wcoenen

53 ms·

481.
by wcoenen 5y ago
Update: a relevant article appeared on phys.org this week about starch synthesis. https://phys.org/news/2021-09-chinese-scientists-starch-synt...
482.
by wcoenen 5y ago
Not a prank. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/04/smile-to-pay-c...
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by wcoenen 5y ago
That's about $7500 per victim. That seems like a lot to hold outside of a bank.
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by wcoenen 5y ago
> It's extremely, extremely unlikely that we're going to beat plants on efficiency of biomass production I'm not so sure this is true. If it turned out that a more efficient pathway is possible with solar energy collecti
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by wcoenen 5y ago
I'm not sure why the title of the article focuses on mining. China had already banned mining. This was very visible as a drop in the hash rate over the summer[1]. What has been announced now (by the Chinese central bank and a bunch of
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by wcoenen 5y ago
> Continuing with your naive reasoning, let's make synthetic corn instead of farming too because why not needlessly maximize complexity of the systems that we have to maintain? Sarcasm aside, it is worth exploring. The typical pho
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by wcoenen 5y ago
Wind turbines that need to deal with ice typically have an internal de-icing system, with electrical heaters[1]. The meme about de-icing with chemicals was spread by oil and gas consultant Luke Legate. The picture he shared was actually sho
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by wcoenen 5y ago
> Why annoy people like this? Does it matter? Someone is going to do it anyway. They might just think that it's funny that they can make all the tags in the subway car start making noise. So maybe the question should be "why
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by wcoenen 5y ago
I'm a little confused about the issue description, because "mov" is not a MIME type. Examples of MIME types: "text/plain", "text/html", "image/png" "application/pdf"
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by wcoenen 5y ago
The price chart in the article showing the +50% rise is labeled "IT durum wheat DELFIRST". I believe the "IT" stands for "Italy", so this is already showing the effect on the Italian market.
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by wcoenen 5y ago
> Anyway going from 2-3€/kg to 2,3-3,6€/kg wouldn’t make big difference. The article shows that durum wheat prices have increased by more than 50%. So assuming that the dominant factor in the price of pasta is the price of wh
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by wcoenen 5y ago
The near and far side of the moon spent the same amount of time in darkness, so there's no advantage gained by putting it on the far side. Edit: I just realized this idea comes from radio telescopes. Those would actually benefit from
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by wcoenen 5y ago
That seems to be based on a quote from the book "The Wizardry Compiled" by Rick Cook: Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to pro
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by wcoenen 5y ago
The article links to a post by Fitch Ratings[1] (from two months ago) about how the dumping of stablecoin reserves could affect the rest of the financial market. That still seems to be the most plausible mechanism for contagion. [1] https:
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by wcoenen 5y ago
> I feel like any human driver would give a wide berth to parked vehicles. Plenty of human drivers have hit vehicles parked on the shoulder. It's not difficult to find news items about such accidents. Random examples: https:&#x2
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by wcoenen 5y ago
It is also done in Europe by Sofort / Pay Now / Klarna. (It's all the same thing, there is some brand confusion because of takeovers and translation).
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by wcoenen 5y ago
It can continue until people start withdrawing physical cash in large amounts, which will happen when the negative rate starts outweighing the cost and risk of storing cash. After that, further decreases of the interest rate can only work i
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by wcoenen 5y ago
It's not unusual for this time of the year. The thing to look at is SSTA (sea surface temperature anomaly), that will tell you how much the current temperature is deviating from the long term average for this month. https://
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by wcoenen 5y ago
The unsubscribe link should lead to a separate HTML form describing the unsubscription and a "confirm" button.
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by wcoenen 5y ago
HTTP GET requests should not be interpreted by the server as a request to change something. That's what POST, PUT, DELETE and PATCH are for.
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by wcoenen 5y ago
> Consider that a table has 10^verylargenumber of "spherical" atoms That "verylargenumber" exponent is not actually a large number. It's probably close to 28. E.g. for a rough estimate, pretend that the table h
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by wcoenen 5y ago
> while population has tripled (300% growth). Tripling would be 200% growth, quadrupling would be 300% growth. Therefore I wasn't sure which one you meant, and I checked: according to [1] there was roughly a tripling from 1.5M to
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by wcoenen 5y ago
> The current understanding is that since electrons are quantum particles, they can only gain or lose energy through quantized packets Just to clarify. An electron moving freely through a vacuum can move at any speed; it is not restric
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by wcoenen 5y ago
Even ignoring galaxies, there's also the cosmic microwave background. It turns out that there is a rest frame in which this background looks the same in all directions. But if you keep accelerating in one direction, the CMB coming from
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by wcoenen 5y ago
By applying carbon pricing to imports. https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/eu-pro...
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by wcoenen 5y ago
> 41,000? I thought the best estimate for the Platonic year, the time for the precession of the equinoxes to complete one revoution, was 25,772 years? Yes, I mixed up the precession cycle with the obliquity cycle.
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by wcoenen 5y ago
Phone batteries are typically used very aggressively by charging them to 100% every day. The time spent near 100% causes most of the damage. EVs typically come with a configurable maximum charge limit (e.g. 80% or 90%) which avoids a lot of
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by wcoenen 5y ago
> we need to have an agreed starting point, and by historical accident we've all adopted an estimated (likely slightly incorrect) birth year for the founder of one of the world's major religions. It is hard to pick a culturall
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by wcoenen 5y ago
> You could be asked to sign a message provided to you by the government. That would be enough. That would only link you to one particular address. Modern wallets are typically "hierarchical deterministic" as described in BIP
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by wcoenen 5y ago
If many different initial conditions can evolve to almost the same state, then reversing time must necessarily blow up small errors/perturbations. It's the same reason why driving with a trailer backwards is more difficult than fo

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