When I was a kid, I would often sit on my bed and stare at the wall. My Dad would walk by my room and ask if everything was ok. I would always say "yeah", since I was literally just thinking.
It's a great feeling to just stare at a wall and think.
My first thought is usually, "If I could think about anything right now, what would it be?" And this frees my mind up to think about what I want to think about.
I sometimes went to bed early just to think! I was excited about it and looking forward to it. I don't do that anymore, but going for a walk without smartphone, no music, no audiobook reminds me of that time.
> When I was a kid, I would often sit on my bed and stare at the wall. My Dad would walk by my room and ask if everything was ok. I would always say "yeah", since I was literally just thinking.
When Vibrams were first popular, I took to training with them on my runs. People told me to "take it easy" or you might get injured. I thought what's the worst that can happen? Well let me tell you. About a month into wearing them, I was doing a hard run and the trail had a section of concrete. My foot felt a sudden sharp pain and "snap!" I broke my 3rd metatarsal bone in my foot. Took a month or so to heal, and I decided to stop using the Vibrams.
A month isn’t enough to adapt your ankles to high force hard running.
You have to take it easy.
Build low impact volume (walking and hiking), and then scale it (jogging then running), over time emphasizing recovery. Shoe adapted gaits are expecting materials to handle forces that simply aren’t there ‘barefoot’ (minimalist).
Flip side: adapt like you understand the intense forces generated in running and that the baseline level of chronic dysfunction is high, and proper foot function can help correct movement form and posture issues, both of which are major drivers of chronic pain.
Big thick shoes allow us to run like assholes. Shin splints, knee problems, chronic injuries, overuse injuries… Great for competition(!), great for sacrificing health to get speed (faster!). Unquestionably better for racing. But for people interested in longevity, evolution did one thing, Nike/Adidas another.
This could be "fixed" right now by a software update that limits the maximum charge level to 80% of capacity. However, this comes at the cost of how many minutes of runtime your phone can operate.
So manufactures might just responds to this by making your phone heavier with a bigger battery that is being under utilized.
Honestly we should define 80% as the new "100%" on such batteries and label "charging to full" as "overcharging".
Psychologically, people understand charging a battery to "125%" (or whatever) a lot better: Do it when you really need to but if you do it all the time it wears down the battery a lot faster.
Nice idea. I think the reason it's not communicated as such is that then companies would be expected to advertise time on battery when charged to 100%, not 125%.
The Samsung phone I use these days has a "Protect Battery" mode that can be toggled (both manually and with automatic user-defined routines). It limits maximum charge to 85%. For those who want it: That's the ~same thing, without the psychological trick.
It also has some other settings that relate to smart charging that I don't fully understand (mostly because it's kind of inscrutable).
But the idea, AFAICT, is that it works with a person who charges their phone on a fairly regular schedule (they sleep at about the same time every night with plugged in all night).
The battery meanders up to 85% or something and holds there. Shortly before the person normally wakes up, it starts coming the rest of the way up to 100%. And then they wake up, unplug the phone, and it begins to discharge.
This helps to minimize the duration of being at a high state-of-charge, which is also a big factor in long-term battery longevity.
I recently investigated large portable power banks (Jackery, etc.) and like that there are options to charge faster with a battery life tradeoff. Let people make their own informed choices.
This sounds great. I would've loved to have set my phone to charge up to only 60% or 80% of its design capacity to reduce wear. I do this on my laptop.
It has been on iPhones for quite some while, but on androids even longer. Before that it was in the form of some smart charging scheme that it would only finish charging until the moment it thought you would unplug it.
Anecdata, but I did this on my iPhone, and it did absolutely nothing for battery longevity compared to charging to 100% with "optimized charging" (which keeps it at 80% for as long as possible when charging overnight).
Same for my s24, 80% battery limit and slow charging at night (most of my charging). It's been over 2 years and the battery seems to last just as long as day one
Battery capacity of smartphones seems to double every ~8 years. The design space is adding more battery capacity, reducing battery life, or using less power.
The Apple Watch Ultra also has an aggressively sharp screen edge. It's kept me from upgrading from my current watch (Model 8). But maybe I would get use to it?
The side that faces your wrist is rounded - only the face is sharp. I haven't noticed any issues with the edge wearing the thing.
I was worried about scratches because I abuse the shit out of anything I wear, and sure enough, there are scratches in the titanium bezel, but they look good in a way that scratches on my (non-pro) steel Apple Watch did not.
Leading out with "The numbers aren't working out" is a bit disingenuous. If they were "working out", would you continue to stay? If the answer is "no", then just remove the numbers talking point in your justification altogether.
One risk here is that a giant pile of biomass could allow nefarious critters to grow disproportionately. For example, in Alaska, they had giant brush piles that ended up fueling beetle infestations across the state.
EVs are essentially a giant battery on wheels. Seems there is a good opportunity to configure them as bidirectional power banks for your local grid. You could rewire all parking slots to have a plugin that acts as a bidirectional power station. Imaging how much power could be moved around with such a grid! This would require a major investment in power transmission layouts, but a city full of batteries on wheels.
California has registered around 1M Teslas alone. So this is like having a 1Mx80kwh = 80GWh battery at your service. As a reference, the largest solar + storage facility in California is around 3.2 GWh.
It's nice for an emergency, and almost all EVs can do that already.
But people pay extra to put the batteries over wheels because they need to haul charged batteries around. It's not normally useful to discharge them locally.
Just charging your car when electricity is cheap and avoiding times when it is scarce would solve most of the issues, provided there is a dynamic pricing system in place.
No idea why this has been downvoted. There is a lot of demand for this, and at least one company actively working on orchestrating home and EV batteries with the grid: https://www.amber.com.au/amber-for-evs
There is a LOC (Loss of Crew) number that is typically calculated for these missions. I'm curious what that is? Early Apollo missions were on the order of 4%.
Before the Apollo launch, von Braun was asked what the reliability of the rocket was. He asked 6 of his lieutenants if it was ready to fly. Each replied "nein". Von Braun reported that it had six nines of reliability.
The joke that made the rounds of NASA was that the Saturn V had a reliability rating of .9999. In the story, a group from headquarters goes down to Marshall and asks Wernher von Braun how reliable the Saturn is going to be. Von Braun turns to four of his lieutenants and asks, "Is there any reason why it won't work?" to which they answer: "Nein." "Nein." "Nein." "Nein." Von Braun then says to the men from headquarters, "Gentlemen, I have a reliability of four nines."
In 2014 an independent safety panel estimated 1:75, but I think it's slightly better now. The shuttle program officially had a limit of 1:90 but in practice achieved 1:67.
In the early days of the Shuttle program, the probability was supposedly estimated as low as 1:100,000. Challenger brought on a more realistic approach.
This is a brilliant take because Micron has traditionally struggled with their products being seen as a commodity. There is good value in trying to differential MU as some kind of magic memory company that is better than others (despite it following the same specs).
For the sake of bringing this to different cities and regions, maybe you could do the same thing but with a "Memory Mobile (MM)" that travels around the country like the Oscar Meyer wiener truck.
To motivate visitors, you could offer one "Willy-Wonka" ticket each year, that gets a huge cash price or something cool. Tickets are handed out upon visiting the MM, and at the end of the year, ticket number is announced. Hold on to your ticket kids!
It's a great feeling to just stare at a wall and think.
My first thought is usually, "If I could think about anything right now, what would it be?" And this frees my mind up to think about what I want to think about.
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