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> 2. Deal with the things that are much harder to electrify.

What about wars? Unlikely anyone would completely electrify their armies anytime soon, and that blocks even starting the transition in the rest of economy. Some drones are electric, but you still need to move heavy stuff and many people in denied environments, and stationary electric grids are still more vulnerable than liquid fuels.

Re:Philae's extraordinary comet landing relived (2024) on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @09:18AM (#48732380)
Comet colours would be extremely bland and boring to a human eye (and to the regular cameras we use on Earth) - the Sun is far, no atmosphere to have meaningful shades of grey, and the material they are made of is not really vibrant at all. The budget is better spent on instuments and the cameras that capture images in the invisible spectrum (which could be always false-colorized into colorful "photos" of galaxies and nebulae we are all used to see)
Re:Earth's largest modern crater discovered in Southern China on Thursday November 13, 2025 @03:52AM (#45912468)
This one is 11700 yo and 900 meters in diameter, but TIL that people are also fond of looking for fresh (<10k yo) craters [1] as small as 24 metres [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_structures_on_E...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalgaranga_crater

Re:If you don't tinker, you don't have taste on Wednesday October 29, 2025 @05:26AM (#45744507)
> ...there are two kinds of people, those who do things only if it helps them achieve a goal, and those who do things just because. The ideal, of course, is to be a mix of both.

This is related to what Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance calls the romantic (subjective, "artistic") and the classical (objective, "scientific") understanding. He, too, points that the ideal is to enjoy both. Not because there are both useful and have their place and time, but because this is a false dichotomy to begin with and, ideally, one should refrain from defining the splitting and abandon both concepts (after all, the Zen in the title is there for a reason).

Re:Joining Apple Computer on Sunday June 08, 2025 @03:29PM (#44219027)
I'm curious, could you plz share the source for the last claim? In my field - distant from the book - it's quite respected.
Re:Soldiers in combat can kill without moral injury on Friday April 18, 2025 @12:58AM (#43725158)
> "Original data collection for both studies was funded by the Norwegian Department of Defense; however, data extractions were archival and, hence, not funded."
Also, if we are talking X-rays, in Ukraine it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Puluj, not Röntgen. Although, to his credit, the latter apparently did cite Puluj when using the X-ray emitting Puluj Lamp (Röntgen attended his lectures after all).
Re:Building a Medieval Castle from Scratch on Thursday January 23, 2025 @05:27PM (#42808715)
Haven't tried it, but it seems you could get, within 6 km, to Saint-Saveur-de-Puisaye - on bus 861 (need to call them) from Auxerre Saint-Gervais which is reachable by train from Paris.
Re:Why do bees die when they sting you? on Saturday January 18, 2025 @05:17PM (#42751854)
Most likely, yes, like the loudness of baby crying. Humans are pack animals so any predator attracted by snoring or baby cry, and deciding to check it out would be in a very very big trouble.
Carl Sagan proposed something along the lines in 1961 (but using bacteria to convert CO2 to graphite), however later it became clear that wouldn't work, in part, because the depth of the created sediment layer would be >100 meters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus

Ironically, borsch is actually a famous Ukrainian soup and has about 20 ingredients (sometimes more, it depends on a region, village and family). Why one would reduce to only 4 ingredients and continue calling it borsch is beyond me.

Regarding cabbage, it is indeed the only ingredient of a different soup, called "schi", which (perhaps unsurpisingly) is of Russian origin.

Re:Apple Mobile Processors Are Now Made in America. By TSMC on Thursday September 19, 2024 @05:48AM (#41590175)
Yes, in Germany all months when you are expected to in the oncall rotation are basically an addendum to your usual contract that you sign and receive more money even if nothing ever happened during your shifts.
I'm suprised the post and comments here do not cite the famous Nature paper by S. Carlson - "A Double-blind Test of Astrology" - which performed a very similar experiment 40 years ago.

(and yes, astrology didn't work back then too)

[1] https://muller.lbl.gov/papers/Astrology-Carlson.pdf

Re:Should Adults Be Consuming Breast Milk? on Sunday June 11, 2023 @04:32PM (#36285353)
It can't be iron though, as it's not soluble in milk. In fact, that's the reason why, in the 3rd trimester of pregnancy, babies stock iron for the first 4-6 months of (postpartum) life, basically, for all the way up until eating solids, and why pre-term babies have to be supplemented with iron because they didn't have a chance to complete stocking.
Re:The Difference Between European and American Butter on Saturday April 29, 2023 @10:17AM (#35753079)
What prevents people from biking these 5 miles? Can't be capitalism, because bikes are cheaper than cars or just fuel with amortization costs for such trips.

For 2+ years I had to bike 12 km each time I needed groceries. In fact, this was in France.

Re:Ask HN: How to deal with regret of not having kids on Wednesday October 19, 2022 @03:54PM (#33267194)
Birth of the first (and only first) child triggers what might be the largest brain rewiring in males since pubety. Women don't seem to undergo a rewiring of the same scale [1].

To me, this makes sense, given how unusual the new skillset has to be compared to pre-fatherhood life (manipulations with the newborn, deciphering needs, new attetion patterns etc.).

[1] Mentioned in the book by Stanislas Dehaene, "Consciousness and the Brain", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_and_the_Brain

Re:Can Trees Heal Heart Disease? on Thursday October 13, 2022 @03:49AM (#33188376)
Yes. The Reichenbach Common Cause Principle [1] tells us that behind every correlation there is a confounding variable that causally influences both of the corrrelated variables, so the project may very well be onto something.

The article already hypothesises a few confounders (leaf hair trapping particles, plants sequestering pollutants in other ways) but psychological reasons could even turn out to be stronger, given how little of exercise is sufficient to offset cadio-vascular risks - more plants around make it more likely for people to go outside for walking or running.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physics-Rpcc/

Re:We're improving search results when you use quotes on Friday August 05, 2022 @02:02PM (#32359642)
You can use the UBlacklist addon to achieve that.