WhatsTheBigIdea

7 ms·

31.
by WhatsTheBigIdea 3y ago
It's so good to hear about a scientific organization that is doing excellent, repeatable, high quality work. I wonder how they are compensated/incentivized?
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by WhatsTheBigIdea 3y ago
What a fabulous analysis! The serendipity is remarkably high! I suppose penicillin might be a good addition to the list of powerful compounds discovered by happenstance? Does this mean that innovation is basically a brute force calculation
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by WhatsTheBigIdea 3y ago
"Independent Polling" of people living under a repressive regime appears to be 100% impossible to me. Yet the idea that such a thing exists seems widespread? Can anyone here explain how independent polling under a repressive regim
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by WhatsTheBigIdea 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failed_state https://www.britannica.com/topic/failed-state https://www.dictionary.com/browse/failed-state Russia does not appear to qualify as a
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by WhatsTheBigIdea 3y ago
tldr; Why not slow down when sensor range is shorter than stopping distance? It seems the basic argument is that sensor range is not always long enough to fully encompass stopping distance, but the data presented in the article shows that t
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by WhatsTheBigIdea 3y ago
Cats are not a "natural" predator in the modern context. They have massive advantages over wild animals including but not limited to 1) A guaranteed source of high quality disease free calories 2) Veterinary care 3) Safe places to
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by WhatsTheBigIdea 3y ago
There is clearly a problem, but the remedies proposed in this article are absurd and completely ignore the cause of the problem. Plastics are incredibly useful, fabulously performant, and astoundingly cheap. It is no wonder they are ubiquit
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by WhatsTheBigIdea 3y ago
The Solar Cycle is approximately has a period of ~11 years ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle ). The heating clearly shown in these visualizations does not appear to be related to the solar cycle.
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by WhatsTheBigIdea 3y ago
A good friend of mine was cured (knock on wood) of leukemia by CAR-T. She was one of the first people to get it during a clinical trial. She'd been through all the regular chemo, bone marrow transplant, etc as well as 3 other (failed
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by WhatsTheBigIdea 3y ago
Where does the octopus fit in your "similar species/genetic relatedness" equation? I have read that cephalopods are on a genetic tree that diverged from our own before the emergence of photosynthesis. It seems that we are mo
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by WhatsTheBigIdea 3y ago
Some interesting things about silicosis are... 1) The ancient Greeks and Romans knew about the hazards of breathing dust, and knew that stone workers were particularly at risk. 2) The name Silicosis was coined in 1870 by Achille Visconti wh
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by WhatsTheBigIdea 3y ago
Yes! Texas (ERCOT) is by far the easiest electrical market to enter. It is also one of the highest volatility markets which is also good for storage. But the barriers to entry are still way too high to call it anything like an open market.
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by WhatsTheBigIdea 3y ago
The reason we don't see new grid storage tech succeed is because there is no market for it . Seems like there ought to be a market... every electrical system in the world would be much better off with gobs of storage. But there isn&#x
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by WhatsTheBigIdea 3y ago
All of the Rangers and CalFire people I know never call them "controlled burns". Rather they call then "prescribed burns"... for exactly this reason.
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by WhatsTheBigIdea 3y ago
What is the viable alternative to land ownership? The Tragedy of The Commons is a well known and frequently repeated experiment in many areas of life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
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by WhatsTheBigIdea 4y ago
+1
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by WhatsTheBigIdea 4y ago
I miss RPi a great deal. I recall that a core piece of RPi's strategy was to use excess capacity to create an awesomely capable and super inexpensive product family. That core piece of thinking was instrumental to RPi's success.
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by WhatsTheBigIdea 4y ago
Seems like the next step will be to figure out a way to bring these objects down with out destroying them. My understanding is that very few winged aircraft are able to operate at 60k feet. The ones that do fly super fast and are not able