Viewing profile — paulgerhardt

I recall we were seriously talking about using one during the early days of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. For a variety of reasons it wouldn’t have worked in that instance. [1] h…

I just restored an 1800’s house and we redid the paint in limewash as part of that process. (Effectively zero VOCs but pretty caustic when wet.) Historically (for interior paint) y…

Seeing the index in action next to an oura I appreciate how much smaller/thinner the index is (or at least how much less it seems to “spread” my fingers apart with of a width of 6.…

Sounds like a kanji version of their Big Tic line. You can find old copies of the JR-1999/JR-8034/JR7978 on eBay but if you’re curious about fashion history (as I am) the backstory…

Recurring revenue, K-factor, long shelf life and low actuation rate. Few verticals outside of video storage could support a monthly subscription putting negative pressure on suppor…

Some lesser god of protein folding is big mad we just copied her homework instead of spending 6 billion years in the lab like she did.

Watched this when it came out. I felt like it had that typical Technology Connections problem where it will take one under explored point along a Pareto frontier and conflate it fo…

This recent article[1] answers a lot of these questions with great photos too. I would go so far to say it’s the most authoritative piece to date. Previously [2]. [1] https://apps.…

Pretty clever solution to rabbit starvation.

Some napkin math suggests July 11, 2478 AD assuming 1% annual growth and utilization of PtL / Fischer–Tropsch. Closer to March 19, 2063 if you just mean crude oil supplies only.

First couple of crews to orbit the earth at 0’ AGL had mortality rate of 9 in 10. I’d say we’re doing better!

I mean there are multiple, multiple boundaries in place for this reason. I’d start by saying most “in the middle of the night” updates target non-safety critical systems in the car…

“Cyberfunk”

Just went through this. Sample size one: While the fire resulted in the total loss of the house it was actually the water from the fire department not the heat that did proportiona…

I’ve seen it a lot in ‘90’s hacker / net adjacent cultures. It always reads as gen-x/elderly tech millennial to me - specifically post 1993 net culture but prior to mass adoption o…

I would imagine the endorsement requirement reduces submissions by a few orders of magnitude.

I was curious about the forecasting success story here too. The German LOK article is better in this regard: https://www.lok-report.de/news/europa/item/62410-oesterreich...

That unreplicability between chips is actually a very, very desirable property when fingerprinting chips (sometimes known as ChipDNA) to implement unique keys for each chip. You us…

Thanks. Higham explicitly addresses the authors substitution crime in section 2.5. Wonderful resource. My complaint stems more to the general observation that readability is prized…

I wish there was a Strunk and White for mathematics. While by no means logically incorrect, it feels inelegant to setup a problem using variables A and B in the first paragraph and…

Because it keeps coming up there is an anti-Novamin crowd that says it’s useless and Biomin is the true re-enamelizer.

While I understand the spirit of this comment, if you look at the fossil record you’ll see that’s objectively not true. Roughly half of the shifts in the last 11 evolutionary perio…

Aside from the skin lotion thing[1] that got popular recently, what is the state of the art in 2025 for allergy prevention? It feels like there is a lot of common ignorance in this…

A few ways. This particular project is doing it by hand and very tedious. The traditional way of transplanting large trees while keeping the root system intact is with a hydrovac. …