bh42222

26 ms·

181.
by bh42222 15y ago
I think the mechanism is fairly simple. The article mentions pipes deep under ground. I am assuming they dig deep enough to find permanently cooler temperatures, then they circulate air and water condenses due to the temperature differentia
182.
by bh42222 15y ago
NASA article: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/super-black-m... With more information, more pictures, and less confusion about "absorbing light leading to lower temperatures."
183.
by bh42222 15y ago
Really? You think charity is better or more efficient than productive work?
184.
by bh42222 15y ago
Nature loves symmetry!
185.
by bh42222 15y ago
This is exactly how "law enforcement" used to work behind the iron curtain. An anonymous tip that you were anti-communist could get you arrested.
186.
by bh42222 15y ago
What kind of pedantic asshole cares if the main benefit of fair trade is a sense of superiority? And it's quite something to claim the sense of smugness some people feel is a bigger deal than higher prices for farmers! Humans are instinct
187.
by bh42222 15y ago
Why would the US electricity infrastructure care if the electrons come from coal heat or sun light? And if renewable power becomes cheap enough you can synthesis gasoline from air. Renewable power does not have to become incredibly cheap fo
188.
by bh42222 15y ago
Like donating to whistleblowing websites like WikiLeaks.
189.
by bh42222 15y ago
"Tweakers" (God what a horrible name, and I thought "hacker" was kind of bad for makers.) might have contributed to the industrial revolution in England. Then again, the relative prices of labor vs energy at the time probably played a great
190.
by bh42222 15y ago
I think this is BS. It's not that it's hard, it's that is too hard for what you get for it, in both money and social respect. Actually even that is not correct. It's harder compared to other things (Law, MBA, etc.) which can pay more and co
191.
by bh42222 15y ago
To me the more interesting part is how Google has managed to maintain a sense of fun and a corporate attitude that allows fun hacks to make it to the world. Too bad that (to me at least) Google is now firmly on the side of extremely non-f
192.
by bh42222 15y ago
Let's momentarily put aside the question of Asange's legal troubles, and concentrate only on WikiLeaks. It is greatly disturbing that an informal impromptu collusion of financial companies and governments is successfully shutting down a whi
193.
by bh42222 15y ago
Huge numbers of people engaging in tax avoidance in Italy and Greece is primarily the result of of a broken tax system.
194.
by bh42222 15y ago
A couple of nights ago a had strange dream about asteroids hitting earth. Didn't think much of it... still don't think much it.... but I would like to know where this would hit if it were to hit.
195.
by bh42222 15y ago
If you enjoy reading long prose articles, with plenty of human content, do not let the following tl;dr: spoil this article for you: tl;dr: A cylinder of cobalt, probably used in a medical instrument. Things like that are understandably very
196.
by bh42222 15y ago
I have to agree, Melbourne is just too cold to live in year round. Huh? I thought... well let me go check Wikipedia: Melbourne is colder than other mainland Australian state capital cities in the winter. The lowest temperature on record
197.
by bh42222 15y ago
I viscerally distrust anything from physorg.com. Anyone have a better option?
198.
by bh42222 15y ago
Are you making the claim that the N bits of DNA involved in coding the brain can encode more than 2^N neural algorithms? That's exactly what the article above explains. Did you read it? Or do you think that the particular set of 2^N (ass
199.
by bh42222 15y ago
Sad, but true of all knowledge.
200.
by bh42222 15y ago
Well I'll be darned. I don't think I've ever seen this, but maybe I did and forgot it wasn't my idea. So I fully admit I've never had an 100% original thought.
201.
by bh42222 15y ago
It seems to me that Kurzweil is on rather strong grounds when he argues in effect that 25Mbytes is a safe conservative upper bound on the information needed to specify a human infant brain. This is the best I could do: http://www.science
202.
by bh42222 15y ago
I recall Stephen Fry's great comments on Steve Job's "Apple stands at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts." statement. But it has always bothered me that the age of reason also means the age when the scientific principle an
203.
by bh42222 15y ago
Every creature starts from a single cell. At that point the only difference between a mouse and a human is the DNA, right? No. That single cell is a working machine of which the DNA is just one component. The proteins which transcribe the
204.
by bh42222 15y ago
Our understanding of thermodynamics is very thorough. Our understanding allows us to make a plethora of predictions, all of which are falsifiable, and have been throughly tested over the years. This is what makes our theories about thermody
205.
by bh42222 15y ago
I tell people "business emails should be one short paragraph at most". This is one of the reasons good people, often the best people, (not just software engineers) leave big companies.
206.
by bh42222 15y ago
I thought Brin's response was HUMAN! And if not re-contextualized by the reporter, then also clearly shows him being a dick. I've been at huge companies, I've written Yegge sized rants to the VP of engineering, and that VP actually red my
207.
by bh42222 15y ago
Neither Kurzweil nor Allen have done their homework. This is a disappointingly informal argument if you're looking for hard scientific facts.
208.
by bh42222 15y ago
It's startling to me that everything I do comes from 50 megabytes of source code. This fact was a result of the mapping of the human genome, and has since been proven wrong. But like many such facts it has a certain "stickiness" to th
209.
by bh42222 15y ago
Allen writes that "the Law of Accelerating Returns (LOAR). . . is not a physical law." I would point out that most scientific laws are not physical laws, but result from the emergent properties of a large number of events at a finer level.
210.
by bh42222 15y ago
also, i don't think software is viewed as a "high-prestige" profession. It really depends on where in the world you are.

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