65 degree range, and a curve of a different protein's hydration shell density changing. At the very least, showing correspondence between hydration shell density and denature curves within a single protein would be significantly more convincing.

While protein folding and interaction is devilishy tricky to compute, the basic idea that injecting extra energy into a system thats held together only by weak hydrogen bonds will disrupt structure and function hardly requires invocation of additional forms of water.

This isn't to say that the claims may not be true. But I would not jump to "probably".

In fact, your quoted statement doesn't even say that proteins become less stable, what the quoted statement says is that a SINGLE protein (lysozyme) undergoes irreversible structural changes over 65 degrees.

We know of a variety of high temperature resistant proteins (Taq Polymerase for example). While is certainly true that most "ordinary" (ie non extremopile) proteins will probably suffer irreversible structural changes in about that temperature change, it's not super great proof.

No, its just too expensive, and probably too heavy.

If OP is right (pretty sure he is), he said that by using something completely free (average weight), we were able to achieve like 50+ years of safe operation of largish commercial airliners. That's amazing.

Also, the problem isn't too much weight per se, it's weight distribution.

I mean, most of what North Americans do in their every day life is robbing a child in Africa of... all sorts of things.

Can you clarify what your culture is? And who specifically these out-groups that you worry about are?

I'm not trying to bait you - you're essentially making an argument that relativism in some forms runs into problems when pressed to limits. It's difficult to discuss this without understanding whereabouts you think these limits lie. I don't think anyone can really make an argument about the logical structure of your argument per se, but most will have issues with how you connect various "real world entities" to components of your argument.

In another post I just made an assumption about your beliefs - maybe I was wrong.

Sure. It's just xenophobic.

And since the OP's culture was clearly a white man's culture - a culture that has been relatively slow to accommodate others, in many ways its still a racist, sexist vision - granted one with unusual bluriness at the edges.

Because the story is useless. Story shows that cancer death rate in SF is ~160-200 per 100,000 depending on demographic. Overall US cancer death rate is about 170 per 100,000 (https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics).

The "real" story is SF has a lower rate of death from heart disease (which is the leading national killer) than usual. And for reference, heart disease and cancer nationally are almost neck and neck (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm)

So yeah, it's a useless story.

They are all pluses, but most of those didn't exist till the last couple years. So effectively the first 6 or so years of Python 3 existing had much less incentive.

I think the flip around - ~30% adoption of a newest version at 1-2 years in - especially one that breaks backwards compatibility isn't bad.

I've started numerous python projects at work over the last year all on 2.7. I think we just started the last one. We're finally ready to jump to 3.

You can interpret that statement in any number of ways. That quote originated no later than 1994. The semi-conductor industry then was certainly dominated by men. In that sense, the use of the male gender is surely just a byproduct of its environment - if nearly everyone you work with and compete against is a bunch of dudes, you'd surely end up using masculine pronouns all the time.

Another interesting thing is the entanglement of male personal identity with the corporation. Because men don't actually own fabs - corporations own fabs. Economic/legal entities designed to exploit human labour and creativity own fabs. The very people muttering these statements about real men are doing so while embedding themselves into a matrix of control.

And another way to interpret this - even if a positive vision of masculinity merely includes sufficient self dependence and a capability to provide for others - ie to be free, then this statement is blatantly true. The statement is that people who are truly able to be free are those who own the methods of production - something which the vast majority of men (or people really) in our world do not.

I've found the ftp-sync extension's sftp support adequate for my use so far. I've definitely found full-syncs to be a bit slow when there's a lot of stuff in the folder, but it seems ok so far.

Are they sleeping 3 hours a day every day? Or is that just their average when they get a shitty on-call rotation?

I think both cases are ridiculous, but it's worth separating the two cases.

It's worth noting that many developed world's medical systems have a problem with the acute-chronic gap. Remember that pretty much all systems grew out of acute care - as a result, nearly all of them are quite good at it. But one of the problems with increasingly good acute care, as well as general increase in public health is the rise of chronic care issues.

