WillNotDownvote
Joined 11 years ago
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HN would be a much better site with downvoting completely disabled for everyone.
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Comment · 11 years ago
"Would the Grand Canyon be less grand if it was only a couple millennia old?"
Yes.
Comment · 11 years ago
This page seems to suggest that poplar seedling density in clearcut areas is on the order of thousands per acre, which then thin out considerably as the trees mature. See the "seedling development" section.
http://www.na.fs.fed.us/pubs/silvics_manual/volume_2/liriode...
Comment · 11 years ago
It's a testament to the brilliance of game show producers that they took something like this that both the contestant and the audience will misunderstand (but looks so simple!) and made a long running show out of it, making millions along the way.
Comment · 11 years ago
Where did you find that 100 trees per acre figure? That sounded really low to me, so I did some googling and found numbers more along the lines of 300-400 per acre.
In fact, 100 trees per acre is the minimum to be classified as a forest in a particular program, and that's in Southern California, which is especially sparse land for trees. http://mountainsfoundation.org/uploads/media_items/landowner...
Comment · 11 years ago
Poplars are considered to be among the best trees in terms of carbon sequestration according to studies done thus far. In addition, if they're converted to paper and other wood products, they continue to sequester the carbon for the life of those products.
Here's a layman's article on the "best trees" for carbon sequestration- http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_l...
Comment · 11 years ago
Yellow Poplars in Georgia grow at pretty much that same rate naturally. When I was living there I let a portion of my backyard go from lawn to natural, and the poplars were amazingly fast.
Comment · 11 years ago
Speed- The difference is after that 10 minutes, the transaction is settled. The money has moved. What you have with a credit card in 10 minutes is a promise that the money will move, possibly days or even weeks later.
The bitcoin can be moved again (spent by the receiver) after 10 minutes. Try that with money you received by a credit card payment.
This really is the fundamental difference of bitcoin- once the money has moved, it's really moved. It takes some time and thinking to appreciate how that opens things up quite a bit.
Comment · 11 years ago
I was looking for something on r/askhistorians I saw a while back about a hot sauce bottle found in Virginia City ruins, indicating a brand that had gone national in the 1870s or so.
Haven't found it yet, but did find this- a discussion of the saloons of the city, which mentions the Irish bar in town a few times, as well as Tennent's Ale, which was a growing global brand at the time.
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/285y5g/what_e...
In any case, I spend a fair amount of time browsing 19th century American magazines and newspapers (for fun, I suppose), and you can see the early national brands growing over the decades. The railroads were what made it all possible, they really did transform daily life in substantial ways. Certainly in places that were directly connected, but also even in more remote towns. Goods moved much more quickly, and growth hacking of all sorts was rewarded quite handsomely.
EDIT- here's the thread I was looking for, it was specifically the Tabasco brand we know today. There's also a subthread on cocktails of the era! http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/29tus4/compar...
Comment · 11 years ago
Trendy brands are fashion items with limited product histories? Who would have guessed?
In any case, it's instructive to look at old menus and wine lists to get a feel for what was actually on offer way back when. For the most part, cocktails as we know them don't show up until the 1940s or so. Though it's worth noting there aren't a lot of speakeasy menus around.
On the other hand, generic types of liquor like "old tom gin" or "rye" date back well into the 19th century.
Wine brands certainly date back even further, and interestingly it's the champagnes that have changed very little in the top brands for centuries. Some beer brands, particularly Guinness and Bass have been popular on American menus for a long, long time.
Browse the New York Public Library's historic menu collection here- http://menus.nypl.org/
Comment · 11 years ago
This was also part of the Survival Swimming course that used to be mandatory at Georgia Tech back in the olden days. At some point in the class, we had to jump off the high dive, use our pants as described, and remain floating in the deep end of the pool for some length of time (30 minutes I think?)
Fun class, but I shouldn't have taken it in a poorly insulated gym at 8 am Winter Quarter. Brrr.
Comment · 11 years ago
Combine this with pg's essay on the importance of importing the 'best and brightest' to America and some things start to make sense. More minds working where they can be aimed in the 'desirable' direction.
Comment · 11 years ago
What if the AI was integral to the design and manufacturing processes of all the airplanes, which is a much more likely path?
Then you can see how it gains 'control', in the senses that control matters anyway, without us necessarily even realizing it, or objecting if we do.
Comment · 11 years ago
Large corporations "restructure" all the time. Most often this consists of a periodic pruning of exactly these jobs, which really are worthless. The company continues on, wholly unharmed by the cuts.
Comment · 11 years ago
When I worked as a bartender, if we didn't know what a particular drink was, and the customer didn't know what was in it, we just asked "What color is it?". We usually came up with something satisfactory!
Comment · 11 years ago
Hinton's Coursera class a couple years ago pulled me in. I wish there were more Coursera classes at that level.