As a rule of the thumb, the longer your stomach (and its bacteria) have to work to get calories extracted from a food (this has a big correlation with the food not being excessively pre-processed, and also has a big correlation with lack of additives) - the better it is for you. :)
We will surely learn the precise reasons later. Until then, acting upon that information is possible without knowing why. :)
The interesting part: Democrat officials made public statements about going silent for a while, and those statements reached headlines even in Europe. You can go silent and still have your statements in headlines.
Also, as far as money and efficiency are involved - if they save money now, they can advertise more later. Currently, advertising against Trump would have a low efficiency, since he currently receives positive attention. I think their current action plan is “let’s wait for Trump to open his mouth”.
Knowing psychology, almost any PR advisor will advise to temporarily cease media attacks against a person who’s been shot.
As a minimum, messages may need to be reworded, because Trump is likely to change his messaging after his narrow escape.
Some notes:
almost no doubt: this will have a mobilizing effect for Trump supporters (“our great leader is being attacked”, etc)
possibly: this will improve Trump’s ratings among voters with no clear political preference (a big story where he’s not the villain is what he needs)
pattern: historically, surviving an assassination attempt has improved a candidate’s chances of getting elected; in the most recent example, Slovakia’s prime minister Fico enjoyed a boost in ratings while in hospital after being seriously wounded
I don’t blame Democrats for temporarily ceasing campaign advertisement. Two principles dictate this: “you don’t kick a person who is already down” (Trump was incredibly lucky and isn’t) and “you don’t attack someone who has martyrdom effect”. Generally, you wait until the dust settles. Democrats too will wait until the dust settles. They will also check the popularity ratings and decide how to proceed.
In my opinion, Democrats would strongly benefit from a younger candidate. I would advise getting someone under 55 to run. Among the wider population, not enough people understand that, as things are, the Democratic candidate is Kamala Harris, her name is just currently Joe Biden. :o
Overall, it seems that Trump has considerable chances of getting elected president. Preventing that will require exceptional effort and considerable luck. Only if the Democrats manage to paint a clear picture of what a Trump presidential term would bring about, and only if that picture causes their voters to show up and vote nearly without exception - only then will things turn out differently.
My personal view from Eastern Europe - contingency plans for a Trump presidency ceasing aid to Ukraine have a very high probability of occurrence now (estimated time: early 2025). Over here, everyone and their cat will researching cheap weapons systems to replace things that only the US can provide. I think that group will now include myself.
1 C more temperature -> air can hold 7% more water vapour
…but the peaks of fringe events are quite a bit taller than +1 C. Raising the average by 1 C raises the peaks considerably more.
Interestingly, warfare also has the effect of:
causing houses to be abandoned, necessitating houses elsewhere while the abandoned ones likely get bombed
decreasing the number of future consumers, whose future footprint would depend on future behaviour patterns (hard to predict)
changing future land use patterns, either due to unexploded ordnance or straight out chemical contamination (there are places in France that are still off limits to economic activity, because World War I contaminated the soil with toxic chemicals), here in Estonia there are still forests from which you don’t want trees in your sawmill because they contain shrapnel and bullets from World War II
I have the feeling that calculating the climate impact of actual war is a difficult job.
But they could calculate the tonnage of spent fuel and energy, that would be easier.
It sure is possible.
A typical “obscenely bright” LED chip might be Cree XML, but many similar chips exist. You’d need a plano-convex or equivalent Fresnel lens - shorter focal lengths favour compact design. Then you need a driver. Some are fixed while some adjustable with a tiny potentiometer. You’d need an 18650 cell holder (it can be made too, an 18650 will go into a leftover piece of 20 mm electrical cabling pipe with a spring-loaded metal cap engineered of something).
Myself, I bought a nice head lamp, but it broke after one year. The driver board failed. Being of the lazy variety, I replaced the board with a resistor to limit current and now it’s been working 3 years already. Not at peak luminosity, the resistor wasn’t optimal of course. :)
I think the EU Commission has done a fairly good job of listing the pros and contras of small modular reactors:
They have some advantages over conventional (large) reactors in the following areas:
Explanation: even a shut down NPP needs cooling, but bigger ones need non-trivial amounts of energy, for example the 5700 MW plant in Zaporizhya in the middle of a war zone needs about 50 MW of power just to safely stay offline, which is why people have been fairly concerned about it. For comparison, a 300 MW micro-reactor brought to its lowest possible power level might be safe without external energy, or a minimal amount of external energy (which could be supplied by an off-the-shelf diesel generator available to every rescue department).
The overview of the Commission mentions:
SMRs have passive (inherent) safety systems, with a simpler design, a reactor core with lower core power and larger fractions of coolant. These altogether increase significantly the time allowed for operators to react in case of incidents or accidents.
I don’t think they will offer economical advantages over renewable power. Some amont of SMRs might however be called for to have a long-term steerable component in the power grid.
Regarding transformers: it’s easier to let a power grid trip offline (and transformers are designed to behave so instead of being overpowered) rather than to keep operating despite a Carrington level solar storm and suffer failure on all longer east-west connections.
Also, I don’t think they used capacitors to protect their high voltage lines back in 1921, because the article Overvoltage Protection of Series Capacitor Banks notes:
“Their first application dates back to 1928 when GE installed such a bank – rated 1.2 MVar – at the Ballston Spa Substation on the 33 kV grid of New York Power and Light. Since then, series capacitor banks have been installed on systems across the globe.”
Also, failure on north-south connections isn’t nearly as likely, so a considerable part of the transformer “population” would be spared from impact.