The sheer inefficiency and ineffectiveness of America's chronic care is not alone. Here in Canada, it's pretty clear that our system strains when put up against chronic care.

There's certainly a lot to fix, but as you've pointed out, doctors are a huge component in the current system that has the change. This points to the fact that somehow we need to engage and get buy in from them.

One of the things that I'm always wary about when reports like this come out is that while they present a wonderful opening into engaging with current stakeholders, it's also very easy to put current stakeholders on the defensive, and have them quickly adopt a us-vs-them mentality, something that certainly is not conducive to change.

Practically no one in the time period you care about thought that the Earth was flat.

Ok, maybe the second paragraph is kinda bunk, but there's still good stuff in the third paragraph.

I mean, the question is 'diversity in the workplace' in western nations pretty much comes down to asking the questions of 'why should your workplace not roughly reflect your hiring pool' and 'why should your hiring pool not roughly reflect your demographics'. There can be good reasons for why either may not the case for specific instances, but unless you can give a good reason, then you're either actively screwing people over, or participating in some sort of systemic activity that's screwing people over.

Not denying the asymmetry of power and actions, but I think calling the relationship as purely "US is bady" is while less wrong than just "Iran is bady", it still pretty wrong, and an honest description of the relationship as "complicated" with both sides doing bad shit is the only way forward.

I think calling the relationship between two countries who do bad shit to each other, but generally don't want to have to do bad shit to each other (if nothing else because it distracts them from other issues, or cause bad shit includes getting your own economy starved) as "complicated" is okay.

Thats because the US Navy has two rear admiral ranks. The lower rear admiral is a 1 star officer and is equivalent to commodores in other navys. The upper rear admiral is a 2 star officer is equivalent to "normal" rear admirals in most other navies.

Intel will probably end of spinning this as the first (more impressive) set of numbers being estimates of the potential limits of the new technology.

Almost certainly those nice round numbers came from some engineers (or more likely, engineering manager) being pressured for 'long term performance estimates of the technology', coming up with something that seemed plausible, and then wrapped up nicely into a marketing presentation.

Or, it might be that intel actually did have something approaching each of those three claims - in three separate embodiments of the product, and is running into problems combining the traits together.

In all cases, I feel for the Intel engineers working on this project right now. Probably all cursing that original reveal.

It appears that once you remove the g-load, recovery is relatively fast (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16696261)

In the field of materials and fabrication? Not that much. Fundamentally, the problem is that for many of the problems that we consider interesting in materials or fabrication, meaningful analogs to say.. the Navier Stokes equations don't even exist.

In the field of fluid and thermodynamics? Probably quite a bit. This is why I tried to emphasize the materials and fabrication bit.

The Air Force requested the ability for the shuttle to take off from Vandenburg Airforce Base, go into polar orbit, and then land back at Vandenburg at the end of that one orbit. This required that the Shuttle have ~1000nm of cross range (that is that once it deorbits, it needed to deviate from its ballistic path by 1000nm). This required big ass wings (which the shuttle got).

The Airforce also helped drive the payload (weight and dimension) requirements, but I feel that this is secondary to the cross-range requirement.

Well, they've almost certainly been trying that. And as the OP said, it hasn't been paying off in a big way. If they've been doing it (I'm guessing they have), then they've probably benefitted, just not enough for the big win.

Once you get into materials and fabrication, having a finished example to examine is rarely going to lead to a big win. If the secret sauce is in the fabrication (HOW do you make a single crystal blade? HOW do you inflate corrugated titanium? HOW do get this type of grain structure with this nickel-iron-manganese mix? HOW do you get a laser weld in this impossible again?), then a single example isn't -THAT- useful.

Reversing engineering a modern turbofan(remember, the basic principles of turbofans are well known) is more akin to reverse engineering Intel's fab process by peaking at a finished i7 (with AFM and electron microscopes) than reverse engineering say... a sensor fusion module once you get the assembly code.

Which is why the technology transfer associated with the engine deal is a big deal. It should (I mean, its possible that the terms are all fucked up) give the Chinese an oppourtunity to learn all of these hows and whys (albeit for a slightly dated design, but still a relatively modern one).

