cmsmith

5 ms·

1.
by cmsmith 7y ago
Informative headline, for those not wanting to figure out the wsj paywall: >Faced with an influx of visitors, India's picturesque village of Jibhi has shut down the local liquor store and tried to restrict loud music, smoking and ba
2.
by cmsmith 7y ago
Yes, the assisting crane is a mobile crane where the boom pivots up and down about the base. Some have booms that need to be disassembled piece-by-piece, so you just pivot it down until the top is resting on a flatbed trailer, then unbolt i
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by cmsmith 7y ago
Hydro doesn't need pumping to provide load balancing. Just build more turbines [1] than you need for average load - then you can flow extra water overnight and less water during the day while keeping the average the same. This is then
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by cmsmith 8y ago
It wouldn't be exactly a polar orbit, but slightly offset from one - like a sun-synchronous orbit around the earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit
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by cmsmith 8y ago
The bridge looks to be precast concrete box-girders (hollow rectangular beams with plenty of steel reinforcement around the edges). The 'gravel' is the asphalt roadway (often this will be cast-in-place concrete) that's poured
6.
by cmsmith 8y ago
Nah, the building is (mostly) just as good at the end of that time. It's just a convenience to make the probabilities easier to conceptualize. If we designed buildings such that the design earthquake had a 5e-6 daily chance of occurrin
7.
by cmsmith 8y ago
Japan and California are pretty comparable in terms of science and engineering for earthquake resistance. There are some differences on the public policy side, which influence how the engineering requirements are implemented, but Japanese b
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by cmsmith 8y ago
Current building codes are intended to design to a 10% probability of collapse in the "Maximum Considered Earthquake", which is roughly a 2475-year event. The 2475-year event has a 2% chance of occurring during the (assumed 50 yea
9.
by cmsmith 9y ago
News article titles: > 7% of Scott Kelly's DNA was changed due to his year in space > Humans and chimps share 96% of the same DNA Seeing as how Scott Kelly is not severely mutated (or dead, as the article says), this should be an
10.
by cmsmith 9y ago
>shows commercials even to premium users I think this idea that businesses are only allowed to have one revenue stream seems a bit strange. Other businesses that are supported by payments and ads include: magazines, cable TV, movie theat
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by cmsmith 9y ago
>If Mr. Musk were somehow to increase the value of Tesla to $650 billion — a figure many experts would contend is laughably impossible and would make Tesla one of the five largest companies in the United States, based on current valuatio
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by cmsmith 9y ago
Data: https://www.recode.net/2017/11/8/16617798/uber-delete-uber-l... It is a real trend, but doesn't represent 'most' users.
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by cmsmith 9y ago
>A single interrogator can cover some 40 kilometers of fiber, Biondi says, and monitor a virtual sensor every couple of meters. Earthquake engineer here. This is the cool part. We've got plenty of data to detect and locate any given
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by cmsmith 9y ago
In DC, the mass transit agency is usually referred to as Metro, and offers two main services - Metrorail and Metrobus.
15.
by cmsmith 9y ago
There are also single-use radon test kits, which should be fine if your home is in a relatively steady-state condition.
16.
by cmsmith 9y ago
I'll take a guess: 300 feet is awfully deep. If you believe that 300 feet of draft is needed to get the stability they need, then this seems like the only way to get it. There are no ports, or even semi-protected waters, where you coul
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by cmsmith 10y ago
There is also a lot of more dangerous nuclear material scattered all over the country in bombs and power plants - none of which are designed to last more than a few decades. If society does collapse, and that collapse is not precipitated by
18.
by cmsmith 10y ago
>Creating them, however, is a monumental task. There are more than four million miles of roads in the United States. I assume that most passenger-miles are driven on <0.5MM miles of roads, moreso if they are marketing mainly to normal
19.
by cmsmith 10y ago
Your distance is off by quite a bit (should be ~1e11 m at closest approach). The actual force is closer to 10^16 N. Which is big, but 10^7 weaker than the earth-sun interaction. But the sun has to move the earth by a couple AU per year wher
20.
by cmsmith 10y ago
Read more carefully - HR8799 is the subject of the animation up top, and the subject of the quote about motion interpolation. Both are credited to J. Wang, while the composite photo of Fomahault B is credited elsewhere. Also note the use of
21.
by cmsmith 10y ago
I shopped for created diamonds a year or two ago, and like others was disappointed with the cost savings. It seems awfully odd that on the spectrum from $0.01/caret to $1,000,000/caret, that created diamonds ended up costing exact
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by cmsmith 10y ago
I worked at NIST until recently, and my password expired every 90 days. We also had separate passwords for a half-dozen legacy IT systems (timesheets, travel requests, IT support, etc), all with more stringent and senseless length/char
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by cmsmith 10y ago
Given the choice between Thiel (favors reconstitution of our political establishment and believes in science and technology) and the rest of the Trump hangers-on (are ambivalent towards reconstitution of the establishment and are anti-scien
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by cmsmith 10y ago
You could just as easily argue that environmental effort is not a zero-sum game, and that recycling gives people a sense of ownership over the environment and increases their appetite for more important efforts.
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by cmsmith 10y ago
The author should have been more specific in referring to the professional 'self', rather than the general self. My takeaway was that they don't want people who value their own professional advancement at the expense of the c
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by cmsmith 10y ago
Note as well that for 50-80% of the year (depending on location), the farmers market tomatoes are just Mexico tomatoes bought at Costco.
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by cmsmith 10y ago
I work at NIST and took a tour of this machine a few months ago. A few bonus facts: - The spatial distribution of the local gravity field is a significant part of the uncertainty of these measurements. The weights extend into the basement o
28.
by cmsmith 10y ago
>Also, why the dead weight? 500 tons is easily doable with a (smallish) hydraulic press. Sure, but how do you know the hydraulic press is applying 500 tons? You need to have a universal standard for length (to determine the area of your
29.
by cmsmith 10y ago
>there is hardly any authentic science left I'm sorry, but what? You list a half dozen of the hottest-button research areas, but those represent (with the exception of pharma) probably less than 2-3% of non-proprietary research. The
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by cmsmith 10y ago
>If an idea is good, monopoly is icing, but not required for its adoption. I would amend this to say that if an idea is obviously very good, and has an obviously large market, then monopoly is icing. The inventions that you described fit

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