mchannon

If you're ever going to record an interaction with people who do not want it seen by the masses that they are breaking the law, you need to ensure that you livestream it.

Then you can tell them, "Go ahead, confiscate my phone. Proof of your illegal acts have already left the building, and the country."

During 1998-2000, AOL was ordering so many free trial CDs that it locked up world production, and music CDs faced 8-12 week delays. It was rumored that certain weeks there were no albums getting fabricated at all, worldwide.

I wonder if history isn’t repeating itself. AOL CDs had pretty much jumped the shark by 2000.

In 1987, Paul Verhoeven predicted exactly this in the original Robocop.

ED-209 mistakenly viewed a young man as armed, blows him away in the corporate boardroom.

The article even included an homage to:

“Dick, I’m very disappointed in you.”

“It’s just a small glitch.”

Am thinking propane tanks.

Working with those temps probably not appropriate for an office environment, but on a porch or well-ventilated garage, should economically outperform 110V pretty well.

But now we have the “deathbed pardon” or the lame-duck preemptive blanket pardon, popularized by 46.

Break the law all you want, long as the old boss or his successor is happy with you, you can’t be held accountable by the new boss.

The ZT (figure of merit) is an apples-to-apples number for comparing one thermoelectric material set to another. Higher is better.

Bismuth Telluride is the standard and has been for decades. It has a ZT of about 1.3. There have been some breakthroughs to exceed that in a few spots, but with limitations. Most of its competitors still exceed a ZT of 1.

This publication’s material is less than 0.01. Not all that newsworthy, unless I’m missing something.

Having read the same book (while on the fourth floor of MDC Brooklyn of all places) I believe the conclusion I read was that they were trying to make it all work with one drop, which was impossible, because of the number of tests they were promising and the low solute concentrations some of those tests had to work with.

But there's a wide gulf between a drop and a 20mL vial. Requiring three drops and claiming half the battery of tests would still be a substantial improvement. That's what they should've done. And I think this new startup can do that.

I interviewed with Theranos toward the very end. I have never been in a place with a bigger show of security, and I've previously worked for years in nuclear weapons laboratories. If this new startup ditches the demonic-possession voice and the arch-military security schtick, and the Wizard of Oz curtain, I might not consider an investment in them as foolhardy as one in Theranos.

Just wow.

I think it's an uncomfortable truth that there was some good in Theranos in terms of the unfulfilled needs of society and the potential of diligent work toward realizing those needs with technology.

I don't know how often it's been said by others, but I often think that Theranos would have had an easier time if they hadn't falsified anything. Faking things takes effort too, and aiming a little lower and being less secretive would have been a better outcome. Maybe a different tack is possible through this reboot.

Mr. Evans' silver spoon is worth $10M, so raising $20M against that in such a fraught area is eye-opening. Whether he sees this as part of Elizabeth's redemption arc or just can't quit the hair of the dog that bit him, I guess we'll see.

Elizabeth Holmes' crime wasn't defrauding people, it was defrauding people richer than her. Change my mind.

Most VC's are taking it in the shorts right now anyway, because they're addicted to free money and there's no more free money, and most of them quite frankly suck at spotting good deals. So for the intrepid souls who cast their lot in with Mr. Evans, maybe only Nixon could go to China, and maybe they'll fare better than the stodgy fat-dumb-and-happy B-tier VC's who are not long for this brave new world anyway.

The devil's always in the details.

I notice they use potassium hydroxide to treat this, and I seriously doubt merely in a catalytic capacity. That means that a lot of electrical input needs to be run into a chlor-alkali plant to make the KOH. If it's just a sprinkling, great. But is it?

Now if you're making moderately valued commodities like sugars or bioreagents, or perhaps even bioplastics, it might be cost-effective in spite of an electrical chlor-alkali input stream.

If you're making biofuels, however, this looks like corn-based ethanol or certain kinds of biodiesel, where there's lots of electrical and petrochemical energy inputs that conveniently get omitted when they tout how great for the environment and home-grown that biofuel energy is. Really hope they're not planning on going the same way with this set of discoveries.

Trackers are useless when the majority of the incoming sunlight is diffuse (as is the case where you live).

Trackers are useful when the majority of the incoming sunlight is direct (America has a mix but the western half and parts of the south have a lot of direct).

Trackers are essential when you use concentrated sunlight.

A tracker that doubles the amount of sunlight hitting a panel is not free, but it also makes the panel take up 2x the area, or more, to avoid shading its neighbor.

The thing people tend to forget about trackers is they offer this trade-off where you can trade shaded area for power per rated panel. When land is cheap and panels (or arrays, heliostats, power towers, etc.) are expensive, trackers make sense.

