The problem with glass is that it isn’t biodegradable. If it gets broken, it can cause a hazard for humans and wildlife. If it gets thrown away, it’s not going to break down. Glass is good for the ideal case, but not great for the other use cases. For milk and juice, it’s seems like thick paper might be a better option, since it’s biodegradable and recyclable.
Glass is literally molten sand. It will break down just like the rock breaks down. It's not toxic or hazardous, except when it's freshly shattered, but these super sharp edges weather relatively quickly, after which they aren't any sharper than natural found rock. This not to say that we should just don't care and throw away glass anywhere we want, but it's really not a huge deal, unless you hate seeing glass pebbles among normal rock pebbles.
> It's not toxic or hazardous, except when it's freshly shattered, but these super sharp edges weather relatively quickly, after which they aren't any sharper than natural found rock.
Glass actually takes a long time to lose its sharp edge unless it's dumped in a river or the ocean, which is in fact a great way to dispose of glass.
There really is no better way to dispose of garbage than dumping glass in the ocean... returning silica to its source in a way that doesn't look bad.
This all hinges on what you mean by “relatively fast”. If glass is being shattered and ends up being a hazard for years, this is much worse than a goopy old discarded plastic bottle, regardless of the perceived ugliness of the latter.
Glass will cut my feet and shred my tires. The wildlife is largely unaffected. There'd still be trees, birds, animals, etc. You're blowing it out of proportion.
Just because Hillary’s campaign contributions were not as effective at persuading voters enough to win a electoral college majority does not mean that Trump (or other politicians) are not influenced by those contributions. It seems clear to me that businesses are getting a return in investment for the money they are spending in politics, otherwise they wouldn’t do it.
For example, the British Museum is free, but the donation box when leaving points out that its paid for by taxes. I've seen international tourists making significant donations (e.g. £30+ for a family) recognising what visiting a similar museum would cost in their own country. But I like that a student from a low-income country can still visit the museum, and I'm happy for taxes to cover the cost.
It’s $5 for a group wilderness permit application plus $5 per person per permit. I think it’s another $5/person if you want to add on the Half Dome summit.
The linked article indicates that only a small amount of seaweed needs to be added to their diet to be effective and that seaweed is easy to grow, so it doesn’t sound like it would take long to scale.
Not that it would eliminate the gains, but cows and seaweed are generally far apart geographically. Therefore you would need to ship the seaweed product to where the cows are.
We really need to include suggestions for adding programs and laws for encouraging saving, removing predatory lending, and incentivizing responsible spending in articles like these. There is too much focus on consumer spending and not enough on household stability and having money in the bank for emergencies.
Several states already ban payday loans and some don’t allow lotteries (let alone state sponsored lotteries that are used to fund things like education). Personally, I think setting an effective interest rate cap (including loan fees) at around 15-20% a year would be very effective at preventing the kind of lending that can lead someone to multiple years of high-interest debt repayment or eventual bankruptcy. More education in high school about how to manage your finances wisely could also prove beneficial.
The article makes it sound like there is no possible way for the probe to melt. Is this actually the case? Is there no possibility that manufacturer defects or a solar anomaly that could cause unexpected problems?
I don’t want to downplay the good design and engineering that went into this, but should we be so confident without actually having done something like this thousands of times?
> Is there no possibility that manufacturer defects or a solar anomaly that could cause unexpected problems?
There sure is. At least two of the systems (positioning and water cooling) are active systems that could fail.
> but should we be so confident without actually having done something like this thousands of times?
"we" are confident enough that we rely on it to protect a > 1 billion USD probe. What's the use in adding a lot of ifs and maybes to some piece of marketing/explanation?
If it fails, adding some ifs and maybes to a marketing video won't really change anything.
Doesn’t it undermine the credibility of NASA if something goes wrong? The public who is the audience for this article is also paying the bills (through taxes). I’d settle for just changing “won’t melt” to “shouldn’t melt”. I think that appropriate for something that’s never been attempted.
(former software engineer on PSP here) It's a certainty that it will melt eventually, but that's not a satisfying answer to the question "why won't it melt?" The satisfying answer is "for the time period when it won't melt, it won't melt because of..."
Either way we’re chucking lots of money at the sun so if it fails we still learn something, not to mention developed a lot of technologies along the way.
For sure, but it would be a shame if NASA lost confidence and trust (and possibly funding) with their stakeholders (the public), because they weren’t more upfront about the potential risks. As a scientific organization that has experienced significant (and expensive) failures before, I expect better.
It seems like you want to discredit NASA now ("shouldn't melt") vs some imagined possibility("won't melt" but it does). With the amount of design, analysis, testing, and independent review and verification of the systems, backup systems, triply redundant systems, and autonomy, we can be as sure of it not melting as we can be sure of anything. And we certainly spent a large amount of money on this (about 1/10th of the World Cup), but in performance and value per $, it's a great deal.
