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Comment Re:Mosquitos as "animals" (Score 1) 74

Yes, it is regional.

As I never lived in a country that has Gizzlies, or Crocodiles. Well, in Thailand we have water monitors (harmless) and something that resembles a Kaiman, but is called different.

The Tigers prefer to live in the forest. Nearly all are GPS tagged and it is unlikely that one ever comes into my room. Germany has no Tigers or Crocodiles, and brown bears only very recently.

So, cockroaches, spiders, mosquitos would actually be on the top of my list: both in Germany (or Europe) and Thailand.

Obviously an animal is an animal, so no idea about that part of your question.

Comment Re:FTFY Re: Unpredictable Side Effects (Score 1) 74

That is actually under debate.

Both the time and how they went there.

As that land bridge: actually did not exist at that time.

It was a gigantic pillar of ice.

Does not mean it was impossible to pass ... but to get there: you already have to pass thousands of miles of icy land, where nothing lived at all.

So: it might have sounded plausible when the books saying this were written, it is absolutely not plausible from a practical point of view.

Knowing that the oldest artefacts from "early settlers" are over 40k years old, we have proof the time frame is wrong.

How did the people got there? Most likely by boat. How else? While the idea that some people walked from Africa to China, to Siberia, crossed a land bridge to Alaska, walked down north America, to finally reach South America is not absurdly wrong, but it is far less plausible than boats from China to West Coast America.

Why do I write this "nonsense"? Well a few month ago I read an article who they think Japan was settle, roughly 20k years ago. They tried to row there from Taiwan, I believe. In sea worthy rowing boats. They managed the trip in 30 days, an concluded: it was possible for early settlers to travel by boat to Japan, roughly 20k or 30k years ago.

That is the biggest nonsense ever: because of the ice mountains over the land bridge connecting north America with Siberia: Japan was connected by land to China. You just walk there. Or tame some Mammoths and ride on them ... there was perhaps a large lake between China and Japan, but the land masses were connects.

Except for a small gab, which you probably could look over to the other side: everything from China down to Australia was connected, because the sea level was close to 200m lower than right now (yes, it is not 200 ... but close enough for a rough number)

Same stupidity about "how was Australia settled". What we call Aboriginals settled there roughly 40k years ago. And the mystery always was sold as: how did they get there? No one knows!! Yeah, dear IQ monsters: it was in the middle of an "ice age". Actually at the peak of the last ice age. Except for the last 30km ... they walked there. So much to "land bridge".

Comment Re:that is a lot of land if my calcs are correct (Score 1) 73

Absolutely nothing bad about hectars, as hect means 100 and hence an hectar are 100 Ar, oops. And for your interest one Ar is 100square meters - aka 10m x 10m. So no idea what your point is.

So 100 Ar - 1 hectar, are 10Ar versus 10Ar, which is 100m versus 100m ...

And: all that is not binary logic, with 1 and 0 ... it is standard decimal. You are using the decimal number system, right? Why do you insist that your measurements are in odd bases, but translate them to decimal to express them?

1000000
^

insert a coma at the correct place(s), if you need to shift scales. Simple. I use them to get visual clues ...

What is next? You do not know what a hecto liter is? Well, it is 100 - in greek "hecto" - liters. Until 40 or 50 years ago, hecto liter was the unit to pay water bills or sewage bills. Then it got changed to cubic meters. Which is a meter versus a meter versus a meter ... obviously. Up to you to figure how many hectoliter fit into one cubic meter.

Hint: the number will start with a 1 ... and have a series of 0 behind it. Instead of being some odd multiply like 3, or 12 or 16 ...

Comment Re:Reads like the beginning of a Tom Clancy novel. (Score 1) 130

Those stories/researches must be hundreds of years old.

There are plenty of solar power plants that use molten salt as heat storage.

The problems with fission reactors using molten salt: is keeping the stuff in a fissionable state, removing fission products and inserting fresh fuel.

Has absolutely nothing to do with corrosion resistant alloys, this is really solved since long long ago: before I was born.

So, if you want to nitpick, at some point you have to accumulate waste, and get it out, and the "vent" to get it out is complex, yes, you are right. We have problems with expansion caused by heat, and keep everything tight, we have problems with welding ... and so on.

Bu the materials, we have since the 1950s.

Most things about molten salt fission reactors, people claim, is just nonsense. Like "burning the waste". The waste does not "burn", it decays and produces extra heat. Depending on what it is, it is harmful for the real fission processes. Keeping/controlling the salt mixture to have it in constant controlled chain reaction: that is a problem.

And then: you fill the damn thing, with SOLID salt. How do you start it?
And then: it shuts down for some reason, and as physics tell us, the heavy stuff will go to the bottom, the light stuff to the top, how do you make sure you can restart it, or do not get "critical" masses on the bottom.

Well, with Thorium and the breeding process, it is not damn hard to shut it down, avoiding that problem.

Comment Re:that is a lot of land if my calcs are correct (Score 1) 73

It is always good to have some numbers as reference for things that matter.

No one really should care if it is in fact 105 x 105 or even 150 x 150 miles, based on increased power usage. Or still the same, as the panels got more efficient than the power usage increased?

100 x 100 miles is a good number. As people simply are bad in grasping things. In Germany on a highway without speed limit, you can drive - with a reasonable speed, not recklessly - around it in 4 hours.