The reverse has been the case for the past ten years, and continues to get more true by the day. I doubt we will ever see the day return where land is cheap again and/or PV are expensive again.

I've been in solar energy as my primary vocation since the 1990's.

I've built solar cars, I've built solar panels, I've installed solar panels, I've designed solar trackers. I know this industry inside and out.

I'd never heard of an east-west array before (though I did experiment with one-cell-wide "crinolations" at 60 degree angles, did not find any value to using them but it was a different application where low-angle light wasn't a factor). I'd never thought of such an array on this scale, at this low angle, before.

I don't think most of the people reading this article quite understand that this is a completely different kind of array topology to flat-plate fixed-tilt, or tracking-based systems. Do yourself a favor, if you consider yourself intellectually curious, and if you came away from skimming this article thinking there's nothing new under the sun, read it again with a keener eye toward the novelty of it.

It's not sulfur so much as sulfate.

It doesn't always come from mining. A huge problem with acid rock drainage (ARD) showed up when they built a freeway in Pennsylvania by merely exposing the rock.

The concept of making batteries out of drainage because both contain sulfur is like making socks out of cow manure because both contain carbon. There's so much of the latter that you could never use it all, but also the ingredient is dirt cheap in pure form.

I have a side project that could convert ARD into industrial strength sulfuric acid, which is unbelievably difficult to buy and transport, despite it being the most common industrial chemical in the world after water.

I like the site.

Unfortunately for this American, having a different set of standards for mathematical notation tripped a "don't these people know the difference between Hz and kHz?" impulse in my brain.

To illustrate: When an American sees "50,000 Hz" we process it as you would process "50 000 Hz". This misunderstanding could be corrected by using two or four significant figures after the decimal. That's too much to ask though, probably requiring a large number of hours to accommodate someone not even from there.

Your site is fine, it's our brains that are more appropriately adjusted. A little disclaimer link or something would help a number of us understand. A large number of otherwise intelligent and educated Americans don't realize this difference in notation and this would be a great opportunity to educate them.

The contrapositive of which is just because you’re right does not mean you are not crazy.

Fun fact: Sucrose, from our friends cane sugar and beet sugar, is a glucose/dextrose molecule tied to a fructose molecule. And when you digest it, you get the effects of some of each.

Another fun fact: The "H" in HFCS stems from the fact just plain "corn syrup" is defined as 0% fructose. Fast food restaurants push the percentage to 58%+ fructose to turbocharge the sweetest taste in their sodas.

This is the tail wagging the dog.

Jobs' fruitarianism meant he didn't eat eggs, meat, dairy, or other sources of selenium. Fruit doesn't contain selenium. One of Selenium deficiency's side effects, well established in the literature: pancreatic cancer.

I can already type on a QWERTY keyboard way faster than I can think.

That's one reason I haven't adopted a Dvorak habit.

Most court reporters use software nowadays that renders their special stenotype skills obsolete.

That's a completely different thing.

Honey, for instance, has a high glycemic index. Watermelon has a high glycemic index. They will not get you fat the same way cane sugar and watermelon juice will.

A juice made of celery, kale, and spinach, will still have a low glycemic index. But it's still nowhere near as good for you as unprocessed celery, kale, and spinach.

The article name is "Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad for you", the opposite of this thread's title.

Everyone's ignoring the elephant in the room: fiber.

Fiber locks up calories and makes the body miss a lot of them, or absorb them later in the digestion process. If we reduce the word "processed" to a single action, it's removing fiber. It's turning wheat berries into flour. It's ripping off rice husks to make white rice. It's crushing nutritious apples and oranges into sugar water.

Western countries use calories as a metric, and it's a very hackable metric. If I eat 1000 calories of whole oats, a lot of those calories are passing through my body. If I turn those whole oats into oatmeal, fewer are. If I'm McDonald's I'll pulverize them to get all 1000 calories into my health-conscious deluded customer's bloodstream, so they buy more food from me.

Of course you can add 100g of Metamucil fiber to a processed meal, but the original fiber's function was to lock in the sugar, which the new stuff can no longer do. So it doesn't help.

Why are processed foods bad for you? Follow the fiber.

I tried "write me a 5-page EULA for a [$YOURKINDOFBUSINESS] website" on ChatGPT and it looked great.

Do you want this EULA to do anything in particular for you? You could hire an attorney to write one, where they'll use a similar (or in any likelihood inferior) tool, and bill you $5k, and be just as happy to charge you $300/hr. to back it up, as they would to charge you $300/hr. to back up someone else's EULA.

There are some really smart lawyers out there. But most of the ones you'll find aren't adding any value over ChatGPT, they're just really good at sounding like they're one of the few smart lawyers out there.

