nkoren

60 ms·

511.
by nkoren 9y ago
> it's hard to figure out where my skills are best allocated Better is the enemy of good enough -- just do something, and if that doesn't work, do something else. There are so many issues facing the world: climate change, popul
512.
by nkoren 9y ago
If you ask a child to draw a hand, they will almost always draw it with five fingers stuck straight out, widely separated. This is a view of a hand that one almost never actually sees; generally you'll have fingers clustered together,
513.
by nkoren 9y ago
Me too. If this is a worry of yours, though, may I suggest, in no way rhetorically, going into the "not fucking it up" business? The pay is generally terrible, but nothing beats making your own hope.
514.
by nkoren 9y ago
Fun fact: Cleopatra and Mark Antony etc. lived closer in time to the invention of mobile phones than to the construction of the Great Pyramids. Egyptian history is deep . Funner fact: the Great Pyramids were built closer in time to the inv
515.
by nkoren 9y ago
> As an organization, I don't have very much faith in the leadership doing much more than barely staying afloat. There's a strong bias for seniority over meritocracy, which over the long term frustrates and deflects talented pe
516.
by nkoren 9y ago
The desert is not a uniform place. Arcosanti is half a mile from the third largest river in the state, with very healthy wells. Water is really not an issue there, at the kind of population levels they're targeting.
517.
by nkoren 9y ago
Posted an answer for you. As for the move -- I feel like I've spent the last two days in a bar fight. Definitely need to be rich enough to pay for professional movers the next time I do this!
518.
by nkoren 9y ago
Okay, finally got a moment of downtime to answer this. The first thing I'd do differently is to prioritise the development of economic diversity. One of the most important aspects of cities is the way they create wealth, by facilitatin
519.
by nkoren 9y ago
Answering this question first; will come back to your other tomorrow. - Organic waste is composted for the farm. - Glass is broken down into aggregate for the concrete (glass recycling is barely ecologically justifiable; reuse is better). -
520.
by nkoren 9y ago
First you'd have to convince me that that would be a good idea. Many of Arcosanti's problems stem from the fact that it's a (small) company town, and is thus unable to model the socioeconomic complexity or governance processe
521.
by nkoren 9y ago
No, they intercepted the water far enough upstream of their settlements. Let's say you have a pueblo on a 200 ft mesa, above a river that's running at a 4% gradient. Your aqueduct needs a 2% gradient to maintain good flow -- the H
522.
by nkoren 9y ago
The Agua Fria river flows about half a mile away from the site. Although it's rarely above ground, the subsurface flow is the third-largest in the state, and there aren't very many people upstream. Arcosanti has a well and gets al
523.
by nkoren 9y ago
Hah, you beat me to it! :-) Still happy to answer questions, although this is trending on a particularly bad day, as I'm moving house. Leave a question here, however, and I'll answer it.
524.
by nkoren 9y ago
No, but every single one of them asked whether I was Muslim. Their responses to my answer ran the gamut. One, a conservative, was clearly perturbed by my answer and wanted to convert me, but lacked the English to do so. The best he could co
525.
by nkoren 9y ago
I once filled out "None" for my religion on a Saudi visa. It was accepted and I had no problem whatsoever on my visit there, even discussing my alleged atheism openly with curious taxi drivers etc. Only later did I discover that a
526.
by nkoren 9y ago
Very much so -- and one has even been explored by humans! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadley%E2%80%93Apennine
527.
by nkoren 9y ago
This is the correct answer. These lava tubes are, at their youngest, a couple billion years old. Since then, the moon has been thwacked very hard and -- on those timescales -- often. If the tubes haven't collapsed yet, then there'
528.
by nkoren 9y ago
Just so. In the 1990s I was part of a group called the Space Access Society, which was a bunch of cranky but idealistic rocket scientists (and enthusiastic amateurs; John Carmack was a constant presence with his Armadillo Aerospace) trying
529.
by nkoren 9y ago
ULA has abruptly gotten way more competitive in their pricing. A few years ago they were not. Their "Best deal" for the Atlas V was a 36-rocket "bulk buy" priced the lowest-tier Atlas V 401 at $164M/launch[1]. That
530.
by nkoren 9y ago
This is a very fair point. There might be components that are routinely used in non-life-safety-critical applications, but this is no guarantee that they will pass certification scrutiny when they are in the critical path for thousands of l
531.
by nkoren 9y ago
He's getting very close, if one is considering domestic rockets. The standard-bearers were the Delta IV and Atlas V, which price out at around $17,000/kg - $20,000/kg to LEO, respectively. The Falcon 9 comes in at about $2,80
532.
by nkoren 9y ago
This kind of Hyperloop criticism is commonplace, but strikes me as intellectually lazy. Did you read Robotbeat's link? Particularly with respect to to the MNLC Bellows Expansion Joint. > 1) will hold a vacuum Plain wrong. > 2) ar
533.
by nkoren 9y ago
I am assured by those in a position to know that thermal expansion joints which hold a near-vacuum are an entirely solved and essentially trivial problem. I do have some concerns about whether they're a trivial problem within this cont
534.
by nkoren 9y ago
In the main, I think we'd simply have no chance of detecting such civilisations. In the next couple of decades, however, advanced space telescopes with starshade coronagraphs could be able to start doing spectroscopy on exoplanet atmos
535.
by nkoren 9y ago
If you're happy to let them starve, then sure, although that would be a rather pointless thing to do. But if satellites were orbiting and then returning to Earth after a few days or weeks, we'd know. And if they were being resuppl
536.
by nkoren 9y ago
> There may be privately or secretly "launched" people It's essentially impossible to covertly put or keep anything in space. Getting into space requires expending a rather obvious amount of energy, which there are fleets
537.
by nkoren 9y ago
Back in the 1990s, I maintained a "Population of Space" page which showed exactly this. To my knowledge, nothing like it exists anymore, which is a shame. I occasionally think about recreating it, just as soon as the day job leave
538.
by nkoren 9y ago
Knowing more accurate footfall counts down individual corridors is essential for better planning of stations and services. And yes, it's also a boon to pricing advertising along those corridors. No way to improve one without improving
539.
by nkoren 9y ago
> This is just a convenient data grab and profiteering. I know people working on this project, and that is absolutely not their motivation. They want to better understand the movement of people within the system, so they can design bette
540.
by nkoren 9y ago
Looks like any decimal place breaks it. Whole numbers only. But hey, whaddaya want for 220 bytes?!?

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