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Comment Hear? (Score 1) 23

"Hear" is being arbitrarily used to denote something other than "see" in the all-electromagnetic-radiation-is-light sense. But gravity wave are a different communication vector completely. I wonder if that community needs to come up with a different word (other than "detect"), that maybe doesn't try to connect to a real human sense, since humans can't feel it.

I vote for "floomp".

Comment Re: In "normal person speak" (Score 1) 19

Actually I was talking about CVE and enrich. There are people on this site that, believe it or not, are nerds but not in IT. I'm a physical chemist. I follow many science and tech stories that pop up on /. I don't typically pay much attention to the IT stories, but this one caught my eye because of the near comical number of times it was used in the summary. I checked the comments section to see if I was the only one, and apparently I wasn't. Maybe I'm in the minority [shrug].

Comment How is that possible? (Score 1) 199

That cost is so extreme I feel like I'm missing something, or there's more to the cost. The entire annual budget of California is $350 billion, so even if this is spread out over the next 10 years we're talking about ~7% of the annual budget going to a single transportation project.

This will run LA to SF. If you take the populations of both of those cities (who will benefit most from it) it's 18 million people. So we're talking about costing 231 billion / 18 million = $13,000 per person to build the thing. How is that worth it?

I just looked up and I can get a flight from LAX to SFO for $70. For $13k I could fly back and forth between them almost 100 times.

If that's a real number, as a CA taxpayer (which I'm not) I would be asking where else that money could go. Like increasing the state's education budget by 20% for the next 10 years. Or helping both cities handle their homeless problem.

Comment Re: In "normal person speak" (Score 3, Interesting) 19

There are a lot of technical topics on /. I don't understand, but the point here is that they use an abbreviation like 20 times in a summary without ever defining it. If you use an abbreviation in technical writing (including a summary), you should define it the first time you use it. There may be some very common abbreviations that don't require defining, but this is not one of them.

Comment Re: As long as it's just an option (Score 1) 50

I use side tabs because I'm trying to maximize horizontal space on a wide laptop screen. The widescreen standard leaves a lot of unused space on the edges. I could zoom browser text to go edge-to-edge, but then it's unnaturally large font and I get only a few lines of reading before I have to scroll. Making text/docs/webpages fill the center 2/3 of the screen is comfortable for me, leaving the outer 1/6th on each edge perfect spots for tabs.

Comment Re: Less enshittification (Score 1) 89

Agreed, especially with the fact that titles will randomly disappear based upon what the service feels like paying a license for. This results in seemingly popular movies just not being available, which keeps surprising us. Case in point, we wanted to watch the DiCaprio/Danes Romeo and Juliet, and it wasn't available on any streaming service except to "rent" for $4.99. We found the dvd in the basement and watched it instead.

I miss going to blockbuster with my girlfriend and wandering around, looking at what's newly released, debating what we wanted to watch, and getting that tub-o-microwave popcorn. It's somehow easier and more fun than scrolling through menus in an app.

Comment Eye off the ball (Score 1) 104

I study greenhouse gases and emissions for a living, but I'm always bothered by the attribution of emissions to the fossil fuel companies, because it takes our eye off the ball. We live in a capitalist economy where companies will provide a supply if there is demand. If we want the emissions to go down, we need end users to stop using the fuel. Dry up the demand and the supply will go down. Whether 32 or 3200 companies are responsible for the oil supply is irrelevant - we are the ones that burn it. We can blame O&G companies all we want, but it's our behavior that needs to change.

Of course it's never that simple - the O&G companies are actively lobbying to prevent that demand from drying up, and suppressing climate research, but it nonetheless stands that blaming the O&G companies for emissions is shifting the blame from the end users, who are really going to drive the market to other energy sources.

Comment Brain study gut check (Score 2) 50

The brain study that made news last year was the first time I started to have some doubt in these studies. They reported >5000 ug of MNPs per gram of brain tissue. That's 5 mg/g, or 0.5% by mass. That's doesn't seem reasonable. A plastic grocery bag is ~5 g, and the human brain is about 1.3 kg. So 0.5% by mass is the equivalent of more than 1 plastic bag's worth of plastic in the brain.

That study did perform microscopy and identified what look like inclusions, but their analysis indicated the inclusions were carbon-containing, which while consistent with plastic, doesn't really exclude natural biological material.

The evidence that would be convincing to me is to perform these tests on tissue that either pre-dates the widespread use of plastic (maybe pre-1960's?), or from subjects that had far less exposure to MNPs than typical. Of course MNPs have been detected all over the world, but I would expect some island or Amazon native tribes would have less exposure than the average American, and would therefore show less in their brains.

Comment Re: Cause and Effect. (Score 1) 63

I'm not sure if this is related, but I know that during those windstorms Boulder intentionally cut power to many areas in order to reduce risk of wildfire if a power line went down. This is in response to a devastating wind-driven wildfire last year. I'm wondering if some of the NIST clocks were subject to this.

Comment Re: Voting Trump ... (Score 3, Informative) 284

You're clearly confused about what NCAR does, especially in regard to hurricanes. Feel free to follow that link and see what NCAR does in that regard.

NCAR is a world leader in hurricane research that informs the hurricane models that NOAA (and others) use. NCAR hurricane research saves lives and property.

Comment Re: Voting Trump ... (Score 2) 284

Sweet mercy, you can just look this up in seconds. NOAA does the official predicting, but much of the modeling and development of physics behind the models is from NCAR. This is literally the first google hit for "NCAR hurricane research":

https://ncar.ucar.edu/hurrican...

The fact that you didn't even do that simple check tells me you're not interested in a rational discussion or what's actually true.

Comment Re: Major potential loss for science (Score 1) 284

That's data. They literally just took data and reported it. Welcome to science. The fact that it's got political ramifications does not mean NCAR is advocating for political action. Just because politicians have made the topic political doesn't mean scientists can't research it anymore.

Comment Re: Voting Trump ... (Score 4, Insightful) 284

"nothing useful from that has resulted in decades."

There are millions of people along the gulf coast and southeastern U.S. that rely on hurricane prediction models to know whether they're in danger as tropical storms are evolving across the Atlantic into hurricanes. Hurricane prediction models, constrained by NCAR hurricane flight data and research, are crucial to saving lives and property.

What's sad is that so many people in the southeastern US who are cheering for this dismantling are also benefiting the most from NCAR hurricane research.

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