The writer appears to be under the impression that CO2 is not a valuable commodity.

In fact, it is, so long as it's under enough pressure, and in the right place. In Montezuma County, Colorado, sits the McElmo dome, an ancient underground CO2 well. They pump it out, down a 500 mile pipeline, to Denver City, Texas, where it gooses oil wells into pumping more crude out. Other than making more oil and making it cheaper, not really much in terms of greenhouse gas contributions- the CO2 starts underground and ends up underground.

Kinder Morgan won't just let you back up your truck and buy some (it's already spoken for), and even if they would, they'd expect you to pay a pretty penny for what we widely consider to be waste gas.

I think MIT is doing some good work. Just wanted everyone to be mindful of the massive scale under which CO2 is already getting bought and sold.

Great concept, you have a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem where there's no places to rent and therefore no transactions. How do you see yourself getting past that?

Personal experience. Unlike most, I have been wrongfully convicted on fabricated evidence but never denied insurance coverage.

I strongly encourage you to get in the habit of proofreading your posts for tone. You write with pique, a habit I find familiar, as I used to do the same when I was younger.

It’s not just what you say but how you say it, and tone can either further your contribution or get in the way.

Perhaps it was inadvertent diction, but your use of “imagine” appears to ridicule my opinion. Not cool.

I’ve done time with an individual who got (I believe) wrongfully convicted due to genetic genealogy. A lay jury watches Law and Order, hear “DNA”, and will proverbially buy the Brooklyn Bridge from prosecutors.

Get too unpopular with those in power, and maybe your DNA can be traced to a shell casing for an unsolved assassination a continent away from you.

Annie Dookhan wrongfully convicted thousands upon thousands upon her doctored drug tests. Someone just like her could do it to you or someone else with your DNA test.

There are laws against insurers citing preexisting conditions to deny coverage, and most DNA is equivocal as to whether you’ll develop expensive maladies. So that doesn’t worry me either.

If I was worried I wouldn't have furnished my DNA to a corporation with very little accountability in the first place.

I got enough out of the deal (instead of nothing from the government) that it was in my mind an acceptable tradeoff. No one's about to start cloning me.

Your DNA is not secret. You leave it everywhere you go. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy for your litter when you litter. It's only a matter of time and of tech before everybody has a copy of everybody's DNA.

The US Government already has my DNA. Because of 23andme, I was able to discover I had one copy of delta-32, and that’s pretty cool.

I was also able to find out where I came from and connect with distant relatives. To those who are tightly connected with their huge family, you’re privileged.

I’d be sad if this resource went away but I don’t fear it being used for nefarious purposes. I can rest assured the US government is already miles ahead toward that end.

I applaud that approach. The first year of a Ph.D. program could be reformulated to become 75% replicating the research of others, preferably that of unaffiliated research organizations.

A lot of this research is very involved and esoteric, requiring specialized equipment found only in one place, so some would be very hard to replicate. If what Theranos was doing (or claiming to do) was easy to replicate, it would've imploded years prior to when it did. So not all fraud could be detected, but a lot of the low-hanging fraud, especially in the psychological and pharmacological fields, could be quickly identified. Such a system would be a substantial upgrade and I applaud your suggestion. A smaller country could blaze the trail, because "big boys", like the U.S., are too set in their ways.

This leads to a tragedy of the commons. Say a random nation, say, Sweden, devotes 100% of their governmental and university research budgets toward replication.

70% of the studies they attempt are successfully replicated. 20% are inconclusive or equivocal. 10% are clearly debunked.

Now the world is richer, but Sweden? No return on investment for the Swedes, other than perhaps a little advanced notice on what hot new technologies their sovereign funds and investors ought not to invest in.

A bloc of nations, say NAFTA/CAFTA-DR, or the European Union, might be more practical.

That's the carrot. As for the stick, bad lawyers can get disbarred, bad doctors can get "unboarded". Some similar sort of international funding ban/blacklist for bad researchers would be useful.

Far more likely he was at the (a?) satellite camp at Lompoc. Minimum security satellite camps share a small percentage of their facilities with a nearby low or medium:

R&D (that's Receiving & Discharge to you), warehouse, mail center.

FYI, Lompoc is pronounced Lom-poke to the townies. Not sure how the inmates pronounce it.

Clearcutting in practice is bad from an ecological perspective, but let's not pretend that it exacerbates global warming.

Most of that tree mass becomes lumber, which keeps a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere. Once cleared, new trees take their place and suck up more carbon. Lumber is a rare win-win for climate change and the economy.

As opposed to natural modes of tree death like fires or simply rotting, in which all stored carbon is released...