Lost_Geometer
No bio...
User ID: 1246
Lost_Geometer
21d ago
Half of the year with the surpluses we could split corundum into al and oxidize, in the winter burn it as thermite.
Not having run the numbers I rather like this solution. We need aluminum anyway, so surplus production isn't as big an issue. Moreover Al is about as ideal a long term energy storage medium as exists -- it's abundant, extraordinarily energy dense by both weight and volume, and safe-ish to handle. Getting power out can likely use existing thermal technology on a large scale, and possibly electrochemical means on a small scale.
Lost_Geometer
21d ago
Methane from hydrogen is actually medium efficient -- apparently up to 80% if you use archea. Hydrogen from water is another 75% though, so together it's far worse than, say, flow cells. But in a world where power assumed to be cheap, but long term storage and transport expensive, it becomes very viable.
Lost_Geometer
21d ago
Could you share some details? From where I sit it's hard to estimate the land requirements for electrochemical storage because there is so little market for multi-day systems. In particular, long term storage should depend on available volume, not area.
Lost_Geometer
11d ago
As far as I've seen commercial storage targets shorter duration, less than a day, so I don't really have a source for how the duration scaling works. The limit is where the footprint is dictated by the storage of redox active material. Large tanks are a bit squat, but still contain enormous volumes reasonably compactly.
Lost_Geometer
3mo ago
I hardly ever have the resources to participate here, so one can rightly criticize for lack of standing. That said, as a regular lurker I'm pleased overall with the moderation -- it's the best I've seen.
On the topic of bans for longstanding posters, though, I agree that long duration (> 2d) bans should be reserved for those who act primarily in bad faith. I don't mind @HlynkaCG being sent to the kennel for a day, but I'd be sad to see him forced out.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
I think folks should recognize that a crowd trying to restrain someone will end badly a certain percentage of the time, regardless of whether neck restraints are used. Violence is random like that -- people don't die when they should, others die when they shouldn't. Some just drop dead from the stress. Add the extreme exhaustion of fighting for ones life, a person who would otherwise survive might not be able adjust their position to breathe adequately. Like with drowning, the death process and mechanism might not be obvious to observers.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
On a literal level, no -- the fossil record records things that have died in favorable circumstances, not things that have reproduced.
On the evolutionary level, 30_000_000_000_000_000 sterile social insects argue otherwise.
How is any of this relevant to the conversation?
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
"We were scared for our lives."
No. No reasonable person would be in that situation, and, "survivor" or not, it cheapens our discourse to tolerate such statements with not even gentle push-back.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
I'm pretty far left, but the author doesn't really give much of a reason to think much of anything. He opens with a weakman, demolishes it, and then proceeds to loosely related speculation. In particular, he doesn't do anything to establish that rape behaves differently than other violent interpersonal crimes. Pretty much everyone knows that blacks victimize whites at far higher rates than vice versa across the board, a fact that is much more reliably established using better reported, less heterogeneous types of crime.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
Contrary to what most people think, rich people work more.
"Facts" not in evidence. I suspect the only jobs where marginal productivity doesn't decline sharply with time worked are highly monitored, low intensity, repetitive ones, like warehouse worker or truck driver. Hence your inequality statement is backwards -- the people who get hurt most by shorter hours are already low paid.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
I guess this is part of why I hated teaching. My viewpoint would have been that (ethically) maximizing the students' chances of passing the test should be heavily prioritized. Even if the fun stuff is better for their psyches, they're paying for a leg up on the competition.
So the worry is that -- if one prioritizes passing the test at all -- the bare facts being tested militate strongly towards certain ideas, and that ethical use of class time does not allow room to introduce complementary material. This is compounded by the fact that so much of the test seems to be free response, and teachers need to be convinced that these would be rubric-ed tightly enough so as to not be graded on ideological parroting. Professionally, I've only seen how the AP grades calculus, so maybe you can tell if such a thing is even possible? My own high school experience was that one wants to approximate ChatGPT's response as well as possible, which is what we'd like to avoid here.
Finally, I found the sample questions to be interesting and challenging (IANA historian). Students would presumably find the course valuable, but (IMO) Florida would be right to claim that the Black experience is better understood with every bell hooks reading replaced by Tupac Shakur.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
I'm not convinced the evidence for superiority of phonics over all other methods is as strong as you suggest it is. Even if that was the case, however, that fact by itself would not necessarily imply anything about how schools should operate.
Here's where I'm coming from. When I was young I transferred from a nontraditional school with relaxed reading expectations to a more normal one, so I ended up going to a remedial reading program for a few months. I don't recall anything phonics based, though this was a while ago. Either way, as far as I recall, I was reasonably literate within a year. As in I was rapidly able to read anything I wanted, though of course subtle literary senses took longer. What I do remember quite vividly is hating English class for the next two years, because as often as not it was just hours of identifying sounds in words I could already read just fine, followed by homework of more of the same, all while I would rather just be reading a book.
Lost_Geometer
6mo ago
Damn, finally somewhere I belong.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
If you're taking a poll mark me down as unconvinced.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
When someone says they "feared for their life" I expect there to have been a reasonable chance that they would die. Now I'm at best a middle-of-the-road martial artist, but I'm not a malnourished psychotic either. Compared to Neely I'm a force of nature. In a train car with a dozen people I doubt I could do enough damage to kill someone before being stopped. Maybe? Call it under 10%, fixating on one person with the sole goal of killing.
Now one might contort the phrase to mean "needed to do something to reliably avoid a lethal threat". That might well be the case here, but it's a dangerous equivocation: after all, by that standard one "fears for their life" constantly while driving a car.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
For those that haven't seen it: Liam Neeson jumping a fence.
Lost_Geometer
8mo ago
Judging just by the quotes I don't find the Destiny/Murphy example convincing. In particular it's not clear who's employing pretextual arguments (both?).
Murphy gives an example of an (alleged) harm that she claims accompanies the sex industry. Destiny responds by proposing a situation where the harm does not occur. But that does not address the argument against prostitution as a whole -- if the industry is necessarily accompanied by harm, you can be against it as a whole, and if you're against it as a whole then it's common to be against it in every case, if only because blanket rules are less corruptible than arbitrarily large decision trees. After all, almost every "unethical" behavior has some corner case where it's actually a good choice, does that invalidate the concept? Destiny's argument reminds me of politicians who talk endlessly about the advantages of clean coal, only to build more of the dirty kind.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
I don't think this is true. Try talking to some normie lefties. They'll tell you that crime stats are biased and you're racist for even considering blacks might be more violent.
This, I think, is where the trail veers into the weeds of expressed belief vs reasonable knowledge vs patterns of action and so forth. I think I've encountered the view you reference, as a genuine belief in every sense, in the wild, but AFAICT it's uncommon in my neck of the woods. I have yet to see the extreme version @hydroacetylene (isn't that just ethane?) claims, but presumably it occurs. More often people will express that point for signalling purposes when advantageous, only when they are not in the business of making factual predictions about the world.
In reality it's hard to know for sure, though. If you start spouting racial crime stats at people then you look like a racist weirdo. People will fight you even when they know you're right.
Lost_Geometer
8mo ago
The alcohol example may be illuminating: note that the counterfactuals have different forms. In the alcohol case, the hypotheses apply to alcohol as a whole, whereas in the prostitution one they only apply to a specific worker. If I told you (a teetotaler) that my mate Paul drinks a fifth every day, has the liver of a man half his age, and actually drives better drunk, would that change your mind on the merits of drink? Now, I may well be imputing an argument that Murphy would not support and did not speak to. One can charitably assume that both speakers abbreviate the rigor of their arguments, and attempt to beat steelmen out of the plowshares (?) they provide.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
[ @The_Nybbler makes similar points ]
To clarify, can you answer 2 questions?
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How common are killings in similar circumstances -- a single, unarmed individual kills complete strangers on a modestly crowded bus/train after exhibiting unfocussed threatening behaviour?
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In light of your answer to (1), and the unfortunate common presence of disturbed individuals on public transit, how do you estimate the probability that any given passenger (other than Neely) would have died on that trip?
From this side of the screen:
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I was unable to find any examples in a brief search -- plenty of cases of group violence, armed killings, or direct person-to-person conflicts, but none resembling the facts at hand. Presumably it's happened -- just due to the huge numbers of encounters.
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Given that I can't find any examples, and that this type of thing must happen thousands of times a year, I'll put the individual death probability at < 0.01%.
If you can get a better handle on (1), then I'm happy to update.
Lost_Geometer
9mo ago
I'm had success with some relatively non-specific musculoskeletal stuff with targeted exercise and weekly rapamycin. I have strong inflammatory tendencies and family history, but no diagnosed disorder. Also psychotherapy helped my general improvement, so maybe that too.
Assuming your responses to LDN and keto weren't psychologically mediated (a big possibility -- many of these problems have a psychological component) then rapamycin could help you. It's not an unusually dangerous drug, but not 100% safe either, so ideally you would find an experienced doctor to prescribe and monitor treatment.
For autoimmune, some people respond to heat: get your core temperature to 102F for a few minutes every few days. This is supposedly safe-ish, though didn't work for me. Again, the standard of care involves medical guidance.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
During WW 2 it was fairly common, and apparently somewhat successful, for prisoners in the Pacific to cultivate yeast to prevent B1 and B3 deficiencies. I'm not sure how many of the other vitamins were known at the time. So primitive fermentation is viable in some circumstances.
On the other hand, alcohol is an anti-vitamin for at least some of the B-vitamins in beer. For example, alcoholics are prone to B1 deficiency.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
OK, I'll bite. I'm not anti-nuclear, but hardly pro either. 20 years ago I was enthusiastic, but overall now I think that nuclear has only a modest role to play.
Nuclear never has never been particularly economically attractive -- successful programs have needed to be subsidized by states for national security reasons. The predictable costs are huge and mostly occurred before the plants even come online. The unpredictable costs of accidents, attacks, and proliferation are really hard to value, and require large states or as yet imperfect international control systems. The technologies needed for nuclear to be perform at its best (small safe thorium reactors and the associated reprocessing networks) aren't yet developed. Overall nuclear wins only if you want a to build a power source 15 years from now, to deliver stably priced energy in a stable environment for the next 70 years.
But that's not what we want. We want power sources that can be built in 1 year, that and are priced for a lifetime of 20. We need technologies that can be deployed at a local scale and are immune to political disruption.
Lost_Geometer
10mo ago
Some adaptations come quickly -- the soreness in particular should improve over the next weeks. On the other hand, at 10 sessions a week even experienced folks can easily outstrip their recovery capacity. To push that kind of volume you need to keep most of the workouts easy and monitor for signs of injury or over training. Bad sleep is one of those. It's been a while since I was 23 but I'd suggest cutting your schedule in half and building up slowly as you learn to listen to your body.
I do Python (and could use of job, if you want to get your forum-nepotism on). Python comes with a bunch of footguns, in that you can make the language behave unexpected ways by, for instance, executing arbitrary code at places like member or index accesses, have completely divergent function behavior depending on argument count and type, or change the behavior of existing objects (almost) arbitrarily at runtime. The art of Python programming is to use these features, with documentation, when appropriate but no more. These issues probably play out a bit differently depending on team and codebase size.
All the usual advice about factoring code into small pieces through narrow interfaces stands in any language.
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