bhauth
Interesting.
About glycol vapor, I might personally go with propylene glycol rather than triethylene glycol.
Do you not feel obligated to tell people that such lights are present, in case they have a different assessment of the long-term safety than you do? I remember how ApeFest caused eye damage with UV lights.
But you really, really need to check your data on transit costs.
I don’t think I do, but maybe you can explain the math to me. You aren’t just comparing per-mile transport costs of loaded ships vs trains, are you? That would be silly, of course.
It’s true that the US Navy isn’t allowed to buy cheaper ships from eg Korea, but that’s not because of the Jones Act, it’s a separate rule.
There’s just not much cargo shipped between 2 US ports. On the US mainland it’s cheaper to use rail than to go thru US ports twice and sail around. The Jones Act does slightly affect prices in Hawaii, and if the Hawaiian gov wants to go after it they can, but for the US as a whole, going after repealing the Foreign Dredge Act would probably be an easier & smarter thing to do than going after repealing the Jones Act.
Well, even the old fabric sails act as airfoils, they’re just not very good ones.
Another approach is to put an actual wind turbine on the ship; it’s more competitive with sails than you might think.
I think most ships still don’t do this, so I’m not sure if it’s currently economical
From the papers I’ve seen, using sails on large cargo ships seems economically practical for up to 1⁄3 of their overall propulsion.
Sailboats have a lot of moving parts, and maintenance on so many of them would be a nightmare.
A sail would be a big rotating airfoil on a pole. Here’s an example. What maintenance issues are you thinking of?
Could you clarify what you mean by “this” and how the Jones Act affects it?
Could you please share some information regarding why you think this is the case?
Well, this covers some of why I initially thought that might be the case. So then I looked into it and found some examples of it happening.
every country invests heavily in what people think is cool or prestigious
I think that’s largely downstream of what makes money, rather than upstream.
In a small country, there might just not be enough of these lottery ticket companies to split
A small country like...China?
Do Korea and Japan produce ~100x more ships than the US?
Yes. That’s by tonnage (thus my wording being “more ship”) rather than dollar value or number of ships, but US Navy prices are inflated so it’s hard to compare by value.
example source: https://www.ft.com/content/4e2d5bb7-e4d5-4b98-b1a8-895c0d493b07
why america can’t build ships
Obviously human trials of diseases are difficult to do in general, but studying transmission of colds is particularly difficult because “the common cold” isn’t one virus genus, or even one virus family. Wikipedia notes:
Well over 200 virus strains are implicated in causing the common cold, with rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, adenoviruses and enteroviruses being the most common.
Certainly, many types of virus responsible are basically only transmitted via surfaces, but obviously COVID can be transmitted by aerosols. There are almost certainly some kinds of “common cold” that can be transmitted by aerosols, too. But it’s not feasible to do human studies of so many virus types—consider how hard it was for society just to realize that COVID was transmitted via aerosols!
announcing my modular coal startup
Oh, maybe you were referring to my Alice/Bob bit, instead of the bit about not using debates as a point-scoring competition. Can you clarify the part you’re talking about by quoting?
If you’re saying you like debates with retrospective point-scoring as a sort of sport, I disagree about adding that scoring being a positive thing, because of the effect it has on the debates.
If you’re saying the Alice/Bob bit has Alice being too serious because debating Substack posts is fun, the point was that:
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Alice doesn’t want to talk to Bob because “having Substack subscriptions” doesn’t make you interesting—but Bob thinks it does, which means there’s probably nothing interesting about him.
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Bob is saying “we’re discussing the stuff I read” instead of finding something of mutual interest, and without understanding how you’d even go about finding something of mutual interest in an efficient way.
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Your active search and your writing are both selecting for
(Me not realizing that is the 1st part of the joke, with the 2nd part being that maybe [quote] is the reason I’m like that.)
Your posts on chemistry and engineering revived some curiosity
Thanks!
I already knew 3 out of 4 of the YouTube channels you mentioned, which made me more pessimistic about how much high-quality, easy-to-digest material I might be missing.
