"I received a Pebble .... the battery life is such that I only need to recharge it a few times a week."

Îoey Pebble (1 year old) lasts an entire week on a charge, unless I have been using realtime apps (gps tracker). It helps to disable the "shake for backlight" setting.

"the only time the 5-star rating is going to go to a 3-star rating is if the national testing facilities start using these dummies. And if they do that..."

If they do that, you'll need twice the number of cars to sacrifice in crash tests and the dummies will wear out twice as fast. Likely, you'll need twice the number of testing facilities as well. A decision to make such tests mandatory should not be taken lightly.

My guess is that these dummies will be used to gain knowledge on how to translate standard test results to risks for nonstandard body types, and possibly to mandatory requirements on car/safety belt construction if the disadvantage of an obese person is large and preventable.

"4W charger can charge devices at the same rate as my 5 and 10 watt chargers! The last generation of phones use 5V 1A = 5 watt chargers"

That the charger is capable of delivering 5 W does not actually mean that the device will actually draw that amount. I have a dongle that measures the current and voltage of USB chargers and my smartphones rarely draw more than 0.8 A, and even then only if I use a low-resistance cable with a battery below 80%. Cables that are long enough to reach comfortably from the floor to my hands while I'm sitting usually do less than that.

Google "usb charger doctor", the dongle is only $7 or so.

"HAM radio operators have a statistically significant higher incident of cancer."

You seem to be selective in your interpretation of the data. From the second link:

"Among men, there were 14,630 deaths (SMR = 0.73 (95% CI = 0.71-0.74)) and among women, 760 (SMR = 0.72 (0.67-0.78)). There were 4,007 cancer deaths among males (SMR = 0.79 (0.76-0.81)) and 289 among females (SMR = 0.82 (0.72-0.92))."

Standardized mortality ratios (SMR) smaller than one for cancer mean that there are fewer cancer deaths among radio operators than among the total (US) population. The abstract continues to state that for some particular types of cancer, the SMR is slightly above one, but with very wide confidence intervals (CI), which indicate that there are too few cases for reliable statistics.

"The problem with Bose has always been that they only sound "acceptably okay" at relatively low volumes, they tend to massively distort at what I would consider a normal listening volume. [...] especially if you'll be using them in very noisy environments"

Cranking up the volume to drown out envoronmental noise sounds like a good pathway towards a hearing aid by the time you're 50 years old.

There have been occasions that I actually asked co-travelers on the train to lower their volume because I could hear their hip hop beat over my own music that was playing through my own noise-isolating headphones. I suspect that those people are already semi-deaf...

"I use some fairly cheap Sennheiser in-ear monitors on aircraft now. The isolation is better than any noise cancelling headphones can ever hope to achieve"

What model? I have cx-300-2 noise-isolating earbuds, which I'd call fairly cheap at around EUR 35, but I wouldn't say they perform better than bose/beats noise cancelling headphones. Whatever else I see in a quick Google is several hundred dollars.

You are probably the only one in the world who uses that definition of 'exponential'. The exponential function has the property exp(x+1)=2.7*exp(x), which is completely analogous to your geometric series.

No, smoking reductions absolutely are 100% definitely due to government intervention, and it's extremely instructive and important that that is so. Much of the initial critical medical research came from Britain, and Britain has a national health service; it's socialised medicine.

And the thing that finally has killed smoking as a thing in the West was passive smoking.

Passive smoking was something that was (in a loose sense) invented by government health agencies, specifically to kill smoking.

By invented, I don't mean that that it's not true that passive smoking is harmful- that certainly is true, it is harmful carcinogens, no, I mean the concept that passive smoking is harmful... AND SO it cannot be done in places of work.

That really, really put the kibosh on smoking.

And THAT's a regulation; it was specifically THAT regulation that enormously diminished smoking.

Before that regulation, smoking was hanging right on in there, the smoking companies were able to pretend that smoking wasn't extremely highly addictive, and that it was 'relaxing' or some such bullshit.

It really was that way around. And that's normal. Governments have a responsibility and genuinely are best placed to enforce regulations with respect to safety and fraud. Really, the tobacco companies were enforcing a fraud on the population that cigarettes are safe. Even the smokers didn't really believe it, but they were addicted.

I am actually pretty libertarian, but when right-libertarians try to argue that it's personal responsibility whether or not there's sugars of lead in my wine or not; I can only laugh at them and their efforts to explain how I could ever realistically test the products I buy. Governments of course don't routinely test products, but they do do random checks. And that smoking was morally unacceptable came from governments.

Stopped smoking? No, but smoking rates are way down, and some of this is definitely due to taxation. People are driving relatively economical vehicles over here, where petroleum is more expensive. I have no idea what you mean by 'fair and balanced climate research' except I know that anthropogenic global warming is very, very real; because the hard science says that it is. If you really believe it isn't: you've been lied to.

"the ebola death curve is exponential. Production and distribution of vaccines, and of antibodies by transfusion, is at best geometric."

Geometric is essentially the same as exponential. The only difference is that geometric is in discrete steps and exponential can also describe fractional steps. So, what did you really mean here?

It's mostly because they're building a lot of new infrastructure.

New electricity always costs more than old electricity because that's been paid off already.

Partly, but it's not enough.

When the wind blows very strongly, Denmark already, even now, generates more than 100% of their national electricity demand. That's because wind can vary by a factor of 3 or so above the average; so once you get to 30% or so, when there's strong winds over the whole country, it completely dominates.

Meanwhile, Norway has a lot of hydroelectricity. So when the wind blows hard they export the excess to Norway, and Norway shuts down their hydroelectricity- it holds back its water temporarily. When the wind drops they turn the hydroelectricity back on more and power Denmark off the hydro with the water they've saved. The overall result is a very even power supply, and no carbon produced.

The previous idiot was claiming that a wind turbine can produce 200% of its nameplate capacity; but by definition the most it can produce is the nameplate capacity.

Now, you, you're claiming that wind power requires a large spinning reserve. The information I have is that this is false. The reality is that there's very little spinning reserve used for that purpose; wind forecasts are used to predict wind power generation several days in advance, and generation is bought in and out as needed in the normal way they would when demand changes.

There are indeed some costs associated with warming up plants to bring them online when wind is predicted to drop, but they're much smaller than the value of the power produced by wind farms.

Incidentally, wind farms cannot lose synchronisation in the way you state; they typically use double fed induction motors; they cannot use simple synchronous generators because the rotor speed changes too much as wind conditions vary.

I'm pretty sure that coal is already more expensive than wind- definitely for NEW power plants.

But basically, anything that is already paid off is dirt cheap.

This Wikipedia article covers this kind of stuff:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

On the upside though, if something is paid off, it becomes easier to shut it down because it's done its job and nobody owes anything.