1053r

16 ms·

91.
by 1053r 16y ago
A solar cell collects energy over a range of frequencies, while a plant (if I recall) uses only two. You can think of it this way. Wheat is say 1% efficient at solar collection, while even crappy solar cells are like 8%. Of course you nee
92.
by 1053r 16y ago
Production prices for solar energy are now below $0.80 / watt ( http://www.123jump.com/market-update/First-Solar,-Inc-Q4-Ear... ), although skyrocketing demand has caused wholesale prices to remain much higher. It seems likely that we may i
93.
by 1053r 16y ago
This is all well and good, but what the article is talking about is the speed of the propagation of gravity waves. I've never heard anyone who wasn't a crank argue that gravity waves travel at anything other than the speed of light. As th
94.
by 1053r 16y ago
Does "everyone" really need "help" from the medical profession? The dental profession? I think you may be showing signs of stigmatizing mental illness yourself a bit, there.
95.
by 1053r 16y ago
The NYTimes article is blogspam. The original is at http://www.nationalpost.com/Westerners+World+weird+ones/3427...
96.
by 1053r 16y ago
The most powerful words in science are, "Huh. That's weird..."
97.
by 1053r 16y ago
Let us assume, for a moment, that Ray Kurzweil's thesis of accelerating returns is correct. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change#Kurzweil_an... It therefore follows that as the pace of change increases, the length of time befo
98.
by 1053r 16y ago
I agree with your reasoning as to why deflation is dangerous, but I feel compelled to point out that the 19th century most emphatically WAS a period with lots of boom bust cycles. There was the recession of 1802, the depression of 1807, the
99.
by 1053r 16y ago
I've done a 6 and 2 biphasic schedule (or sometimes 7 and 3), and I felt better than I ever had before. It's difficult to fit the nap in with work though. I think in many ways the "Italian" sleep schedule (up at 7, awake till 2, sleep till
100.
by 1053r 16y ago
This sounds great in principal, and ending American and European food subsidies would be great for Africa. Additionally, food subsidies distort the market by, for example, making corn syrup cheaper than sugar in the US. The problem is that
101.
by 1053r 16y ago
Wow, this research is really applicable to job interviews. I'm adding some questions that are designed to get at this trait to all my interviews from now on.
102.
by 1053r 16y ago
To be fair though, this exposes a design flaw in Android. Technologies like protected memory and pre-emptive multi-tasking are supposed to prevent applications from gumming up the works. Along the same vein, we need some way to identify a
103.
by 1053r 16y ago
My own personal experience agrees with the need for Advanced Task Killer. When I leave my nexus one alone for a few days, it inevitably starts to slow down (sometime pausing for as much as 10 seconds totally locked up). I'll open adk, and
104.
by 1053r 16y ago
This currency suffers from the same major problem that all limited supply commodity-based currencies have (assuming someone doesn't figure out a way to counterfeit it) - deflation. Whether your fixed money supply is based upon gold or hard
105.
by 1053r 16y ago
Perhaps this is why it generally takes a new generation of thinkers to push political thinking forward. I would postulate that we are more likely to reject the views of our parents than we are to reject our own. If that is true, it explain
106.
by 1053r 16y ago
Has anyone seen any numbers on the difference between people using iBooks vs the kindle app on the iPad or iPhone? Anecdotally, I've heard lots of people say they wanted to get an iPad so they could use the kindle app, but the plural of an
107.
by 1053r 16y ago
I think a lot of us are instinctively reacting negatively to this article, and I don't think it is because it's news we just don't want to hear. There is one point that the author fails to take into consideration: future growth. Anyone who
108.
by 1053r 16y ago
One somewhat useful heuristic I've found for judging my own competence: If I think someone is wrong but I can't say why, I'm probably the incompetent one (they may be also). But if I think someone is wrong and I can give clear directions
109.
by 1053r 16y ago
Wow. Someone besides me has fantasized about bringing modern tech to the past. Has anyone else thought what, say a nexus one (with my handy hp-48 emulator, plus shell scripting) would do to say, ww2? I'm pretty sure whichever side got the
110.
by 1053r 16y ago
<sarcasm>Intelligent people come to non-obvious and novel conclusions! News at 11.</sarcasm>
111.
by 1053r 16y ago
Just being able to have matter that has gravitational attraction and little or no inertia or vice versa doesn't open the door to inertialess drives. To do that, you'd need negative inertia to cancel out the inertia of payload and bits of s
112.
by 1053r 16y ago
This is why thinking about things in terms of "natural" vs "manmade" is only a crutch. It is a reasonably good rule of thumb that if something is sold in the supermarket and was grown and minimally processed, it is good for you, while if i
113.
by 1053r 16y ago
Key features that will push the whole industry forward: super high res screen (960x640) front facing camera with open standards for video calling high def video camera and 5 megapixel still camera. It may be argued that some or all of these
114.
by 1053r 16y ago
The scaling on the graph makes it difficult to tell, but it looks like the stock price fell soon after Balmer took over and has gone up and down since then, but mostly held steady. Why would he be sacked now, if he's survived almost 10 yea
115.
by 1053r 16y ago
The day that I hear that google is trying to write search engines that do anything other than rank based on relevancy is the day I stop using google. TFA suggests that google is pushing people towards results that cause people to worry abou
116.
by 1053r 16y ago
Judging by the comments echoing throughout the blog-sphere, it seems like encodings (and a reluctance to move to Rails 3 because it is new) is the main thing preventing people from moving to Ruby 1.9. But I can't wait for folks to move ove
117.
by 1053r 16y ago
I think that in many ways, physics today is in a similar place to where it was before relativity and QM; it's almost entirely explained, which just a few nagging anomalies around the edges. Today we have QM and relativity, which contradict
118.
by 1053r 16y ago
Based upon some completely unscientific asking around, it seems like a person who has an employee number under 10 is likely to make 1/50th to 1/400th of the total exit after taxes. So $100mm for the company = $500K plus or minus. Not tota
119.
by 1053r 16y ago
"Daddy, where were you when privacy died?" "I was on hacker news commenting through facebook connect." On the one hand, I don't have to use facebook. On the other hand, I worry about the immense asymmetry of information that facebook has
120.
by 1053r 17y ago
A few years ago, I was about to go on a car trip. The hot/cold selector in my car was broken, and my mechanic had ordered the part, but didn't have time to put it in. I knew him pretty well, so I borrowed a screwdriver and took apart my d

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