kale

A side effect of this is that the "pure" olive oil is much more stable and has a higher smoke point. Wikipedia lists "Extra Virgin" at 160C and "Refined" up to 243C. So if you're trying to create a non-stick surface on something, pure olive oil is better than virgin olive oil.

I always though sapphire fulfilled the requirements of "transparent aluminium". It's used as a lens material for a lot of phone cameras.

Without branching (or with limited branching, last I checked it masked and re-ran instead). A core implies both instruction and data operations, rather than SIMD behavior.

PlayOn desktop works pretty well too. That plus Plex is way more convenient when travelling internationally and in places with poor network access.

Stainless Steel is a huge class of metals, most (but not all) have nickel in them. Also alloys of cupronickel, coin metal, cobalt chromium, and nitinol all have nickel in them. And certain countries lie constantly about nickel content in metal they sell. When we source for medical implants, we have to specify no material from certain countries, because we can't trust their certifications, and we can't re-do all of the certification testing on our own.

Nickel is just too useful (and pre-existing in a lot of metal ores, I think) to stop using it, despite the fact that a large percentage of people are allergic to it.

My daughter has an Android tablet. For a while it was vanilla Android until I realized she was downloading an app, tapping the initial ad on the app, which lead to another app. Repeat ad nauseam until she couldn't install anything else. She isn't able to distinguish quality of apps, and was installing apps that were one giant copyright violation (My little Ponies, Mickey Mouse, and a Minion, all in the same app!).

For the life of me I can't figure out how these apps make money. They're like flotsam in the Google App store, so they're making money somehow. For all I know they turn on the microphone and send the data to a rogue organization.

This is very different to when I grew up. I had to write my games in Basic (I got them in the back of a catalog!) and I learned how to modify them. I plan on giving her free use of any of my Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, and if she shows interest in those big, expensive RGB LED matrices, I'll buy those for her. She can go nuts with those!

Titanium is also a relatively poor conductor of heat. Aluminum conducts heat over 10 times better than Titanium. Use of aluminium would be much better at conducting heat away from the body of the notebook.

No, Yagis have a single driven element like a dipole, and you have longer elements behind the driven element (reflectors), and shorter elements in front (directors I think?).

I'm not an expert in the field, but I do annealing work on occasion (simulated annealing, which is kind of like copying polymer annealing).

Simulated annealing is just an optimization. I use it for modelling human motion. You have the position and acceleration of each bone in the legs and feet. You start by deciding on a variable (say, reducing energy expenditure for gait), and then letting the algorithm alter variables and attempt to minimize a variable.

So if quantum annealing is anything like simulated annealing, you aren't "solving" for a single, correct answer, but getting a solution that minimizes or maximizes an outcome faster than brute force.

So a quantum computer could solve "What is the factorization of this huge number?", while quantum annealing could solve "Given these 30 different engine configurations, which combination of intake pressure, fuel flow rate, turbocharger performance curve, and engine timing would result in the best fuel efficiency?"

This is the frustrating part to me. I bought a house with a broker I used a lot (flipped abused houses for a few years). He sold the loan to company A, which was great. They sold the loan to company B after a year, and the nightmare started.

One month, they withdrew my mortgage twice on the same day (found out when my debit card declined at the grocery store).

They sent a mortgage interest statement in January. I filled out my taxes, then after I had gotten my refund, they sent a corrected mortgage interest statement. I had to make a judgement call on whether this required re-filing taxes and the expense that entailed.

The worst was when we got a $2500 check from the mortgage company, saying they had recalculated our escrow, and they had overestimated it initially. We spent most of that money on setting up a nursery for a new baby. Two months later, we received another letter saying, "whoops, our bad, we actually did have escrow calculated correctly the first time. Pay us $2500 in 30 days or your house note is going up by $200 a month until escrow is funded again".

EDIT: Recalled another issue with this company. I'd get e-mails monthly: "You're late on your payment. We're about to foreclose on your house". This would be followed by an e-mail: "Our computer system is being upgraded. Please disregard late payment e-mails if you've paid your mortgage. We should have this fixed within three months".