Other interesting numbers:
- circumference of the planet at the equator: nearly exactly 40,000 km. Why is it not exact, well, when the meter and hence the kilo meter (km) was invented, they made a measuring error. So the meter as a unit is off by a small fraction. Why did they pick 40k ? well actually they picked 10k km which is 1,000,000m from equator to pole as "unit". So from equator to a pole is 1/4 of the circumference ... (going from the pole back to the equator is one half, and then you have to go to the other pole), actually the "odd size" of the equator is not really an error, as distance to the pole is nearly exact.
- height of a geo stationary satellite: close to 1/1th of s light second (that is of course coincidence because of the mass and size of the earth)
- distance earth - moon, a bit more than a light second, roughly 1.25 light seconds

With your examples of 100 x 100 miles, you can extrapolate: similar size for Africa, and one for India and one for China, and less then half for Australia.

And then again: how many roofs are there in Los Angeles or Mexico or Tokyo?

Comment Re:that is a lot of land if my calcs are correct (Score 1) 73

The problem is the inconsistency to go from square feet to acres and then square miles.
Obviously everyone who does not really pay attention, easy makes some mistakes.

Those mistakes can not happen in "metric", that is why your/our parent considers it better.

The only odd unit in metric farming are the German units Morgen and perhaps Ar, but the Ar is just "like we do in metric" a multiple of 10 ... or in this case 10 x 10 meters. A Morgen is 25 Ar, and only really used in farming context, or historical contexts. A farmer would say: "I want to sell that 3 Morgen field, it is to far away from the rest of my land". And every other farmer would know what it is about, and no one else would care, as you can not simply build anything on farm land (in Germany).

Anyway, the fact that you historically use acres and such is as it is. However other countries, like Thailand, simply converted their old measuring systems into the closest metric fitting one, that makes sense. For example 1 Rai, often wrongly translated as "acre" is 1600square meters. Or for simpletons: a square of 40m x 40m. And for the real simpletons: a meter is more or less exactly: one yard. So if you just would drop feet and use yards, you were nearly compatible already. So you would need to define what an acre is, based on yards, and pick a number that makes sense. 37 yards versus 37 yards probably does not make sense ... the Ai overview is kind of funny ... anyway, if you look at the history as explained in this article, then an acre has a completely reasonable size: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

However, no one knows how many square yards one acre is ... I mean: without thinking a bit ...

The worst thing about Americans is they like to argue how much more natural feet and inches are because you can dived it with more whole numbers ... as if anyone in real live ever cared about that in the last 400 years.

When did I once have to divide a thing with the dimension of length? And why would I have cared that the result is a whole number and not a fraction? I seriously do not know, if I ever had this problem in my life.

Ten meters divided by three, for what ever reason ... if you can not do that with a pocket calculator, or on paper, or in your mind: use a rope. What would be the benefit that this 10m are more exactly 10yards and can be expressed as 30feet and now dividing by 3 gives you three 10 feet long stretches? It is the exact same result. Nothing is easier than the other way. It is just the same.

It gets even more idiotic when Americans insist that bolts and screws and screw nuts need to be measured imperial: because there is some odd reason why is better, when the rest of the world uses metric. From an engineering point of view: there is absolutely no difference. The damn screw has to fit the screw nut. Not only in "size" but also in fitting the grooves. There is no objective way to call one measuring system better than the other one. Just like you know from a simple glance: for that screw nut I will need this wrench, I know the same for my screws. Wait ... the fucking screws in my laptop are Torque, or how ever that is called.

Btw, being able to divide a dimension with as many single digit numbers as possible into a whole number, stops making sense when you read this: one acre is 1/640 of a square mile. So the error of the guy who thought that Texas is plastering nearly 10% of its land mass with solar panels, is based on the problem to mix up simple lengths of feet, yards, miles and the squares of them, because the acre used: has in reality nothing to do with either of them.

Comment Re:that is a lot of land if my calcs are correct (Score 1) 73

Depends on the crops.

Also keep in mind agrivoltaics does not have the primary goal to produce electricity. The primary goal is to improve crop yield. For example tomatoes or strawberries. And how do you improve that? By having all the frameworks you need for the panels have a double or tripple usage, like irrigation, grows support and shadow, etc. So, you use the electricity for irrigation, or draining water. And switch your tooling to electric. Of course you sell the surplus.

It is also not "that easy" as you have to plan for the size of the machines you want to use. In other words, a square mile or square km of pure solar (regardless if there is grass/crops below it) will be much more dense plastered with panels than a crop field that has as side effect a solar installation.

With the future price drops, I assume we will get aestethics-voltaic, where panels are placed vertically as walls like separation areas, for example in outdoor restaurants. Or shadow givers on house walls. In theory the glass facades of sky scrapers can be fully solar covered. Even the windows could be half transparent solar panels.

All that stuff exists already, in various colours ...

There are also paint types (the chemical used, not the colour) that are high reflective and drastically reduce ambient temperature as they absorb infrared light and reemit it as visible or ultra violet light. Have bi-focal panels and put them straight vertical, and surround them with 1 square meter / square yard of rocks and gravel painted with such colours and you have a kind of stone garden, that looks nice and produces power.

Comment The UK blocked it (Score 2) 42

Long ago, the UK courts ordered all the major consumer ISPs to block The Pirate Bay along with various other popular services. Ever since, we've had to keep up to date on what the latest proxy address might be.

Of course, thanks to the new censorship laws introduced more recently, we're all on VPNs now, so as to avoid having to hand our ID to the wallet inspector for every last website we ever use. And once that was set up, it was nice to discover that the original is still in play!

Comment Re:Consequences? (Score 1) 159

I guess that is the story. At the time I heard about it, I only "parsed" the headlines ... so it was not as bad as I thought, haha.

But still ridiculous, don't you think?

What is next, I practice Thai and write some notes in the curvy scribble, or worth I learn Myanmar - which actually has an indeed very strange script, inspired by moon phases - and get accused of doing black magic in an air plane.

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