bsmitty5000
bsmitty5000 on Hacker News
I started watching the video linked at the top and the first anecdote is about Elon Musk using first principles to determine he could be rockets cheaper than current companies. He compared $130m to the price of raw materials of a rocket at $2m. But isn’t that comparing apples to oranges? And the exact thing that would get you in trouble when doing back-of-the-napkin estimates. That is, $130m is how much rocket companies at the time were _charging_ NASA for rockets, not how much it actual cost those companies to build.
Yes this was my thought when he implied not knowing the proxy settings, or even that you must connect to a proxy, to get internet was a sign that someone “doesn’t know computers”.
It’s like a mechanic making a blog post complaining that people don’t know how cars work because they can’t change their oil or brake pads and somehow that’s a bad thing.
I just started swimming with a local Masters group a few months ago and can definitely notice a difference in my mood if I miss a couple practices. I thought it was just my imagination but didn’t even think about the breath aspect of it.
My first job out of school was final test for a semiconductor in Phoenix that had a small fab in Gilbert. I remember we took a rabbit suited tour there as part of the new hire orientation, it was pretty neat. The one thing though that stuck with me is how much water a fab needs on a daily basis. I can’t remember the exact number, I just remember thinking how stupid it was to build fabs in Phoenix.
But then again, the amount of lawns and greenways in Phoenix compared to a place like Tucson, it’s pretty clear most folks in Phoenix don’t much care about water conservation.
Do you have any sources to recommend if I wanted to learn more about this thought?
> “Something we may learn from this research is: although our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to leave us to rest, their brains may be replaying some of the nicest moments they experienced in their lives.”
Note to self: die in a way that keeps my brain intact for a few seconds after death.
I'm not trying to justify not acting on climate change. That original comment is really just a snippet of some internal thought trains I've had with myself after we decided to grow some of our own food- where the price of deciding to be a meat-eater is not hidden behind some shrink wrapped plastic. Specifically the argument that eating meat is natural- well where do you draw the line between rationalizing our behaviors as being natural for some actions and trying to elevate ourselves above our primitive selves for others.
I'm not a philosopher or anything. of course slavery is bad- if slavery is natural and I'm against slavery, does that eventually lead to me having to be vegan in order to be internally consistent? Maybe, but I'm still not ready to give up meat.
I'm raising pigs for the first time at home and I'm having a similar dilemma with the slaughter date just a few days away. They're like 300lbs dogs- playing with each other, running to me when I come out (although this might be just because I feed them most times I go out there), friendly with the kids.
I think it comes from a viewpoint that all death is bad and all life is good. something I think is probably pretty culturally specific and kinda ingrained in me since childhood. I was raised Catholic with everyone around me believing that after you die you go to Heaven, but still family members dying was a tragedy, instead of say, it being a celebration since didn't they just get into eternal paradise?
But death isn't bad. It's actually necessary for life to continue. The circle of life, carbon cycle, nitrogen cycle, all that stuff. From that point of view, eating other animals is nothing. It's an efficient, and delicious, way of surviving and passing on genes. We're not above nature. We're in a closed system here that we can't ever rise above. Although with that point of view stuff like climate change takes on a different meaning. If we can't rise above nature then climate change is a natural phenomena even though it's accelerated by humans. Just like the Great Oxidation Event.
This is an off-the-cuff response so maybe I'm completely wrong, but I recently started baking sourdough at home with my own starter.
The starter is simply flour and water, but after a while of refreshing with new flour and water eventually the ever-present wild yeast and (good) bacteria start to grow really quickly.
I usually wrap with saran wrap and when the starter is really active the saran wrap expands a bunch. From what I understand this is the gas from the bacteria eating their way through the flour.
Could excess gas in humans be a similar situation? ie lots of gas means our microbiome is busy eating and farting a bunch. Which to me sounds like a good thing. Maybe not so good for those around you.
