> The sun and that star are single grains of sand on a football field flying at each other.

This is a great way of explaining it but you’re off by a couple of orders of magnitude. It’s more like two sand grains in a large city.

Don't use your car. Don't pull, push. The brick wall behind it is an asset.

Cut a board slightly longer than the distance from the metal pillar to the brick wall of the house behind it. Wedge the wood between the pillar and the wall at the same height the car hit it, and tap it with a hammer. As it gets closer to horizontal it'll push the pillar outward. Go a little past straight, since the beam will spring back a little when you pop the board out.

You'll never get it quite straight, but this is an easy way to get it close enough that nobody will notice, without risk of damage to the house or your car.

Then go to the home improvement store and buy a new gutter downspout, there's no way to fix that nicely.

> higher energy density

Higher energy density per mass, but much much lower energy density per volume, which really matters if you're building a vehicle. There's only so much room inside an airplane for fuel tanks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File:Energy_density.svg

But regardless, whether it's gasoline or hydrogen, the point is that with enough free energy you can synthesize any fuel you need.

Meh. If you've got enough cheap energy, you can make gasoline from scratch.

Fun fact: the weather station that collects that co2 data is on Mauna Loa in Hawaii, and the road to it is currently blocked by a volcanic eruption. The weather station is not currently in danger though.

Yes, seasonal trees cause measurable changes in the amount of co2 and oxygen in earth’s atmosphere.

Here is a graph of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over time. The long term trend is due to humans, but the yearly wiggles are due to trees. Every summer they grow and pull down CO2 into their bodies, and every winter they decay and release that CO2. (You may wonder why the northern and southern hemispheres don’t cancel each other out. Answer: there are fewer trees experiencing winter in the south.)

And here is a graph of oxygen showing exactly the opposite trend, for exactly the same reasons. An important note: we are not going to run of oxygen. Because there’s so much oxygen in the air, the changes are relatively tiny: human activity has reduced it by about 0.08 %.

Yes, you’re mostly seeing a blue emission line from excited nitrogen in the air, but there are other complicating factors.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-spark-discharge-spectrum-of-3-mm-air-gap_fig4_262938332

That's the thing: there aren't any corporate profits either. DoorDash consistently loses a hundred million dollars a quarter, and the more business they do, the more money they lose. Read that last phrase again: it's the sure sign of a broken business model.

The problem is easy to see from OP's chart: working 14 hours a day, he makes 2600 deliveries at $26,000/year, or $10 per delivery. Not many people are gonna pay $10 to have $10 worth of Taco Bell delivered, so DoorDash charges less than that and pays OP more, taking a loss.

If we want OP to earn an actual living wage, with health insurance and coverage for gas and wear and tear on his car, it's gonna cost at least $30 per delivery. Ain't nobody on Earth going to pay that much.

Whether you're a customer, a dasher, or a stockholder, Doordash just. Doesn't. Work.

I’m a bit disappointed too, but it’s still a pretty epic place.

I'm amazed you managed to get a photo of this without any obvious human-made objects in it. Just to the left is a gigantic residential area, a major highway runs through the valley right behind Koko Head, and the bay in the foreground is usually packed with snorkelers and divers.

That transformer's gonna be pretty big too.

No one person sets the price. It emerges through the actions of many buyers and sellers. Let’s suppose I run a bank and have extra yen and want to buy dollars. I offer to pay 139 yen per dollar. Other people and banks are less desperate to get rid of their yen: one offers 138, one offers 137 yen per dollar. Other folks are looking to sell dollars: they want 141, 140, and 139 yen.

I can do a deal with that last guy. I buy up his dollars, and now the low offer is 140. If I want more I’ll have to pay 140 for them. The new price is 140.

Now you come along with tons of dollars to sell. You sell me all I want at 139 yen. If you want to sell more, you’ll have to sell to the next guy who’s offering 138. The new price is 138.

At every moment, the price is set by the most generous offer that nobody is yet willing to meet.

What's your budget? I'm guessing you're looking at about $20-$50 grand just in batteries.

Traffic ticket revenues were way up, though, so lawmakers say it’s a win.

Take the Earth’s lat/long grid and imagine projecting it out in an expanding bubble out toward the stars. Lock it in place so it stays fixed with the stars* rather than spinning with the Earth. This is the astronomer’s cartographic system.

