frankus

32 ms·

301.
by frankus 7y ago
Huge if true. Most fission plants throw away about two-thirds of their energy output as waste heat (according to: https://www.answers.com/Q/How_much_of_the_heat_generated_in_... ), and their cooling towers are so much b
302.
by frankus 7y ago
Maybe I’m misremembering but isn’t torque usually expressed as a cross product of force and radius? (Making pound-feet the pedantic but correct phrasing of the colloquial “foot-pounds”) That way the torque vector points in the direction tha
303.
by frankus 7y ago
Could that be because it effectively registered a lane change by the car it was following and was accelerating to the requested speed? Or are you suggesting that the Autopilot accelerated beyond the top speed set by the driver?
304.
by frankus 7y ago
I can’t help but think that our culture-wide experiment in the normalization of deviance when it comes to speed limits (both how they are set and how they are observed) has something to do with this. A crash at 55 mph would have 40% less en
305.
by frankus 7y ago
This morning I noticed stop signs and traffic lights indicated on the map in CarPlay. Hadn’t seen that until today (to be fair I’m not in a major city by any stretch).
306.
by frankus 7y ago
One of the tricky things with a project like this is that banks are very leery of underwriting a mortgage on something that isn't a residence (I ran into this when I briefly flirted with buying an old fire station). Usually the best yo
307.
by frankus 7y ago
Idle thought I had a while back: Let people who don't have anything in the overhead bins get off first.
308.
by frankus 7y ago
There's a card game that was recently on KickStarter called Pitch Deck: https://pitchdeck.business , sort of in the vein of Schmoovie.
309.
by frankus 7y ago
If this scales down to under a kilowatt-hour it means even a large ebike/scooter/etc. pack could move to double-digit US dollars in the next few years.
310.
by frankus 7y ago
I'm ambivalent about DST as a concept (see e.g. here: https://leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/ ), but I feel like proponents of this scheme haven't really thought it through. "
311.
by frankus 7y ago
Some air-breathing batteries can apparently roughly match liquid fuels for specific energy, but they're not rechargeable so much as recyclable, and they also get heavier as they discharge.
312.
by frankus 7y ago
That equation is definitely changing with modern PV prices and heat pumps: https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/solar-thermal-i...
313.
by frankus 7y ago
I'm curious if you can use the same effect with human/animal eardrums.
314.
by frankus 7y ago
A number of years ago I read a book about the invention of the Segway ( https://www.amazon.com/s?k=1578516730 ) and apparently Dean Kamen used a "south-pointing chariot" as a metaphor for a really cool hack that is
315.
by frankus 7y ago
Another thing that often plays into this is access for firefighting apparatus. A lot of modern streets in North America are designed to be wide enough that two fire trucks can pass each other. But North American fire trucks are huge (often
316.
by frankus 7y ago
If you're truly replacing bike trips (and the cyclist isn't eating or showering* more than they would riding a scooter), then the scooter is less eco-friendly. If you're also replacing an occasional car trip, the scooter is l
317.
by frankus 7y ago
Would be great if someone could come up with a "Pull" sticker that would read "Push" when mirrored.
318.
by frankus 7y ago
This seems to address a lot of the shortcomings presented here: https://mkremins.github.io/blog/unix-not-acceptable-unix/
319.
by frankus 7y ago
Optics aside, it seems like the obvious solution is to give people a free supply of safe drugs and a safe place to use them. Drug users would be better off because their supply would be safe and they wouldn't need to resort to crime to
320.
by frankus 7y ago
I think he was alluding to non-injected drug use, like drinking beer or smoking weed. Of course by the time injecting street drugs into your veins seems like your least-bad option, you're in a pretty desperate place and maybe not someo
321.
by frankus 7y ago
It's not unheard of for EVs to boost the battery voltage to a higher level before feeding into the inverter that powers the motor (e.g. https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1281167 ). There are some advantages to
322.
by frankus 7y ago
The main difference is that a gas pump can dump single-digit megawatts of power, so a "full charge" only takes a few minutes. The best commercial EV fast chargers (that require a six-figure DC power converter) are on the order of
323.
by frankus 7y ago
Deep discharges and sitting at low state of charge for a long time are the main things that shorten battery life. Also harmful is charging to the absolute maximum state of charge. I believe most vehicles have a setting to terminate the char
324.
by frankus 7y ago
Even some non-car-centric housing situations can lead to isolation. I've lived in a couple of mid- to high-rise buildings in walkable neighborhoods where you pretty much don't see any of your neighbors except some who live on the
325.
by frankus 7y ago
I guess one limitation is that "we can make this work for a couple of weeks" doesn't imply "we can do this indefinitely". On the other hand, you might be able to fix most of the pain points for a fraction of the pri
326.
by frankus 7y ago
Local governments (at least in the US) seem to systematically underinvest in experiments like this. Things like traffic congestion have a ton of weird, largely unpredictable positive and negative feedback loops. Seattle removed its waterfro
327.
by frankus 7y ago
Shopping for food in grocery stores was one of the highlights of touring Switzerland in a rented motorhome (for the record Migros > Coop > Aldi IMO).
328.
by frankus 7y ago
Bottom line is that bikes are efficient because they’re slow and light, not necessarily because they’re human powered. In both cases the energy use is lower than lots of things that we don’t think of in terms of energy. By way of comparison
329.
by frankus 7y ago
I like this guy's take: "The common US rule requiring speed limits to be set at 85% of actual average car speeds amounts to crowdsourcing the value of human life, on a platform where only motorists have a voice." ( https:&#x2
330.
by frankus 7y ago
Leaving aside the questions of cost-effectiveness/carbon neutrality/etc of e.g. corn ethanol, but can your tech potentially also make existing biofuels more efficient?

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