I’m hitting the paywall so I can’t read the article, but the headline reminds me of something Andrew Huberman talked about in one of his recent podcasts-
https://youtu.be/rW9QKc-iFoY
It’s a small segment at the beginning, about a recent study showing how fermented foods help decrease inflammation possibly through increased gut bacteria diversity.
> 5) Reusable launch technology. The world still doesn’t grok this. They will. It (long term) enables access to orbit comparable to really long distance airfare or air freight.
I worked at ULA for a year about five years ago. At that time they were arguing that it wasn't going to be cost effective. Back then though there may have been one or two SpaceX landings.
since I left I haven't kept up with this debate at all. Do you know if ULA changed their stance after all the successful launches?
Wow this is the first time I've ever seen a contrarian opinion on this book. I've never read Why We Sleep but I see it pop up in threads really often.
Pretty old but I read them for the first time in 2019: Microcosmos by Lynn Margulis and Full House by Stephen Jay Gould. Both of them really blew me away and changed my worldview.
I also started on The Vital Question by Nick Lane but haven't finished it yet. But I would recommend anyways based on what I've read so far.
> And for nitrogen fixers, it's not at all clear that the nitrogen they fix is available to the plants around them. It might not become available until they die back and rot.
Do you mean it’s a question of if they provide more nitrogen then they use themselves? I literally just read from a children’s book in the nitrogen cycle about how bacteria that live on the roots of some plants are the only way plants can access it.
Thank you for this, I love good book recommendations.
If by microbes you mean bacteria. Maybe we also contain fungus as well though.
And actually, if you're looking at cell count our cells are outnumbered by about 10:1, it's incredible!
This seems to me like someone criticizing introductory physics courses because they're not taking into account air friction and all the other minutiae from the very beginning.
If someone progresses to the point where these misconceptions really become an issue I think they would be corrected organically.
This article doesn't mention the declining insect population at all but I would think it's clear that a quickly declining food source would be a major cause of population decline. I wonder if there's a similar decline in other animals that rely on insects, eg bats. Although, interestingly, the article does mention neonicotinoids as a direct reason for the decline in population.
It's hard to imagine humans taking the corrective solution here. My gut says we either continue on this road and completely destroy the natural world a la Trantor in Foundation, just one huge mega-city that fabricates all of its needs, or we die out and the planet recovers on its own.
Can anyone speak to the different translations? My local library doesn't have this book and the cheapest Amazon version is the 1973 translation of the German translation of the Polish original. But I wonder if it's worth getting the direct Polish translation from 2006.
I think this is the first place I've seen recently that says steady-state cardio is better than HIIT for anything. It does seem odd that they study they cite compared equal times for steady-state vs HIIT; I thought one of the main benefits was with HIIT you can see benefits with less time.
Maybe you meant to say Earth is anti-human. Earth is incredibly life friendly. There's been five previous mass extinction events and each time life has rebounded amazingly.
There's also immediate benefits, like helping to alleviate some of the current issues with our mass-produced food chain, eg less concern w/ salmonella in your romaine if you grew it yourself, higher quality eggs and meat if you control what your birds eat, etc.
I'm a bit more impressed with this article. This person posted the project to reddit 14 hours ago [
https://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads/comments/bw6xs7/lyricsr...] and already here's this professional looking write up generating additional clicks...really makes me wonder how much residual income a site like reddit creates. Reminds me of remora fish somehow..
That's amazing and I can't believe how much this sounds like what I'm trying to go for! I got my first two hives setup on Saturday and we finally moved our first group of 12 chickens out of the house and into the coop yesterday.
If you don't mind, how many hives do you have and how do you sell the honey? I was always thinking I would need more hives than I could ever manage to actually get enough to sell. My goal was to get into gourmet mushrooms and sell through the office or maybe get attached to a CSA or something.
Ironic because intelligent people should know correlation != causation? Well, I think sometimes correlation could indicate the cause, you just can't prove it. And in the case of myself I choose to believe!