I was deliberately choosing popular channels that uploaded a lot. You might also like https://www.construction-physics.com/archive?sort=new but you probably already saw that. As for obscure things you probably haven’t seen, well, here are some random bookmarks of mine:
typical examples of personal projects:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPqGaIMVuLs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdXOS-B0Bus
frequent uploads on China:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT9i1vKkDA0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neOjEHJDjJU
examples of blogs with a lot of posts:
https://eighteenthelephant.com/
https://www.marginalia.nu/log/
https://macwright.com/writing
You can also use something like https://hn-buddy.com/ or look at weekly top posts for mid-size subreddits if you want; a pretty high % of high-quality posts are on blogs that only have 2 or 3 posts.
There’s a trend, I think, towards people making a youtube video instead of a blog post for interesting things, and that has a lot of obvious advantages, but also means that indexing by search engines is worse, they’re buried in a larger amount of junk content, and there’s less cross-linking between people and posts.
The most important factor is probably that mormon women are consistently told by their community as a whole that they should marry a returned missionary.
But if you think there’s no point adding any cinnamon because it has no nutritional value anyway, you’re sort of being more of a robot than a human.
It’s my rant and I’ll complain about what I want! But it’s funny you bring up cinnamon, because I also wrote this:
While I’m an American myself, I’ve come to agree with some of the complaints Europeans often have about American food culture, such as “Americans use too much cinnamon”.
The flavor of cinnamon comes largely from cinnamaldehyde and cinnamic acid, which were so named because...cinnamon contains them. Are those antioxidants? No. They’re anti-microbials. Cinnamon inhibits bacterial growth. That’s what it does for you. But what do Americans do? They make cinnamon rolls where cinnamon-sugar paste is put inside the food. It’s not accomplishing anything, it’s just flavor.
So, why do Americans like that flavor, more than Europeans? That’s because American kids grew up eating sugary stuff with cinnamon. There’s an unconscious reasoning that happens:
This has sugar, so it’s probably a fruit.
This compound is in things that are probably fruits, and fruits tend to be good for you for evolutionary reasons.
Therefore, these compounds are probably good for you, at least if they’re combined with sugar.
But that’s wrong! A cinnamon roll is not a fruit! You’ve been fooled!
Do you like cinnamon when it’s not combined with sugar? If not, is it really cinnamon per se that you like?
there is no point in arguing like the world depends on the outcome when you’re literally just a few guys on a private Discord server
To be clear, that’s what I was saying, yes.
has candles burning it regularly, outside of annual rituals like Petrov Day
That is what I meant, yes.
unless you confidently know that they keep the windows open during & after cooking
It’s pretty obvious when particulate levels are as high as what indoor candles produce. Anyway, normal people don’t “keep the windows open” when they cook, they use a range hood fan.
Burning a candle indoor once or twice a year is just not that many micromorts
OK, but are the candles actually providing value at all? If you want to develop social ties or whatever you could just, say, have a LAN party instead of something highly-scripted with cult-y vibes? Petrov day...yes, there are things that could go wrong with the world, and some people don’t consider that enough, but on the other hand some people already consider it too much. Sure, the guy himself deserves some amount of honor, but I don’t think he’d have been impressed by that.
No, I think that would be worse, and lead to degenerate equilibria.
EG = ethylene glycol, PG = propylene glycol
PG vapor pressure is such that you could potentially just leave open bowls of it instead of needing a vaporizer device.
PG is probably equally effective at disinfection.
PG should have somewhat lower toxicity.
PG is used sometimes in foods as a humectant so it’s relatively available.
About toxicity, tri-glycol is safer than EG because EG is partly metabolized to glyoxal which can permanently form cyclic compounds inside cells. PG is preferentially metabolized to lactic acid before the secondary OH is oxidized, which is why it’s safer, tho yes you could get a small amount of methylglyoxal, so there is that issue, tho methylglyoxal is at least less reactive than glyoxal. The concern I have is that eg, ethoxyethanol is metabolized to ethoxyacetate which is somewhat toxic, and oxidized tri-glycol might be analogous. Note also that ethers eventually get oxidatively cleaved. I’m simplifying a bit here obviously.
Yes, there have been studies, but toxicity studies use high doses in mice to get obvious effects, and then we assume that much lower doses in humans don’t have subtle long-term effects, but the effect of tri-glycol would be limited by the rate of metabolism, and the tri-glycol itself should be safe.