Should probably begin by saying that there's no fundemental reason why China could not eventually develop their own modern turbofans without outside assistance. But obviously now is better for China.

Designing and building modern turbofan engines is incredibly dependent on your mastery of materials science and fabrication. These are areas of science and engineering that are notoriously "art like" or even "black magic like". The accrued knowledge that sits in Rolls-Royce or GE or Pratt-Witney don't really exist in textbooks, and they aren't taught in classes either. This knowledge and know how was generated over 60 years of trial and error, and are jealously guarded, not just by the manufacturers, but also by their governments.

Things to consider: modern turbine blades are already pushing the absolute edge of lightweight-temperature resistant materials. And then modern designs will run these blades at temperatures that are nominally above the material failure point, because we've come up with ways to cool the structures. Oh, and the temperature resistant alloys in use? Secret. Empirically determined, and likely unique.

shrug it's honestly going to be a bit hard to compare. But for a rough guess, the AN-225 can lift like 300,000kg, and the AN-124 (from which its derived from) can lift like 230,000kg. The AN-225 has 6 of the same engines that the AN-124 has, so naively assuming roughly the same fuel use, the lift ratio is ~ 1.34 to 1 and the fuel use ratio is ~ 1.5 to 1. And the AN-124 is sufficiently cheap to operate to be in use commercially.

So by those rough guesses, the AN-225 should be ok.

That said, the moment you have a too heavy, or too big load for an AN-124, then the extra fuel cost of the AN-225 has almost infinite value.

The drawbacks to scale always have to do with complexity, and ground infrastructure. The AN-225 can't operate from as wide a variety of fields that the AN-124 can (though this shouldn't be a huge concern from commercial use).

Structurally, the modifications from the AN-124 to AN-225 aren't super complex. They basically added plugs before and after the wings to extend the fuselage, and added a wing extension. While these aren't trivial changes to an aircraft, they're basically the simplest type of structural change you can make. Oh, I guess there's a tail modification, but that's not that risky either.

I mean I guess the point is that you probaly would not want a whole-scale replacement of AN-124 class lifters with AN-225, but keeping a few around enables entire types of lifts (and therefore operations) that simply aren't possible. The key would be to estimate what the appropriate amount of AN-225 are.

For an example, the famous Beluga Airbus enables a form of manufacturing distribution (for good or for bad) that simply isn't possible without it existing. You would never want a giant fleet of Beluga, but having it is invaluable.

Something to take note of was that analog systems could drive far more power than solid state systems at that time, especially given the USSR's relative backwardness in solid state electronics. It really is worth noting how montrously powerful that MiG 25's radar is. It could pump out 600kW. Western fighter radars top out in the low 10s of kW. (they went with raw power to burn through jamming).

I think the whole EMP robustness thing is overplayed everytime something like this pops up - I think that at most the EMP robustness is just a side benefit to the analog systems.

True, but they really should have taken the care to clarify that this is also suppose to be the new normal. Kind of sloppy otherwise.

C3 and C4 refer to different methods of photosynthesis. C4 confers advantages in sub optimal conditions - the most obvious form is growing in conditions of water stress.

Study authors show through a whole pile of methods that the grain part of wheat uses C4 like photosynthesis while the rest of the plant uses C3 (we previously had always just classified wheat as C3).

This is an additional piece of evidence that falls inline with a large spectrum of previous evidence pointing to relatively complex distribution of the spectrum of C3 to C4 traits. Other cases include finding C3 mechanisms in use in the leafs of the ears of corn (a C4 plant).

Authors end with the suggestion that since the C4-like genes are already present, it would then be easier to breed and/or engineer wheat varieties to using higher proportion of C4-like photosynthesis.

While the abstract calls out breeding specifically, the discussion calls out genetic manipulation. You can interpret that choice as you will.

Did you go to waterloo? I'm in the exact same boat =P.

I'm currently dual hatted as a system's engineer and software developer, so people are always inadvertently right when they ask me that question.