For moving objects in the solar system, we describe the shape, orientation and timing of their orbits and then use some nasty math to turn that into celestial latitude and longitude.

* turns out “fixed with respect to the stars” is really complicated.

Oh, and to follow up on my followup: the case of New York shows one important subtlety, namely that glacial loads can cause both downward and upward motions at the same time.

/u/CrustalTrudger described the earth as a viscous trampoline. I'd like to suggest you think of it as a viscous air mattress. The overall volume of the mantle remains unchanged, so if the weight of glaciers pushes one area down, nearby areas must move up, as the mantle displaced under the glacier has to go somewhere. When the glacial load is removed, the opposite effect occurs.

This means that while most of Canada is currently rising as it recovers from the weight of the Laurentide ice sheet being removed, much of the United States is currently sinking by the same effect.

> With respect to projections of global eustatic sea level rise over time frames like 50-100 years, most won't necessarily include projections of isostatic responses to recent (i.e., anthropogenically related) ice mass redistribution and resultant changes to ocean basin volume, because the effects will be relatively small

It's rare I get to correct /u/CrustalTrudger ! Modern sea level rise predictions do include the effects of vertical land motion, because that effect is significant over 50-100 year time frames.

The IPCC has released a sea level rise interactive map that shows its projections for the rest of the century, and lets you compare the various terms.

In New York City, for example, sea level is projected to rise about 40% more than the global average. Much of this extra sea level rise is because the crust beneath New York is currently moving downward due to the glacial isostatic adjustment process Crustal described. The rest of the extra sea level rise in New York is due to the changing gravitational pull of Greenland as it melts. (!)

In a few areas, such as Hudson Bay, the crust is moving upward fast enough to completely cancel out the effects of sea level rise caused by global warming. But that's pretty rare.

Anyway, point being that modern sea level forecasts do include isostatic response, and while it's not a dominant effect, it is big enough to make a difference.

It’s 100% media marketing. Full moons have been happening forever, and some are a little bigger, and sometimes two happen in a month, or one happens near an equinox, but nobody cared because apart from eclipses, these things are pretty subtle and uninteresting.

But in the past ten years, 24-hour news and weather media outlets have realized that you can get a bunch of viewers to tune in to an exciting breaking story about a super blood vampire moon, and it works because people these days are a lot more likely to like and share a news story than they are to actually go outside and look at it and realize it doesn’t live up to the hype.

Named winter storms are the same way. They’re just the same blizzards we’ve always had, but a weather channel has started giving them names and running breathless nonstop coverage about “hunkering down” and “major disaster”.

Here are the moon phenomena worth paying attention to: solar eclipse, lunar eclipse, and maaaaybe a big occultation if you’re a nerd. Everything else is just media hype.

There's a really great book called "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman that goes into detail about this and other related questions about how long the relics of humanity would stick around if we all disappeared.

He argues that the power would go out almost everywhere inside 24 hours. Power plants really do have a "driver" who decides how much to "step on the gas", and while there's some automation, a lot of the decisions happen by humans and involve manual work, like bringing new generators online as electricity use varies over the day, running a bulldozer to shovel coal into the loading hopper, and so on. If nobody does this, supply doesn't match demand, the grid gets overloaded, and circuit breakers start to trip. That shifts the load to other parts of the grid, overloading them and causing a cascading chain reaction. (This can happen even when the power workers are doing their jobs!)

Anyway, if you liked "Station Eleven", do check out "The World Without Us", it's a scientific look at the post-apocalypse and it's pretty great.

Several reasons have been proposed: people are outdoors more in the summer, interacting socially rather than watching TV. School's out, so more teenagers with not much to do but hang out and get into fights.

Interestingly the seasonal trend is just as strong in warm states as cold states suggesting that it's more about school than temperature.

This checks out. After my third semester studying Russian, I'd talk to friends learning other languages: "Oh, we're reading Don Quixote or The Three Musketeers, how about you?" "Yeah, I'm reading a nursery rhyme about a speckled chicken."

Fuck, it's been 30 years and I think I still have a bit of it memorized: "жили были дед да баба. была у них курочка ряба..."