Solar farms produce 50 times more energy per acre than corn grown for ethanol.
A rabbit hole I started working down was how much ammonia would cost is the hydrogen was from electrolysis power by solar. It's sort of competitive.
Whack bit. 2200 calories a day is 2.5kwh. That's what a 400W solar panel puts out.
Which made me wonder about just synthesizing amino acids directly. Why make ammonia and spray it in crops that use sunlight (2% efficient) to turn it into protein.
You start digging an there are two dozen companies working the bioreactor angle. Hydrogen + N2 to feed nitrogen fixing bacteria.
I find this way more interesting than using AI to replace MBA's and code monkeys.
I stumbled on something also interesting. The oxygen from photosynthesis comes from water not CO2. So all the energy from food is essentially from splitting water.
Also I think I read in a book on aeronautics which was published in the 1950's that more energy is required from oil to grow food than the food itself. Trying to look that up again just now the internet spits out an efficiency as low as 10%.
You have to be a little careful about that figure because a lot of the energy comes from natural gas, not oil. Natural gas is a much bigger thing now than it was in the 1950s. Natural gas in the US is mostly "dry", that is not associated with oil production.
I have a friend that worked for a big corp back 15 years ago managing Macs. At one point they told him they were going to can him and switch the Mac uses to Windows. Didn't go anywhere when he pointed out he was managing all their Mac users. And he was managing 5 times as many Macs as his coworkers were managing Window Boxes.
The thing is the billionaires are terrified of US. The point of these surveillance systems isn't to make us safer. Because we're actually pretty safe already. We're not going to be assassinated, kidnapped, or beaten because we pissed someone off.
It's to make people like Garrett Langley feel protected from us.
> The thing is the billionaires are terrified of US.
Are they though? The odds of any kind of coordinated response that could seriously threaten the billionaires seem next-to-none. Flock seems to be a lot more offensive than defensive - it enables the targeting and mass surveillance in order to find and punish the 'right people', as well as mass tracking to create yet another datapoint to understand the way people move, think and coordinate. The defensive side is already covered through internet services, like social media. They don't have much to fear. I reckon that a powerful/rich enough person could kill a stranger on the street in plain view of a huge crowd and have absolutely nothing happen to them.
Friend of mine used to work for a single digit billionaire. No one you know. His name barely comes up in a search. He said he found out after a few years that the guy had been kidnapped and held for ransom.
No he didn't. Luigi turned out to be an anomaly. He proved the public didn't have the stomach for revolution because none was forthcoming. He was reduced to a meme and thrown in prison.
He allegedly murdered a CEO — regardless whether it was him or not, a bloodthirsty CEO was murdered by a random member of the public. Other bloodthirsty CEOs no longer feel safe from the public.
Anyone can get shot by a random member of the public, that's the price we all pay for our American freedoms. The fear (and some might say hope) was that Luigi represented something bigger, an actual dawning of class consciousness in the US, but he didn't. He was just a guy with a gun and a grudge and there are literally millions of those.
"some" implies more than one. There was only one. There weren't any more, and there doesn't seem to be any sign of more. And this happened in a city where people get shot to death every day.
Life is literally no less safe for CEOs in the US post-Mangione then prior. The whole narrative that he represented some kind of social or cultural inflection point against CEOs was simply false, and the ones that are actually afraid already hire security because getting kidnapped for ransom is a much bigger threat than being shot in the street.
That hardware real time clocks keep time in date and time drives me batty. And no one does the right thing which is just a 64 bit counter counting 32khz ticks. Then use canned tested code to convert that to butt scratching monkey time.
Story my old boss designed an STD Bus RTC card in 1978 or something. Kept time in YY:MM:DD HH:MM:SS 1/60 sec. And was battery backed. With shadow registers that latched the time. Couple of years later redesigned it as a 32 bit seconds counter. With a 32khz sub seconds counter. Plus a 48 bit offset register. What was a whole card was now a couple of 4000 series IC's on the processor card. He wrote 400 bytes of Z80 assembly to convert that to date and time. He said was tricky to get right but once done was done.
I would guess that’s because those chips were designed for use in systems that didn’t have a CPU, but reading the data sheet, it doesn’t look as if you can easily hook up this thing to 7-segment LEDs, so maybe this is a matter of “this is how we always did it, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, and then ‘fix’ it, anyways?
I had some interactions with the guy responsible for the code that made our system do the right thing around Daylight Saving. Listening to him talk out loud as he thought about bugs was fascinating. He was clearly one of the smartest people I've met and I would quickly fall behind as he rationalized problems to himself. What a marvelous mind.
The Renesas RTC divides the 32khz clock by 256. And after waking up doesn't update the shadow registers till the next tick. So if you wake out of deep sleep you don't know what the time is for 8ms.
I know of one that draws 0.5uA in normal mode but 12uA in binary counter mode.
I propose naming the code that ensures this 8ms has elapsed "the yawn".
But to be fair, it doesn't seem that onerous an issue - the biggest problem would have been if this was completely undocumented. One obvious workaround is to read the time immediately on wake up, and then ignore the result until reading the time returns something different.
I'm curious about using a hybrid system where you have multiple electric fans. For instance 2 turbines and 4 fans. Advantage is smaller diameter for the same mass flow. And more redundancy. A negative is the weight of the electric motors and generators. If you added a battery you have some other advantages. Less pucker when you lose an engine. And better throttle response.
Another advantage is you can place the fans all along the wing getting you better stall resistance as the flow doesn't detach as easily. There's already a prototype of a hybrid plane that does this:
Or you can use a horizontal-axis style helicopter rotor with variable pitch, and it gets you omnidirectional thrust (VTOL) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclogyro
There are a lot of interesting possible alternate histories (only requiring a few tweaks to physics) where fixed wings never really work and horizontal rotorcraft dominate, especially in a world where lighter-than-air craft are common - something like a hybrid between a zeppelin and a paddleboat.
There was never any possible alternate history where those alternative lift or propulsion approaches could dominate. The fundamental flaw is that in case of power loss they can't really glide or autorotate. Perhaps useful for some limited drone applications but not safe enough for humans.
Friend of mine was naturalized under the Simpson Mazzoli act. He said while their application was being processed he and his brothers would repeat the same joke. One would say It's Saturday night! What are we going to do? And the rest would say in a sad chorus, 'stay home'
Personally I think immigrating to the US illegally requires a level of social skills and level headedness that is negatively associated with criminality.
> Shouldn't we all want H1B rather than offshoring?
That's my opinion.
However there are issues with who's sucking the tit. If you bring in a bunch of people from outside instead of hiring locals that's not a win for the locals. On the other hand whats the difference for someone in San Francisco if Apple hires a guy from India vs New Jersey? Not much.
And H1B visa's can be low grade indentured servitude.
A rabbit hole I started working down was how much ammonia would cost is the hydrogen was from electrolysis power by solar. It's sort of competitive.
Whack bit. 2200 calories a day is 2.5kwh. That's what a 400W solar panel puts out.
Which made me wonder about just synthesizing amino acids directly. Why make ammonia and spray it in crops that use sunlight (2% efficient) to turn it into protein.
You start digging an there are two dozen companies working the bioreactor angle. Hydrogen + N2 to feed nitrogen fixing bacteria.
I find this way more interesting than using AI to replace MBA's and code monkeys.
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