Thus, while a single strong solar storm within the limit charted out in 1859 would be an extreme inconvenience and strong economic setback, it seems unlikely to end civilization.
A long period of severe solar storms could also result in ozone depletion in the atmosphere and become another extreme inconvenience - through increased UV exposure. However, most forms of life have seen such things in their evolutionary past, and humans have the ability to wear glasses, clothes and apply sun screen.
Being informed that “from now on, we’ll use Microsoft development tools” because our branch in $other_country decided to.
Soon after that, I informed the boss that I’d wrap my projects up (using development tools of my choosing) during the subsequent year, and then leave, and support the projects in future as a subcontractor.
So I went and started my one-person-company. It was hard, but so far it has worked.
It might interest people that the soon-to-be previous biggest thermal energy store is also located in Finland, under the island of Mustikkamaa in the capital city of Helsinki. The city heating company Helsingin Energia “charges” the store by pumping heat out of sewage in summer. I think it was about 10 gigawatt-hours and it’s not pressurized, so water can only reach 90 C over there.
(A side note: if you allow water at 140 C to boil in a controlled manner, you get steam, which can also produce electrical power, although probably in a suboptimal manner.)
Finnish bedrock seems more suitable than average rock for such ventures (which I would call “artificial geothermal energy”) - granite is a poor thermal conductor and a reliable rock for making caverns.
I hope it goes well. :)
Copying out the noteworthy bits.
Claim:
the UAE’s National Center for Meteorology told CNBC it had not seeded any clouds before the storm struck on Tuesday
Verifiable with a bit of FlightRadar searching:
seeding operations tend to take place in the east of the country, far from more populated areas like Dubai. This is largely because of restrictions on air traffic, and means it was unlikely that any seeding particles were still active by the time the storms reached Dubai.
Verifiable with a weather map:
perhaps the best evidence that cloud seeding wasn’t involved in these floods is the fact that it rained all over the region. Oman didn’t do any cloud seeding, but it was even more badly affected by flooding, with a number of casualties.
Now, if I was running a cloud seeding programme and saw a mega-rainstorm coming, I would quickly consult with a person who knows about drainage and call off the flight, saying “we’ve got enough coming”. It doesn’t take superintelligence to make that decision, just a functioning meteorological office and a bit of sense.
…and the final conclusion:
Dubai is comically ill-equipped to deal with rainfall
(because they typically don’t get any)
Poleward winds, which previously made few inroads into the atmosphere above Antarctica, are now carrying more and more warm, moist air from lower latitudes – including Australia – deep into the continent, say scientists, and these have been blamed for the dramatic polar “heatwave” that hit Concordia. Exactly why these currents are now able to plunge so deep into the continent’s air space is not yet clear, however.
Even if they cannot explain the “how”, it seems beyond doubt that the process can happen repeatedly.
When it happens repeatedly, one should plan for faster Antarcic ice loss, since the excess heat of the rest of the planet can now increasingly reach and melt glaciers.
That has implications for coastal regions everywhere on the planet. Don’t build on the coast. Make plans for higher storm surges and sea level rise. And - needless to say - don’t add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
That is quite a lot of interesting experiments, thanks for introducing. :)
I’m inclined to add one more:
51: monitor the radio spectrum for drones (and if their signature looks hostile, warn people about them) - there’s a DIY recipe for a monitoring station out there somewhere, and some Ukrainian guys scan their sky using HackRF
SDR is definitely a technology worth learning. I’m already a happy user of RTL-SDR, but if I want to really see what my WiFi is doing, I should get a HackRF eventually too. (Note: WiFi is too fast to intercept without loss, except with another WiFi card, unless a slower bitrate is deliberately chosen.)
The car is correctly represented, about 0.15 KWh / km is what one gets.
However, the positioning of the e-bike looks strange to me. I’ve looked at previous studies and the e-biker has always been first in efficiency - because the efficiency of a motor far exceeds the efficiency of human digestion and muscles, while weight and speed remain comparable to an ordinary cyclist.
I think someone has calculated food energy incorrectly, or assumed that e-bikes move faster than they do. :)
An exercise in game theory:
That wouldn’t be a smart way to play this game. :( As long as civilized protest gets the goods (or has some effect), one should always prefer that. It’s short-sighted to remodel the playing field to make it dangerous.
I hope the sentence will be something ridiculously small, because otherwise state is sending out a signal “you shouldn’t get caught, consider real sabotage instead of civilized protest”.
Trying to figure out how my heat pump supposedly supports WiFi… in unfathomable and non-standard ways. It’s available as an access point, I can associate and ping it, but no TCP ports listen and no UDP port responds. Nothing cool, undocumented features down to the rocky bottom. When you buy a heat pump and plan to automate its use, check out supported protocols before making a decision. :)
Regarding infiltration of the police - a similar theme played out in Greece during the 2008 economic crisis, when Golden Dawn vied for power - they tried hard to infiltrate the police, and succeeded to a considerable degree.
At some point, they made a mistake, though - GD thugs killed a popular leftist rapper named Pavlos Fyssas. He was able to point out who stabbed him. His death caused widespread rioting. Rioting incapacitated GD temporarily by blocking and damaging their party offices while the security service raided high-ranking members for evidence (apparently they didn’t manage to infiltrate counterintelligence and in the confusion probably couldn’t dispose of evidence even if they knew of incoming raids) …and evidence was plentiful. They were banned and leaders got meaningful sentences in courts.
Only in a country where entering the police force requires lengthy studies to obtain a diploma (and background checks), is there some chance of random bozos not worming their way in. Most states of the US aren’t such a place, sadly.