elihu

38 ms·

451.
by elihu 4y ago
I mean, sure, how can you expect to live a normal middle-class lifestyle without a few hundred tons of ytterbium? What are they going to want next? Lanthanum? Terbium? Praseodymium? Dysprosium? What else are we supposed to build our pal
452.
by elihu 4y ago
Magnesium isn't entirely without risk. Here's some firefighters spraying water on a Jeep Liberty (see 1:11): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY9ri-UOoLo
453.
by elihu 4y ago
Apparently US Magnesium is a major producer and they use evaporation ponds and brine from the Great Salt Lake. It's a bit of an environmental controversy because they use a lot of water and the Great Salt Lake is shrinking. https:&#x
454.
by elihu 4y ago
Tourism, mining high value minerals for Earth, mining low value minerals for construction on Mars, manufacturing rocket fuel so that Mars can be the gas station for ships headed for the asteroid belt (enabling more high value mineral mining
455.
by elihu 4y ago
Probably the best way is to not have the districts in the first place. If a state has five representatives, run a single state-wide election with five winners, using some variant of proportional representation. Even better: modify the fund
456.
by elihu 4y ago
They could put a cross on the roof, but that wouldn't actually resolve the ambiguity.
457.
by elihu 4y ago
"Cubist church" is kind of a funny caption because of the grammatical ambiguity between "this is a church constructed in a cubist style" and "this is a church where people go to worship perpendicularity." http
458.
by elihu 4y ago
I think there's a growing sentiment that we need to be decarbonizing our economy right now. We don't need any new technology necessarily (though some technological advances might make it cheaper and/or easier), we just need
459.
by elihu 4y ago
Yeah, it depends on what your objective is really. Killing a lot of people is easy with nuclear weapons, but it doesn't necessarily equate to "winning". The impression I get as a non-expert in this area is that the only cou
460.
by elihu 4y ago
I believe that's still being done right now in Ukraine. (Not necessarily to protect from shock waves so much as it's to protect against an adversary being able to attack the trench from an optimal angle where it provides no defen
461.
by elihu 4y ago
Possibly pretty survivable in the short term as long as a nuclear warhead doesn't go off very close to where you are. Just because you're in a major city doesn't necessarily mean you're a high priority target. (In nucl
462.
by elihu 4y ago
Presumably they could ask the car thief where the records came from if they caught him, but it seems likely that the police found the car but have no idea who stole it. In which case, the records are just random objects with no identifiabl
463.
by elihu 4y ago
That seems like an improvement, but not really what I'm talking about. I'd like a mouse where the scroll wheel is replaced with something you can apply pressure to, and as long as you apply pressure it continues to scroll -- no n
464.
by elihu 4y ago
Huh, I'd never seen those and that's pretty much exactly what I want. I figured my idea was too obvious to be original, but wondered if someone had created a failed product based on a patented design, thus locking out anyone else
465.
by elihu 4y ago
I haven't had an issue with the scroll wheel clicker, or have any particular idea to improve upon it, unless one were to do away with the clicker entirely in favor of thumb buttons or maybe putting an extra button next to the scroll wh
466.
by elihu 4y ago
Those look like they have standard scroll wheels, albeit maybe they're wide enough that you could get a continuous scroll by alternating between index and middle fingers. Am I missing something fundamentally unique about them?
467.
by elihu 4y ago
I think a great option if we really want to build a better mouse is to replace the scroll wheel with something TrackPoint-like. Scroll wheels are a ridiculous interface that we tolerate because they're useful, but if we had a better al
468.
by elihu 4y ago
Cobalt is "needed" for luxury EVs. Everyone else could get by reasonably well with LFP cells.
469.
by elihu 4y ago
Supercapacitors aren't that useful for grid storage. The energy density is very low. They have a very high power density which allows them to produce or store enormous amounts of energy in a short time, but that's not really a p
470.
by elihu 4y ago
> There are many zombie environmental groups that will continue to fight against anything humans try to change about the built environment, but over time the astonishingly good economics will move them to the side. I think environmental
471.
by elihu 4y ago
There's two ways to power your house off your car battery. You could have your car act as a mobile electrical outlet that you can run extension cords off of to plug things into, or you could have it tie in directly with the wiring of
472.
by elihu 4y ago
I don't think that makes sense given that you'd probably want a full battery in the morning to start your day, and night-time is when you'd want to draw from the battery (assuming solar becomes a much bigger component of grid
473.
by elihu 4y ago
Presumably as we use more renewable energy, we'll need more temporary storage. Buffering out day/night cycles from solar generation, for instance, would be a daily occurrence not a rare event. $9/kwh might be reasonable in
474.
by elihu 4y ago
One use of rare earths is for permanent magnet motors. Induction motors don't use permanent magnets, but they tend to be significantly less efficient. Permanent magnets can also be made without rare earths, but I expect the result wou
475.
by elihu 4y ago
Maybe used cells out of a crashed Nissan Leaf? For new cells, probably the best option is to try and find a good deal on LFP cells, though in the U.S. at least they tend to be really overpriced. A BMS will be needed too.
476.
by elihu 4y ago
https://www.wood-database.com/osage-orange/ Seems like it would be an interesting wood to work with. I don't think I've ever seen it for sale at a hardwood store, though maybe I would if I lived in its nativ
477.
by elihu 4y ago
I suppose squirrels might end up propagating the seeds by stashing them away somewhere, then for any number of possible reasons, never actually coming back to eat them.
478.
by elihu 4y ago
I'm not from Texas, but in Oregon we have a plant, the wild cucumber, that served in the same ecological niche, being a fruit whose sole purpose seems to be furnishing children with satisfying projectiles. The wild cucumber is shaped l
479.
by elihu 4y ago
Also Hauptwerk, or if you prefer something open source there's GrandOrgue https://github.com/GrandOrgue/grandorgue
480.
by elihu 4y ago
Apparently the great salt lake is also a huge magnesium source. There's a company called US Magnesium that takes salt water and routes it into a bunch of evaporation ponds.

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