rgmerk

29 ms·

511.
by rgmerk 4y ago
As cool as the rotary engine is, Mazda’s attempt at a rotary hybrid is flogging the deadest of dead horses.
512.
by rgmerk 4y ago
And it’s worth pointing out here that conventional hydro is being optimised in some places for a world with a lot of wind and solar in the grid. In a nutshell, you put in more generators to maximise your peak generation capacity, and operat
513.
by rgmerk 4y ago
To be honest I'm pretty doubtful the economics of excavating a reservoir are going to work. It needs to be very big and very deep, which is going to be very expensive unless you're planning to go all Edward Teller (don't go
514.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Worth pointing out here that nobody is planning to do large scale 12-hour storage with lithium ion batteries. Even leaving out better battery chemistries for the moment, you can use pumped hydro (even with seawater - some of the UAE’s highe
515.
by rgmerk 4y ago
And British people at the same income decile have much longer life expectancies than Americans of the same income decile, despite the fact that Americans at every income decile (except perhaps maybe the very poorest) are richer in absolute
516.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Nobody has explicitly connected the other damning life expectancy visualisation on Twitter yet, so it’s worth linking to it: https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799627128143873?... The difference in life e
517.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Sure. But if you’ve got enough money to not have to work, you can choose to solve whatever puzzles you want. The best position in academia is “emeritus professor”.
518.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Underfloor heating is awesome but it’s also very expensive, particularly if you’re also in a climate that also needs cooling.
519.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Surprisingly, this doesn’t seem to be true for most of the split system ductless heat pumps (aka “reverse cycle air conditioners), I’ve seen. The smallest ones are almost the most efficient ones in the range. I’m not sure why this is, and w
520.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Sounds like a great idea… …but it’s also worth pointing out that murder rates are also a lot lower than the US in other developed countries that don’t have Scandinavian levels of welfare transfers.
521.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Sweden’s murder rate is less than a fifth of the murder rate in the United States. It seems like their policies do go a big way to solve the problem, as infeasible as they appear to be for the USA.
522.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Worth observing here that military aircraft having engines with cooling problems and consequent engine life issues is nothing new. The B-29 that dropped the atom bombs in Japan had engines that were apparently so prone to overheating that r
523.
by rgmerk 4y ago
The Japanese car companies including Mazda are way behind on EVs, Nissan arguably excepted. The MX-30 EV is very expensive and has a tiny battery and consequently terrible driving range. It’s a city-only vehicle. The Japanese auto indust
524.
by rgmerk 4y ago
There are a number of advantages: * they are quieter. * they are smoother. * you may not care about performance but lots of people do like it. * they require less maintenance (which is a cost saving, sure, but also a convenience issue) * if
525.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Whatever floats your boat but Iceland is absolutely spectacular to look at as a visitor; Texas…is not (though I’m sure in a state that big there are going to be some scenic spots somewhere). As you say, the biodiversity is minimal, but the
526.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Incentives work. Either pay companies to achieve paternity leave targets, or fine them if they don’t, and we’ll see what happens to paternity leave rates. And for those of you who haven’t been through the process yourself, it’s hard to imag
527.
by rgmerk 4y ago
That’s just not true. If you’re a middle-class American, you have a huge house by global standards, which you heat and cool more than just about anywhere else on Earth. Each family has two bigger than average cars which they drive more tha
528.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Stratospheric supersonic aircraft will have other significant and very poorly understood environmental effects, with complicated tradeoffs between damaging the ozone layer and contributing to climate change: https://pubs.rsc.org&
529.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Yes. This is just more of LLMs showing their impressive ability to regurgitate the appropriate bit of the internet in response to a prompt.
530.
by rgmerk 4y ago
There's actually a long tradition of this kind of thing. As an undergraduate, my first-year maths "course notes" were actually a textbook in all but name, produced by the Mathematics department and sold for a very modest cost
531.
by rgmerk 4y ago
And who’s going to write and update that textbook? If your answer is “the professor teaching the course”, that’s cost-shifting and in many cases less efficient than having one textbook author write a textbook used in many places. If your fu
532.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Which brings me back to my point - big lithium deposits in countries with unfriendly relationships with the US and its allies isn’t as big a deal as people think.
533.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Pop quiz: name the world’s largest producer of lithium. Lithium production is important but lithium is not the next oil. It’s not going to dominate the world economy. There aren’t going to be wars fought over it. And we will ultimately
534.
by rgmerk 4y ago
If you have a look at the top selling vehicles, you’ve basically got it right: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g39628015/best-selling-car...
535.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Yes, but would you really love a morning podcast that's * exactly as long as your breakfast consumption time * talks about the papers you're reading, but... * is as shallow as a puddle and as funny as being the person who steps in
536.
by rgmerk 4y ago
As said elsewhere, one likely contributor is pickup trucks getting higher, leading to a bigger frontal blind spot and more severe injuries when they hit people.
537.
by rgmerk 4y ago
There's pretty good evidence to suggest that the design of American pickup trucks is at least in part to blame for this. They have much longer frontal blind spots than sedans, vans, and SUVs, and their high bonnets mean that pedestrian
538.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Curious. Why a Model S Plaid? Sure, it’s a rocketship in a straight line, but there are reportedly lots of other cars (even electric ones) that are much more fun to drive on a twisty road.
539.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Wing has already changed their drones to attempt to reduce the annoyance from the noise. Better batteries may also assist to make drones quieter: if you have a bigger energy budget, you can afford to waste some of it using quieter but less
540.
by rgmerk 4y ago
The IEA, hardly the most adventurous of forecasters, guesses that, globally, 60% of new cars will be EVs by 2030.

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