china is definitely somewhere else on the convenience – safety continuum.
Chinese drivers hate to wear their safety belts. Instead, they wear specially designed clothing to pretend they are buckled up. But that won’t stop the seat-belt reminder lights and beeps, which are all extremely annoying. It is possible to click the belt in the buckle behind your back but that is uncomfortable. It is also possible to fiddle with the electronics but that is difficult. Creative and innovative Chinese companies finally found an easy solution.
in a world with multiple free, high quality video conferencing solutions, why do the dilberts continue with conference calls? i suspect it is collective work avoidance. “being on a call” while “working from home” is the most transparent ploy to walk your dogs and getting paid for it ever.
it seems heartbreakingly obvious that future generations will someday look back upon the last 10 years as the start of the rise of the machines, and they will see many more armed robots on patrol “in space, on land, in the air, and at sea”—robots so advanced that they make today’s Predators and Reapers look positively impotent and antique. These killer robots, though, will share one thing in common with their primitive progenitors: with remorseless purpose, they will stalk and kill any human deemed “a legitimate target” by their controllers and programmers.
We now estimate that if we were to look at 10 of the nearest small stars we would find 4 potentially habitable planets. That is a conservative estimate. There could be more.
Lockheed Martin has found a way to slash the amount of energy needed to remove salt from seawater, potentially making it vastly cheaper to produce clean water at a time when scarcity has become a global security issue. Because the sheets of graphene are so thin – just 1 atom in thickness – it takes much less energy to push the seawater through the filter with the force required to separate the salt from the water.
The material is called Perforene and is mostly vaporware as of 2018:
The potential of graphene to serve as a key material for advanced membranes comes from 1 major possible advantages of this atomically thin 2D material: permeability and selectivity. Graphene-based membranes are also hypothetically attractive based on concentration polarization and fouling, and graphene’s chemical and physical stability. Further research is needed to fully achieve these theoretical benefits, however. In addition, improvement in the design and manufacturing processes, so to produce performance and cost-effective graphene-based desalination devices, is still an open question. Finally, membranes are only one part of desalination systems, and current processes are not optimized to take full advantage of the higher selectivity and permeability of graphene. New desalination processes are, therefore, needed to unlock the full benefits of graphene.
The researchers have now found a strategy to avoid the swelling of the membrane when exposed to water by building smaller sieves. When the common salts are dissolved in water, they form a “shell” of water molecules around the salt molecules. This allows the tiny capillaries of the graphene-oxide membranes to block the salt from flowing along with the water. Water molecules are able to pass through the membrane barrier and flow faster, which is ideal for application of these membranes for desalination. “Realization of scalable membranes with uniform pore size down to atomic scale is a significant step forward and will open new possibilities for improving the efficiency of desalination technology”
These graphene sheet water filters are a huge deal for desalination and safe drinking water.
Researchers have devised a way of making tiny holes of controllable size in sheets of graphene, a development that could lead to ultrathin filters for improved desalination or water purification. A big limitation in existing nanofiltration and reverse-osmosis desalination plants, which use filters to separate salt from seawater, is their low permeability: Water flows very slowly through them. The graphene filters, being much thinner, yet very strong, can sustain a much higher flow.
Amazingly, Israel has more water than it needs. The turnaround started in 2007, when low-flow toilets and showerheads were installed nationwide and the national water authority built innovative water treatment systems that recapture 86% of the water that goes down the drain and use it for irrigation — vastly more than the second-most-efficient country in the world, Spain, which recycles 19%.
But even with those measures, Israel still needed ~1.9b cubic meters of freshwater per year and was getting just 1.4B cubic meters from natural sources. That shortfall was why the Sea of Galilee was draining like an unplugged tub and why the country was about to lose its farms.
The country faces a previously unfathomable question: What to do with its extra water? Enter desalination. Desalination plants can provide some 600m cubic meters of water a year, and more are on the way.
“There have been a lot of demonstrations of really high-performing, salt-rejecting, solar-based evaporation designs of various devices. The challenge has been the salt fouling issue, that people haven’t really addressed. So, we see these very attractive performance numbers, but they’re often limited because of longevity. Over time, things will foul.”
Many attempts at solar desalination systems rely on some kind of wick to draw the saline water through the device, but these wicks are vulnerable to salt accumulation and relatively difficult to clean. The team focused on developing a wick-free system instead. The result is a layered system, with dark material at the top to absorb the sun’s heat, then a thin layer of water above a perforated layer of material, sitting atop a deep reservoir of the salty water such as a tank or a pond. A system with just 1m2 of collecting area should be sufficient to provide a family’s daily needs for drinking water, and would cost $4.
taxi commissions are one of the greatest evils in transportation.
In 1984, the Federal Trade Commission released a report that explained why taxis could charge customers exorbitant prices for dismal service. The simple reason: lack of competition in the market. The culprit: local governments. City agencies that regulate cabs, generally called taxi commissions, were deliberately protecting from competition the very companies they were supposed to police.
I can’t say why, exactly, but the illustration of the dinosaur doesn’t seem realistic enough. Can we use a photo instead?
that site is both really funny and also depressing. i can understand my friends getting out of the industry due to a) clients being morons, b) race to the bottom from worldwide competition on the one hand and increased automation on the other. 2017-09-23:
One of his main points of contention is the way that we consider dinosaur heads. “The reference has always been crocodiles. The biggest thing is teeth and facial fat. Readers have to be aware that all dinosaurs they see in all media, and especially in popular culture, seem to have their heads flensed. They’ve always got these weird grins with only the teeth visible.” Most animals have lips and gums and lumps of facial fat that change the profile of the head, and cover the teeth. But in many predatory dinosaur illustrations, these are usually missing, making them look fierce, if improbable. “Another trope is what I like to call the ‘roadkill hair’ trope”. Some fossils show signs of hair, which Kosemen says can lead to artists illustrating their creatures with hair only on the parts where it was found on a fossil. However, it’s possible that some dinosaurs had much more hair that they are usually shown to have. “Imagine if you found a raccoon, and only half of the tail was covered in hair, so then you carry that over to a living reconstruction.”
Swans imagined as though they were featherless dinosaurs.
Woah, that’s intense, in a really bad way. I wonder what hitchcock would do with a premise like this. The term you got owned is taking on new connotations, and is getting closer and closer to the meaning used by the creeps, which call their victims slaves.
One poster had already archived 200GB of webcam material from his slaves. “Mostly I pick up the best bits (funny parts, the ‘good’ sexual stuff) and categorize them (name, address, passwords etc.), just for funs’ sake,” he wrote. “For me I don’t have the feeling of doing something perverted, it’s more or less a game, cat and mouse game, with all the bonuses included. The weirdest thing is, when I see the person you’ve been spying on in real life, I’ve had that a couple of times, it just makes me giggle, especially if it’s someone with an uber-weird-nasty habit.”
Gregor J. Rothfuss 