BreakPoint
Random Posts (An alternate to side discussions)
@Ben wrote:
I SUSPECT the piece of paper, which was scrap paper from a laser printer, is treated to NOT catch fire in the event of a jam with paper in the fusing unit. At lest that makes sense to me.
White paper has a higher reflectivity and thus converts less of the light into thermal energy and more is scattered back as light.
@Henrik_Volkers wrote:
A short story in news (german) about an IKEA salat bowl with unintended focus:
We had similar stories here where a certain arrangement of windows and reflective surfaces melted nearby car parts at the right (=wrong) time of day.
A similar story from elsewhere:
When the Disney concert hall was built, there were these problems. (Now some sides are "frosted").
As kids there was an interesting variation on the magnifying glass. Basically we would put water (boiled, to avoid air bubbles and get clear ice) into a round-bottom bowl and let it freeze. The resulting ice lens could be used to burn things by focusing the sun rays. Interesting teaching opportunity: How can sun rays travel through ice and still burn something 😄
The paper reflectivity is also an interesting lesson. We are sitting in a thermos surrounded by the vacuum of space and irradiated by the sun, so the energy balance is critically dependent on the earths reflectivity, such as the presence of ice caps. Los Angeles has a pilot project to lower local summer temperatures by making the streets lighter in color. Of course this could cause more glare for people with cataracts and you might want to wear sun glasses to avoid snow blindness. :D. Ideally, you want a color such as used on these color changing mugs that is dark at cool temperatures and light in hot temperatures for some built-in regulation..
In Austin, Tx they introduced a building code to limit the number of buildings with mirrored glass windows when adjacent buildings' temperatures started really climbing on sunny days.
There was a science fiction story many years ago that had as its premise of giving the fans at a highly contested football game in South America (futbol, I guess) those cards that used to be used to create images in the crowds. Only these were shiny on one side, and when the signal was given and the cards were raised it (in the story) created a giant solar furnace....
As to the reflectivity of the Earth's surface, a side effect of forest fires in Canada last year appears to be increased melting of the Greenland ice cap due to the soot dropped on the ice/snow.
Google's best interest is to not hide information, but to provide the information that the majority of people are looking for first. Same with the web enabled pages. Google isn't artificially promoting sites that have a mobile view, people are choosing to go to the pages that have a mobile view more often. It isn't Google's fault that people are choosing these sites more often. But people going to these sites more often, will mean Google promotes them more often because they want to provide a service that appeals to the most users. This has the result of making Google sometimes look racist because people are often jerks. Like at one point you could Google "French military victories", and Google would say "Did you mean French military defeats?" Google didn't do this intentionally it just saw a trend that people searching for victories often went to the sites highlighting the defeats.
Also if a site has been optimized for mobile that would tell me that the site likely has been remade, or updated in the last 5 or 10 years, and will more likely have the result of what I am looking for, before a site made in the 90s.
The speed and efficiency of my work has increased with search data being more readily available. I remember a guy in the office having posters and posters pinned up in his office with all kinds of RJ-45, DB9, DB25, RJ-11, and various IEC connector standards. It looked cool, but it takes a whole lot less space in my cube to just search the pinout, and have it on my phone than to have to walk back to my cube and get the poster.
I'm not saying it is all for the best, but I just want to nudges you saying life isn't that bad, and major shifts in technology are both terrible and great at the same time. Books aren't ruining our society, neither are cars, cartoons, violence in the media, video games, the internet, computers, smart phones, etc. If we are a terrible society it is because we are terrible people. Likewise if we are a great society it will be because of the people.
