Viewing profile — exue

Got it, hope that helped! I'd be very interested to see what the analysis is for a bike and what the optimal human efficiency is like. In my experience riding road/hybrid bikes vs.…

Agreed - you can't really do much without variables/primitives first. Which are might be conceptually harder to grasp

With web programming, a lot of the initial hassle and set up is gone, and visual learning/iteration by hitting refresh is very easy. So I would say, almost as young as they can pla…

Got it - I think you're asking why the peak is still so low at 40mph, and why we haven't shifted it toward 55, or 65. The reason there is a peak at all and we aren't most efficient…

Good catch! Knew I was missing something when the other comment referenced a quadratic relationship. (Updated)

Longer gearing will improve the high-end efficiency where it wasn't yet optimal - to help 90MPH you could target that with your super 7th gear at "ideal" torque/RPM. However the ov…

The thing is we have a lot a lot of leverage on the technological side. Choosing a behavioral and societal change vs. technological is always a trade off - but for this case some t…

Right now local transit in the US is often less energy efficient per passenger-mile than a solo-driven Prius or Insight, or even the average-loaded (gasoline) passenger car. The nu…

OK, now I understand where you're coming from. The physical limit is that at higher speed, we must expend more energy per unit of distance, to overcome drag (relatively little is l…

It's not always the most efficient for every car, but there are lots of charts showing this tradeoff. Some cars are more efficient at 65 or 70 than 55 (97 Celica), but in modern ga…

In a way, it also helps turnover of tables - it's a soft way of ensuring new customers can get seats and the people who got there first don't stay all day (short of an explicit X h…

Great points, especially on the loans. I'd like to add that you don't need REG 262 except in special circumstances, such as if the seller doesn't have the current title, or with lo…

Great, this adds a lot of trust for me! last thing I thought of - how is the communication facilitated? ex: asking questions about the vehicle's history

In California it's even easier than getting a notary - you just need signatures on the title ("pink slip"), and then both parties can fill an online form for transfer or liability.…

Great service! A lot of people don't have experience or simply don't want to deal with the Craigslist experience. Putting another option between a private party sale and the dealer…

What I really want to know is, if the conspiracy about Yelp taking down reviews based on whether you pay for its premium services. I imagine this is most of the fight with FTC comp…

If Canada is like the U.S., the median traffic speed on those roads you mentioned is greater than the speed limit. Thus it's really not a minority/extremely "can't say" opinion you…

It goes beyond learning though - I'd say we actually need those changed circumstances and advanced technologies for those changes to happen. Trying to adapt a 2010 US morality or s…

I always found it interesting the super strong correlation between essay length and score, and that the scorers are supposed to not care about factual accuracy at all. I also found…

The example they used basically paints taking more risk as 'cooler, more rational option' which seems a bit odd to me. Humans are well known not to have a linear utility function f…

At some point I believe they added photo messaging support by email, but you have to check + check for attachment. I had already filtered/archived all emails by default so I didn't…

Mainly because it's easier to get one government to shift their hours and thus the hours of everyone, businesses, government services, etc. at the same time, rather than relying on…

Antifragile - Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His other books Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan are more accessible - all incredibly great discussions of risk, probability, complex sy…

It's also a matter of scheduled maintenance: If you buy a car right before a bunch of critical components are replaced, expect a repair bill of $500-1K at the appropriate time. Alt…

Tangentially, Road Fever is a pretty epic read about two roadtrippers who get from the Tierra del Fuego, Argentina to Prudhoe, Alaska, in 24 days. Border crossings, mechanical issu…