Thanks. I was mostly basing my answer on my experience with nautical charts, where declination corrections are typically uniform over relatively large areas and local anomalies are less of a concern. I hadn’t considered how much more variable the field can be in terrestrial use.
From that, you can pre-compute a low-resolution declination grid. NOAA even provides one here:
https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geomag/calculators/magcalc.shtml#i.... That’s only a few KB of data and requires just a simple declination subtraction based on lat/lon, similar to how it’s handled on nautical charts. This works fine as long as you stay away from the poles (and Alaska).
The article rightly points out the industrial impact of more powerful and compact lasers but I cannot wait for those PCSELs to reach the small workshop market. Having a cheap laser able to cut metal at home / small shops would be so useful (And sneakily dangerous as lasers are).
You are not forbidden at the Federal level to have fixed units.
But many states do indeed requires a permit to install fixed units. And have strict regulations such as self producing half of the electricity required by the installation.
One of the side effect of such regulation is that many business and houses will use cheap non-fixed units with open door and windows instead of installing proper reversible heat pumps.
It looks like someone took the "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway" sneakernet idea literally.
I love reading those articles about new materials. Since reading James Edward Gordon's The New Science of Strong Materials: Or Why You Don't Fall through the Floor (https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691180984/th...), I’ve been trying to keep in touch with the development of new materials. Still, I find it hard to understand which materials get into production. You tend to read news about new materials when a press release is published (as it is a relatively discrete event), but rarely about the fact that an industry has progressively adopted a new material that it regularly uses in production. It is even worse if there isn't a corporation or institution behind it to promote it.
For example, I read many articles about Flash Bainite Steel (https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1461193) in 2015, and I’d love to know if the industry has adopted this process. (I am especially curious about its potential use as tubing material for bicycle frame building).
Also the planet could well become greener with global warming but the issue is the rate of change. Even if the new growing conditions were great for some crops, evolving our entire agriculture and food regimen to them in a few decades is a huge ordeal.
I do it in practice! With light hills I climb at 25kph (Steeper hills, I can’t hit the limit), and go down at 30-35. Faster than the same length flat road along the lake.
I’m currently renovating a house and we live with a single wood (pellet) stove for the whole building. Living in a 16C home is surprisingly fine but the worst part is indeed the cold bathroom in the morning.
This reminds me of one of my favorite physics lessons in undergrad: classical mechanics are a limiting case of general relativity where v << c so that all terms with v/c can be neglected.
Wouldn’t you be able to have a heat floor heated by your wood? If wood is cheap where you live heating water with it is a nice upgrade from a basic wood stove.
I expect bike and component prices to go down with wider adoption. Especially e-bikes. I was for example surprised to see that on my kids-towing e-bike in a hilly city I have to change front-disc-brakes pads approximately every 1'000km which, at 20€ a pair of disc-brakes pads in Switzerland, translates to approximately 0.02€ per km just for braking. Which at the end of the day is not an issue for me but seems SO expensive in comparison with a car.
Not anymore. That is exactly the purpose of Darpa Ambient program: https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/atomic-magnetometer-...
Demo from 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTnIXWCBYTw