wcoenen

31 ms·

361.
by wcoenen 4y ago
This will backfire anyway, because the printed amount will be very low. Let's say a customer charges for an hour at 5 kilowatt, so 5 kilowatt-hour. So the restaurant subsidizes less than a dollar worth of electricity. And not everyone
362.
by wcoenen 4y ago
> Is our atmosphere more or less transparent to some parts of the frequency spectrum than others? Yes. The frequencies that are not blocked are called "atmospheric windows". And there is indeed such a window for microwaves. T
363.
by wcoenen 4y ago
The same could be said about wind power. Ultimately, wind and ocean currents are driven by the 170,000 terawatts of solar irradiance continuously hitting the earth[1]. Human civilization uses about 17 terawatt[2], so we still have a ways to
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by wcoenen 4y ago
Pure sodium reacts rather violently with water. It might make sense to remove that hazard by allowing the violent reaction to take place where and when you want it to happen. It would be similar to neutralizing a bomb by blowing it up under
365.
by wcoenen 4y ago
History of contamination on the site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory#...
366.
by wcoenen 4y ago
> I am surprised no one mentioned that it is possible to trace bitcoin You mean, other than the fact that that's what the whole blog post is about? :-)
367.
by wcoenen 4y ago
It may be a bit misleading to say that CRISPR babies are "already happening in China". Yes, there was a researcher who genetically modified a few babies. (Specifically, to give them HIV resistance.) But he received a prison senten
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by wcoenen 4y ago
> resistance in electrical wires over long distances eat ~5% of the generated power. This makes it infeasible... Electricity price differences throughout the USA[1] are much more than 5%, so a 5% loss does not (in itself) seem to make
369.
by wcoenen 4y ago
Why would there be a "fundamental" reason for an inability to block/reject payments in cryptocurrencies? Ethereum smart contract can already do that. Just exit with an error while processing an incoming payment.
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by wcoenen 4y ago
The rule of thumb you can use to make this intuitive: A change in velocity at a certain point x on an orbit will change the entire orbit, except that orbit will still continue to go through that one point x. So slowing down at perigee will
371.
by wcoenen 4y ago
I had no problems completing the original course in Octave. No Matlab license required.
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by wcoenen 4y ago
The paper "Large-Scale Study of Curiosity-Driven Learning"[1] talks about AI that likes to take actions that yield results that it didn't predict. The idea is that curiosity is good intrinsic reward function. The problem tho
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by wcoenen 4y ago
This is referred to as "qualia". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
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by wcoenen 4y ago
Agreed. For many people forced to deal with git, the git concepts are just word salad. On two occasions (different people) in the past year, I got in a very confusing conversation with someone asking for help with git, because they kept tal
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by wcoenen 4y ago
Banks, and other companies, can indeed have shareholder votes to make decisions. You can't vote with dollars directly but you can buy more shares. So shares are similar to governance tokens in DeFi projects. And in the real world, peop
376.
by wcoenen 4y ago
Your idea was basically to short tether at high leverage and wait. But margin trading with high leverage isn't free. You are essentially borrowing the money at a very high interest rate. For example, at Kraken the margin cost is curren
377.
by wcoenen 4y ago
TW/h doesn't really make sense. I suspect you meant TWh/year.
378.
by wcoenen 4y ago
> The entirety of human history since prehistoric times Extrapolating from the past doesn't always work. There are real limits. Take the rate of energy consumption of human civilization for example, which is currently about 17 ter
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by wcoenen 4y ago
Just to clarify where the original numbers came from... The claim you are responding to: 1 liter of oil ~ 3 days of human energy output. Energy in a liter of oil: about 30 megajoules. Human base metabolic rate: below 100 watt. Let's sa
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by wcoenen 5y ago
Because of high natural gas prices. The production of fertilizers such as ammonium nitrate and urea require ammonia. Ammonia is synthesized on large scales with the Haber-Bosch process. This process requires hydrogen, which is obtained by s
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by wcoenen 5y ago
The active suspension for kneeling is actually also used in EV buses to compensate for the high center of gravity. See this video about the Mercedes eCitaro[1] for some visuals and technical information. [1] https://youtu.be&#x2F
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by wcoenen 5y ago
The floor of the bus needs to be as low as possible to make it easier for elderly or otherwise disabled people to get on and off.
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by wcoenen 5y ago
Reducing emissions may not have the effect you might think. First, once the CO2 is in the atmosphere, it stays there for a very long time (centuries to millennia). So stopping emissions would not stop the heat. Second, emissions also contai
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by wcoenen 5y ago
These are called "time of use tariffs". Here in Belgium this type of tariff is marketed under the name "dynamic tariff". (It's only offered by the biggest player Engie, but other companies are working on it.) The pr
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by wcoenen 5y ago
The original phrasing of Murphy's law was: "every component than can be installed backward, eventually will be".
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by wcoenen 5y ago
It's a non-profit set up to spend their fortune on charity...
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by wcoenen 5y ago
The batteries are first separated from the phones; this happens elsewhere. The remainder of the phones arrive at the processing plant in Hoboken (near Antwerp) and are shredded. Each batch of finely shredded material is analyzed for its con
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by wcoenen 5y ago
There may be something new about the process here, but there are other processing plants that recover gold from e-waste. Umicore has a plant in Belgium which does this.
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by wcoenen 5y ago
This misconception comes from "the great chain of being"[1]. It's an old idea which still influences us to see evolution as a ladder. Evolution doesn't work like that though. It's a process that finds local optima f
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by wcoenen 5y ago
I was going off the investopedia definition, which claims warrants and convertible bonds are securities [1]. As far as I understand, those are a type of derivative. But I hadn't understood that some other types of derivatives are not

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