carpdiem

Not really. Trees are actually somewhat hard to burn, so most wildfires start by catching dry underbrush on fire instead. So in this case, that would just be the alfalfa. Key to remember is that power…

Ankles can be tricky. Most "barefoot" style shoes have essentially zero ankle support. What ends up happening for most people is that if you ease into them, and use them regularly, you end u…

Forests are not perpetual carbon sinks, as trees eventually die and then decompose, releasing their carbon back into the atmosphere. At best, a young and growing forest can be a temporary carbon sink,…

No discussion of back pain is complete without mention of Stuart McGill (see, for example, his book "Back Mechanic" - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01FKSGJYC&#…

This is very likely. There's also the chance they're taking advantage of some portion of the ground effect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_effect_(aerodynamics) …

Generally, UBI schemes advocate some sort of drop-off in payout as people earn money outside of the program (but structured in such a way as to ensure no sticking points of greater than 100% effective…

I notice that this list looks like it has a very long tail. Can we get the top 100 books as well? (since many of those would have very similar mention numbers as the end of the top-30)

I think you've misunderstood the point. Terawatt-hours is ambiguous, without specifying a time period. In particular, Terawatt-hours can be converted to Joules. To say that humanity's energy…

Interestingly, having gone to Caltech, I suspect that its extreme focus on STEM research actually hurt it here. Mostly because that focus results in a very large portion of undergrads going on to grad…

Agreed! I think it's super important to avoid getting burned out, but I really wanted to highlight the importance of getting to new rungs, though, before you stop for so long that you slip back d…

I feel like this is not a good comparison. Boeing took fifty years to go from the company that built that plane, to the company that helped build the Saturn V. I'm all for long time horizons, but…

I think he's counting in Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia as distinct, largely self-governing regions.

I don't know about MIT and Stanford, but I went to Caltech, and while there are first-year courses with names like 'Calculus', they are categorically nothing like the first-year courses at UCs or CSUs…

As someone who learned to read at a very early age, this is horrifying to me.

Well, it's a combination of two things: 1) We wanted to keep the price / trebuchet low, so our margin after materials is slim. and 2) The laser cutter that we need to produce these is expensive. But s…

Yes, but you have to consider very carefully what "poor grades" means here. Coming from a Caltech admissions offices, "poor grades" is anything less than about a 3.8 (unweighted), or anything less tha…

I went to Caltech recently, and I feel I should weigh in on this. The author of the article spends an unfortunate amount of time talking about SAT and AP scores, as if that's all that Tech cares about…

I spent some time building numerical simulations as the theorist on an R&D team in Los Angeles, and Cython was a lifesaver. Iirc, I got ~150x performance increase (note, 150x, not 150%) out of it.…