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Comment Re:Availability (Score 1) 211

Absolutely correct. Lawn seed mixes used to contain clover. Now people consider clover to be a weed and are quick to apply herbicides to kill it. People seem to think that a proper lawn is a sterile monoculture of KY31 fescue. Au contraire. On my East Tennessee farm I seed red and white clover into my cool season perennial grass pastures in the spring. Clover is a legume plant that is very nutritious and much desired by horses, cows, deer, turkey, etc. Clover will grow in the heat of summer when grass production slows. Clover fixes nitrogen into the soil so one does not need to apply nitrogen fertilizer in the spring. This practice prevents nitrogen fertilizer runoff from getting into the waterways. Also as OP pointed out, bees love clover.

Comment Re:Drive her (Score 1) 1092

No it's not. People could move closer to schools so they could walk, or change their schedule so they could drive their kids. It's about choices and sacrifices.

Now if your comment is "An ever increasing number of people don't want to be inconvenienced by sacrificing for their kids", that I'd agree with.

Absolutely correct, mod this up! It's all about choices and sacrifices. My wife and I chose to live on a single income and home-school our children. It's working out great for our family.

Comment window area, reflection, venting (Score 1) 685

The key here is the solar heat gain through the glass windows of the car. Old cars had less window area, that would be a good thing to reduce the heat gain from our mobile "greenhouses". Existing vehicles could be retrofitted with reflective white or silver tape/coating material applied on the outside of the glass to reduce effective glass area. Have you seen school buses lately? They are yellow on the sides and white on top. Why might that be? Development/implementation of glass with better heat rejection performance would be helpful. A small solar powered vent could remove heated air from the passenger compartment while the vehicle was parked and the inside temperature rose above a certain setpoint.

Comment Two fun projects I did as undergrad ..... (Score 1) 249

We built a superconducting heat engine; it involved a liquid nitrogen bath, a powerful yoke magnet with mu metal, and a disk with high temperature superconductors placed around the outside of the disk. A horizontal axle goes through the center of the disk, the bottom of the disk is immersed in liquid nitrogen. Give the disk a little push to start it rotating, then it will continue to run by itself. The warm superconductor enters the liquid nitrogen, the magnetic field passes through the superconductor. The superconductor cools and begins to superconduct and the magnetic flux no longer passes through the superconductor, it now generates a force which rotates the disk. We also improved the project by adding diagnostics.

Another interesting undergrad project I did was to build a cosmic hodoscope. This involved scintillator paddles, dark boxes, optical fibers, photomultipliers, and timing electronics. When constructed one arranged two scintillator paddles such that if a cosmic particle passed through them it would cause light to bounce around the scintillator, into the optical fiber, to the photomultiplier tube, and to the electronics. If the electronics detected a signal from both scintillators within a given timing gate then we counted that as a cosmic particle that passed through both scintillators. One can get fancy with readouts, computers, and arrangement of the scintillators.

Comment Re:Smarter... collectively (Score 1) 1515

I get my job from a rich person. The question to ask is: If he gets 3 million more this year- on top of the millions he's already getting this year- am I getting a raise? The answer is no. Your argument lacks merit.

OK, it appears that we've established that jobs are created by those with wealth; thereby validating the trickle down theory and not the bottom up theory.

You asked if the wealthy business owner earns an additional $3 million this year, how much will you get? Let me turn it around, if the wealthy business owner loses $3 million this year how much will you owe?

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