Misc

1052 posts in Misc

Comet Ice

· misc

[...]

Could I cool down the Earth by capturing a comet and dropping it in the ocean, like an ice cube in a glass of water?

Daniel Becker

No. In fact, it's honestly sort of impressive to find a solution that would actively make the problem worse in so many different ways.

[...]

Outer space is a lot higher up than Niagara Falls,[citation needed] so the plunge down into the atmosphere at the bottom of Earth's gravity well adds a lot more than 0.1 degrees worth of heat. A chunk of ice from space that falls to Earth gains enough energy to warm the ice up, melt it, boil it into vapor, and then heat the vapor to thousands of degrees. If you built an icy waterfall from space, the water would arrive at the bottom as a river of superheated steam.

Best Before labels are causing food waste

· misc

Do you know the difference between ‘Best Before’ and ‘Sell By’? ‘Display Until’ and ‘Use By’?

Many of us don't, and it’s causing a whopping ten per cent of Europe’s food waste - 9,000,000 tonnes across Europe each year.

Source: TooGoodToGo

Third Place

· misc

I guess that's one thing that I do miss in Singapore: informal places that are affordable (almost everything here costs money) and that are not shopping malls (exactly what he mentions in the video).

Sure, there are bars, but they are usually expensive and atas, and not the place people go for an informal chitchat (more for date nights). There are the places around the hawker centres (i.e.: the food courts) with a lot of "uncles" sitting down -- but that's hardly my crowd. ;)

Japanese produce lumber without cutting trees: Daisugi

· misc

[...]

Shoots from the base of the tree are pruned so that the trunk stays straight.

[...]

The technique results in a harvest of straight logs without having to cut down the entire tree. Although originally a forestry management technique, daisugi has also found its way into Japanese gardens.

Daisugi

Not the most exciting narrators, but… Quite cool!

Would this scale and can we use this elsewhere to avoid cutting down trees?

Free speech

· misc, software

I specifically disagree with his stance on free speech, because I think that it depends on your interpretation of what free speech means. If you allow the most intolerant voices to be as loud as they want to, you’re going to shut down voices of different opinions as well. So allowing free speech by just allowing all speech is not actually leading to free speech, it just leads to a cesspit of hate.