tesseract

Because, specifically for onions, it's infamously illegal in the US (as the site alludes to).

Yeah, they are used in space. I don't work directly in this field, but have discussed wax motors with some newspace/smallsat folks, and get the impression they are popular for the same reason nitinol wire actuators are: few moving parts, no rotary bearings, resettable/multi-use unlike pyrotechnic actuators.

You're going to make me quote the "Dive Manual" scene from _Cryptonomicon_ again, aren't you.

(It features a software engineer introspecting about the fact that his line of work has caused him to dramatically overvalue recency when evaluating books about... pretty much any other technical field.)

And are often _encouraged_ to be wasteful by "use it or lose it" type provisions.

> there is that CO2 on the air that we actually want to get rid of

For this reason I have long been slightly baffled that development of compostable/biodegradable bio-based plastics is such a priority in materials research. Sure, it's interesting in the very long run, but for the foreseeable future, converting atmospheric CO2 (via plants as an initial step) into a long lived, inert material that can just be buried after an initial use seems like a benefit.

What with so many fans, it shouldn't be too surprising that jokes are just blowing every which way.

"Side hassles"... hahaha. Love it.

That's pretty much what a food co-op is supposed to be.

American food contains maize, obviously. This works for multiple understandings of the word "American" :)

That is true but it's also an infamously unusual aspect of the Bay Area.

Many of those big bells in other cultures are on fixed mountings (in a carillon, for instance). The idea of mounting the bell on a rotating wheel - which imposes limits on what music can be played due to the rotational inertia of the wheel, therefore leading to a unique style of composition - is distinctively English.

More likely a hall effect sensor, which is solid state and a lot smaller. And yes, older MacBooks had something like that, as evidenced by the fact you could put them to sleep by holding a magnet in the right place (just to the left of the trackpad IIRC in the models I'm familiar with)

A fairly intellectual audience, in the 50s and 60s when the space race was big news and von Braun's Nazi past was recent history? I'd guess a majority.