Viewing profile — cmsmith

Informative headline, for those not wanting to figure out the wsj paywall: >Faced with an influx of visitors, India's picturesque village of Jibhi has shut down the local liquor st…

Yes, the assisting crane is a mobile crane where the boom pivots up and down about the base. Some have booms that need to be disassembled piece-by-piece, so you just pivot it down …

Hydro doesn't need pumping to provide load balancing. Just build more turbines [1] than you need for average load - then you can flow extra water overnight and less water during th…

It wouldn't be exactly a polar orbit, but slightly offset from one - like a sun-synchronous orbit around the earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit

The bridge looks to be precast concrete box-girders (hollow rectangular beams with plenty of steel reinforcement around the edges). The 'gravel' is the asphalt roadway (often this …

Nah, the building is (mostly) just as good at the end of that time. It's just a convenience to make the probabilities easier to conceptualize. If we designed buildings such that th…

Japan and California are pretty comparable in terms of science and engineering for earthquake resistance. There are some differences on the public policy side, which influence how …

Current building codes are intended to design to a 10% probability of collapse in the "Maximum Considered Earthquake", which is roughly a 2475-year event. The 2475-year event has a…

News article titles: > 7% of Scott Kelly's DNA was changed due to his year in space > Humans and chimps share 96% of the same DNA Seeing as how Scott Kelly is not severely mutated …

>shows commercials even to premium users I think this idea that businesses are only allowed to have one revenue stream seems a bit strange. Other businesses that are supported by p…

>If Mr. Musk were somehow to increase the value of Tesla to $650 billion — a figure many experts would contend is laughably impossible and would make Tesla one of the five largest …

Data: https://www.recode.net/2017/11/8/16617798/uber-delete-uber-l... It is a real trend, but doesn't represent 'most' users.

>A single interrogator can cover some 40 kilometers of fiber, Biondi says, and monitor a virtual sensor every couple of meters. Earthquake engineer here. This is the cool part. We'…

In DC, the mass transit agency is usually referred to as Metro, and offers two main services - Metrorail and Metrobus.

There are also single-use radon test kits, which should be fine if your home is in a relatively steady-state condition.

I'll take a guess: 300 feet is awfully deep. If you believe that 300 feet of draft is needed to get the stability they need, then this seems like the only way to get it. There are …

There is also a lot of more dangerous nuclear material scattered all over the country in bombs and power plants - none of which are designed to last more than a few decades. If soc…

>Creating them, however, is a monumental task. There are more than four million miles of roads in the United States. I assume that most passenger-miles are driven on driving myself…

Your distance is off by quite a bit (should be ~1e11 m at closest approach). The actual force is closer to 10^16 N. Which is big, but 10^7 weaker than the earth-sun interaction. Bu…

Read more carefully - HR8799 is the subject of the animation up top, and the subject of the quote about motion interpolation. Both are credited to J. Wang, while the composite phot…

I shopped for created diamonds a year or two ago, and like others was disappointed with the cost savings. It seems awfully odd that on the spectrum from $0.01/caret to $1,000,000/c…

I worked at NIST until recently, and my password expired every 90 days. We also had separate passwords for a half-dozen legacy IT systems (timesheets, travel requests, IT support, …

Given the choice between Thiel (favors reconstitution of our political establishment and believes in science and technology) and the rest of the Trump hangers-on (are ambivalent to…