kale · HackerTrans

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

A side effect of this is that the "pure" olive oil is much more stable and has a higher smoke point. Wikipedia lists "Extra Virgin" at 160C and "Refined" up to 243C. So if you're trying to create a non-stick surface on something, pure olive oil is better than virgin olive oil.

kale

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

I always though sapphire fulfilled the requirements of "transparent aluminium". It's used as a lens material for a lot of phone cameras.

kale

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

My understanding is that Lehman Brothers still has a few employees left. Mainly to sort through the mess of paperwork left behind. Here's an article from 2013 where they still had employees working on liquidating the assets.

[1]: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-lehman-fiveyear-people/you...

kale

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Without branching (or with limited branching, last I checked it masked and re-ran instead). A core implies both instruction and data operations, rather than SIMD behavior.

kale

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

PlayOn desktop works pretty well too. That plus Plex is way more convenient when travelling internationally and in places with poor network access.

kale

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Illinois has had difficulty recently paying lottery winnings to citizens. In 2015, 3900 winning tickets had delayed payouts [0]. Risk should always be factored into financial decisions, and risk of a lottery institution going insolvent is non-zero.

[0] http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/27/news/illinois-lottery-state-...

kale

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Stainless Steel is a huge class of metals, most (but not all) have nickel in them. Also alloys of cupronickel, coin metal, cobalt chromium, and nitinol all have nickel in them. And certain countries lie constantly about nickel content in metal they sell. When we source for medical implants, we have to specify no material from certain countries, because we can't trust their certifications, and we can't re-do all of the certification testing on our own.

Nickel is just too useful (and pre-existing in a lot of metal ores, I think) to stop using it, despite the fact that a large percentage of people are allergic to it.

kale

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

From a toxicity standpoint they are safer. Bismuth can be consumed in medicine (Pepto Bismol). I work in toxicology and we are worried about the "big four": lead, cadmium, mercury, and arsenic. These are from the Q3D guidelines on toxicity. Tungsten and Bismuth aren't on the list at all. Nickel is a unique concern, since it's so dang useful in metal alloys, and a high percentage of people have an allergic reaction to nickel particles.

Edit for a plug: Don't throw away NiCd batteries folks! Recycle them properly!

https://www.call2recycle.org/locator/

kale

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

My daughter has an Android tablet. For a while it was vanilla Android until I realized she was downloading an app, tapping the initial ad on the app, which lead to another app. Repeat ad nauseam until she couldn't install anything else. She isn't able to distinguish quality of apps, and was installing apps that were one giant copyright violation (My little Ponies, Mickey Mouse, and a Minion, all in the same app!).

For the life of me I can't figure out how these apps make money. They're like flotsam in the Google App store, so they're making money somehow. For all I know they turn on the microphone and send the data to a rogue organization.

This is very different to when I grew up. I had to write my games in Basic (I got them in the back of a catalog!) and I learned how to modify them. I plan on giving her free use of any of my Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, and if she shows interest in those big, expensive RGB LED matrices, I'll buy those for her. She can go nuts with those!

kale

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

The senate has the filibuster provision to give the minority party the ability to slow down or block legislation. To overcome a filibuster, 3/5* of the senate have to vote to end it.

At some point, the senate was afraid of gridlock, so there was a special provision made for things that deal with money (not sure if tax only), where things that have a minimal impact on the budget can overcome a filibuster with a simple majority. The parliamentarian is the one who decides if a bill is "minimal impact", which is set at $1.5T at the moment.

Therefore the parliamentarian has decided that changing the non-profit law would cause this tax bill to be more than $1.5T in net change, meaning it can be filibustered.

Edit: Wikipedia article [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentarian_of_the_United_...

[2] * corrected my math, thanks to dragonwriter

kale

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Titanium is also a relatively poor conductor of heat. Aluminum conducts heat over 10 times better than Titanium. Use of aluminium would be much better at conducting heat away from the body of the notebook.

kale

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

So I'm reading that LASEK still cuts a flap, just a thinner one than LASIK. It also appears to have a longer healing time than LASIK[0].

It does appear to have fewer complications with the flap, since it's a thinner one, and less chance of hazing.

[0]http://www.the-lasik-directory.com/lasik_lasek_chart.html

kale

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

No, Yagis have a single driven element like a dipole, and you have longer elements behind the driven element (reflectors), and shorter elements in front (directors I think?).

kale

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

I'm not an expert in the field, but I do annealing work on occasion (simulated annealing, which is kind of like copying polymer annealing).