Not at all. I expect NASA has done as much due diligence, planning, testing, and verification as possible. I just don’t think they are being upfront as they should be about the possible risks for a previously unattempted scientific endeavor. We’ve had massive failures (including NASA itself), in environments that are much better understood and with systems that have actually had exposure to those environments.
I also didn’t intend on “shouldn’t melt” to be taken sarcastically. I was trying to show how I would like something changed in the article. Probably a bad use of quotes on my part...
Manufacturing defects are part of engineering - they're good at this and there will be multiple scans done of the shield before it's sent up (x-rays etc) to check for defects.
But I'm also curious about what happens in the event of a solar flare or similar - from an engineering standpoint, what's their safety margin? Solar density goes up two hundred percent?
Personally, I’d be happy with just automated freeway driving. That seems like an easier problem to solve (no pedestrians, complex traffic controls, cars going the other way or turning across your path, and visibility is usually pretty good). Why not focus on and perfect that first?
While driving on California freeways I have seen: pedestrians, complex traffic controls (law enforcement rerouting traffic or running moving breaks due to incidents), cars going the other way (drunk or confused), and terrible visibility (fog, snow, dust, heavy rain). It's going to take decades before automated freeway driving is perfected. Those edge cases can't just be ignored.
You can to at least some degree though once you've imposed the constraint that there needs to be a competent licensed driver in the car because they need to handle the endpoints in any case.
Certainly, the car needs to be able to recognize conditions where it needs to turn over control with, say, one minute warning. And we're not at that point today. But one can imagine things like radio beacons for construction zones for example. It's not easy but it seems much easier than the more general case and it's also possible to get too hung up on truly weird corner cases like traffic going down the freeway in the wrong direction.
You're never going to get a one-minute warning about stupid people doing stupid things. Like when some idiot decides to play Frogger across four lanes of traffic because his car stalled out in the median. I suppose we could just accept some collisions in those cases but it would be a mess.
A general enough system would have no edge cases. It is IMO the required solution, and a driver always on the defensive is what we all are, at lease here in South America.
Just following the rules would have killed me years ago. Other drivers are reckless.
Why not just go with paper milk cartons? They are very recyclable and biodegradeable and I think it would be easy to find a supplier/packager and the stores would have no problem selling it.
The same could be said for the racial-based statistics, since race might be tied to cultural opinions which could impact how many hours a week or years in a lifetime someone works.
Why should we care the reason people make their choices? What if I like surfing, so I decide to work part time which allows me to surf more? Does my skin color or gender matter? If I want to participate in this "surf culture," why would you feel the need to either force me to work more or demand that others subsidize my surfing habit?
I’m just saying there is a factor that could impact the statistics and that how much a person works should be taken into account for all the findings. Not just the gender-based one, so that we have accurate data from which to make decisions from.
I didn’t say anything about forcing anyone to work or subsidizing habits. I think these charts are trying to claim that discrimination is happening and if how much someone is working isn’t taken into account, they don’t support that claim very well.
To be clear I’m not stating that discrimination is or isn’t happening. I’d just like better data.
Well, the difference between race and gender is that most women have children, which take up a lot of time and require taking at least some time away from work. If the difference is due to cultural issues then maybe it makes sense to worry about the differences and try to address them, but if the difference just comes down to women have children so they work less that's a less compelling reason to try to equalize men's and women's wages (and as I noted, in some areas young women out earn men already, partly because they tend to be more educated).
Men have children too. There are not many kids that have no biological father.
I mean these comments talk about it as if kids and work around them had zero to do with men and we're some kind of female hobby. Among some men it is so as they don't care, but many men do actually care and do spend time with them.
You cant take numbers from Norway when talking about Americans incomes. Norway is way less christian and way more socialist. Precisely this kind of statistics differ between countries. I have no idea how America compares. (For example Norway has similar suicide rates for women then America, but less of them for males. That is the one on top of head.)
Also, male incarceration is much higher then female one, that is another difference that should push income the other way round. And some babies without fathers are due to incarceration and people in prison are not earning all that much.
I mean, I get argument that women are more likely to do kids work and more likely to say no in work because something kid related, but it kinda rubs me wrong when people talk about kids and female only thing. I see too many good caring fathers around me and also fathers who did made choice to spend more time with kids in expense of career. They deserve a bit of recognition too.
You don’t need to know the reason why someone isn’t working or is working less to have better claims for or against discrimination. I’d just like to see something that says that a certain demographic who work a certain number of hours a week differs from a different demographic who works the same number of hours a week.