Simulated annealing is just an optimization. I use it for modelling human motion. You have the position and acceleration of each bone in the legs and feet. You start by deciding on a variable (say, reducing energy expenditure for gait), and then letting the algorithm alter variables and attempt to minimize a variable.

So if quantum annealing is anything like simulated annealing, you aren't "solving" for a single, correct answer, but getting a solution that minimizes or maximizes an outcome faster than brute force.

So a quantum computer could solve "What is the factorization of this huge number?", while quantum annealing could solve "Given these 30 different engine configurations, which combination of intake pressure, fuel flow rate, turbocharger performance curve, and engine timing would result in the best fuel efficiency?"

kale

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

This is the frustrating part to me. I bought a house with a broker I used a lot (flipped abused houses for a few years). He sold the loan to company A, which was great. They sold the loan to company B after a year, and the nightmare started.

One month, they withdrew my mortgage twice on the same day (found out when my debit card declined at the grocery store).

They sent a mortgage interest statement in January. I filled out my taxes, then after I had gotten my refund, they sent a corrected mortgage interest statement. I had to make a judgement call on whether this required re-filing taxes and the expense that entailed.

The worst was when we got a $2500 check from the mortgage company, saying they had recalculated our escrow, and they had overestimated it initially. We spent most of that money on setting up a nursery for a new baby. Two months later, we received another letter saying, "whoops, our bad, we actually did have escrow calculated correctly the first time. Pay us $2500 in 30 days or your house note is going up by $200 a month until escrow is funded again".

EDIT: Recalled another issue with this company. I'd get e-mails monthly: "You're late on your payment. We're about to foreclose on your house". This would be followed by an e-mail: "Our computer system is being upgraded. Please disregard late payment e-mails if you've paid your mortgage. We should have this fixed within three months".

kale

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

I know war and tension have always been part of the modern era, but it does seem like we're going back to cold war levels of tension again. U.S. vs Saudi Arabia. U.S. and Europe vs Russia. India vs Pakistan. North and South Korea (although it's been like that for a long time). One "Archduke Ferdinand" event and things might get ugly. With as much internal tension that we see inside the US right now, politicians might not be so reluctant to go to war. Giving citizens a common enemy might calm things domestically.

kale

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Breeder reactors run on a different cycle, and allow uranium to capture neutrons and turn into plutonium (spallation). Last time I checked the US had two breeder reactors operational, to make material for nuclear weapons, and one ready but not operational.

I think we could take a vast majority of the nuclear waste we have today and turn it into fuel. But it would make plutonium as part of the process, which makes some lawmakers uncomfortable since it's easier to make small nuclear bombs from plutonium.

Why can't we build a breeder reactor near Yucca mountain, have a reactor core that's completely closed off from human interaction, and breed react current nuclear waste into energy? Design it to need refueling every 10 years or so, and have local national guard present during each refueling session. Considering it should need much less interaction than a non-breeding reactor, I think the plutonium threat could be mitigated.

kale

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Biofilms are nasty stuff. I did part of my master's thesis on them. They group together and communicate with each other (with electrical grids, according to Dr. Costerton, one of the forefront researchers of biofilms before he passed away). Some species use the film to coordinate a certain percentage of bugs stay in a "dormant" state, so they won't intake an antibiotic and die.

For artificial joints like a hip and a knee joint, you have a lot of exposed materials like titanium, stainless steel, or medical polymer, so it doesn't have an immune system. Getting a biofilm infection forming on an artificial joint sometimes means taking the implant out, even if it's working fine.

So biofilms are a tough problem. They're far more sinister than conventional bacterial colonies. Since this is in the digestive tract, I wonder if some type of detergent can be found that simply dissolves the film matrix, washing away the bacteria and fungi.

kale

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Mathematically, "inside" our stomachs and intestines are "outside" our body. They are also outside of our body by looking at epithelial tissue, which has an inside/outside orientation.

kale

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

> Does sleep perform the same function as melatonin? A hormone that allows greater sleep "efficiency" than normal sleep.

Melatonin is the hormone that regulates sleep normally. You're taking additional sleep hormone by taking it orally. So sleep is melatonin.

It's the hormone that is theorized to be involved in the "blue light" sleep effect. When the high-wavelength cones are stimulated, melatonin release is reduced, according to current theory. [0]

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11487664

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