You'd have kept your house if you had a reasonable judge, but only if the statement was "rock is more like an insulator than a conductor" and not if the statement was "radio will work in a mine deep underground".
Everything is an imperfect conductor. There's just an awful lot of rock in a mine, and in practice it's often mixed with highly conductive mineral-bearing water.
Looking up some numbers, "rock" has a conductivity on the order of 10^-5 sieverts per meter. That's billions of times less conductive than something like copper, and comparable to something like wood, which we think of as an insulator. You could touch a piece of wire energized with high-voltage AC to a granite or quartz countertop, touch the countertop a short distance away with your hand, and connect your other hand to the ground reference and feel no shock at all.
I suspect that someone was taught that radio doesn't pass into a faraday cage or escape a microwave because the conductivity of the metal mesh absorbs the radio waves, and separately that radio does not work underground, and synthesized those facts to "rock is a conductor" without actually getting out a 4-wire Kelvin probe and measuring the conductivity of the rock.
> RTINGS measured the Samsung QN800A as consuming 139W typical, with a peak of 429W.
Can you explain why does a TV's power fluctuate so much? What does peak load look like for a TV? Does watching NFL draw more power than playing Factorio?
Power consumption varies significantly based on what's being displayed, on top of brightness settings.
I have a 42" 4k LG OLED. With a pure black background and just a taskbar visible (5% of screen), the TV draws ~40W because OLED pixels use no power when displaying black.
Opening Chrome to Google's homepage in light mode pulls ~150W since each pixel's RGB components need power to produce white across most of the screen.
Video content causes continuous power fluctuation as each frame is rendered. Dark frames use less power (more pixels off/dim), bright frames use more (more pixels on/bright).
Modern OLEDs use Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) for brightness control - pixels switch rapidly between fully on and off states. Lower brightness means pixels spend more time in their off state during each cycle.
The QN800A's local dimming helps reduce power in dark scenes by dimming zones of the LED backlight array, though power consumption still varies significantly with content brightness. It's similar to OLED but the backlight zones are not specific to each pixel.
Dark mode UIs and lower brightness settings will reduce power draw on both QLED and OLED displays.
Traditional LCDs without local dimming work quite differently - their constant backlight means only brightness settings affect power, not the content being displayed.
This explains those power fluctuations in the QN800A measurements. Peak power (429W) likely occurs during bright, high-contrast scenes - think NFL games during a sunny day game, or HDR content with bright highlights. For gaming, power draw is largely influenced by the content being displayed - so a game like Factorio, with its darker UI and industrial scenes, would typically draw less power than games with bright, sunny environments.
I was under the incorrect impression the power consumption would related to the rendering of the image (ala CPU/GPU work). Having it related to brightness makes much more sense.
I have to respectfully disagree here. You place far too much stead in "individuals freely interacting" and none in "micromanaging bosses constantly hassling you at ridiculous hours for pissant assignments that can wait until the morning".
My experience in working at Australian businesses, especially as an IC, is that there is far too much of the latter, and far to little of the former. This is especially true the younger the reporting staff member is.
While I support his new law, more rules do act as a barrier to entry / competition for new / smaller businesses. Larger companies can more easily adhere to increasingly complex employment rules than smaller ones.
The new law protects people from being bothered by micromanagers during off hours, but reduced market competition keeps people stuck with a shitty boss, and reduces their chances to get a raise.
I'm sure not all globes say Türkiye now, just like they don't say "España". We don't have to use the native name for a country instead of the English name. We're speaking English after all.
Erdoğan asked people to, yes, but Erdoğan is not in charge of the English language.
The best bit: They recursively reference the paper to provide proof that too many parents choose the same common names:
> For instance, a parent might anticipate the name “Kate” would be a pleasantly traditional yet unique name with only moderate popularity. They would be wrong [6].
Sketch of a more complete solution, excluding shortened forms and very foreign ones. Alternatives are in rough order of frequency.
vowel 0: E, Ye, Je, Ai. Optional and rare; Ai in particular is very rare.
consonant 1: C, K, G, Q. Mandatory; G and Q are rare.
vowel 1: a, aa, ai; optional h or gh. Mandatory. A few shortened forms use i instead.
consonant 2: t, tt, d. Almost mandatory, but a few r-centric variants lack it. There also seem to be a few
vowel 2: a, e. Optional, only valid if consonant 2 exists. In shortened forms, also i, ie, or y; this is the end.
consonant 3: r, l. Optional. Sometimes L starts a new word instead.
vowel 3: i, y, ee, ie, ii, e if no consonant 2, plus several rare vowel sequences. Almost mandatory (assuming consonant 3), but a few rare variants pack the r right next to the n.
consonant 4: n, nn, nh. Optional.
vowel 4: e, a, ey. Optional; ey is rare.
Some languages shove an s, c, x, t, k somewhere too (some of these are probably language-specific diminutives, but a few might be phoneme drift instead) ...
"Kaylee" and its variant "Kayla" should probably not be counted (despite almost fitting the pattern) since that's a compound of "Kay", adding the additional "Leigh" name.
It goes beyond that. Three of the authors have east-asian last names.
I understand that many people from east asia have a given name in their native language and an english sounding name that they often choose themselves.
If those three authors did chose their english names, then they too fall into the same category of parents who chose a variation of Katherine.
This phenomena also occurs in the transgender community; people put a lot of thought and intention choosing their new names only to wind up surrounded by other people who also landed on the same name, often for similar reasons. There's even a whole subreddit specifically for transfeminine people who are named some variation of Lily: https://www.reddit.com/r/LilyIsTrans/
If they did indeed pick those names while traveling to the US, possibly as adults, I think they’d actually really interesting cases. They’d be choosing names later than their peers, so they could see how the name game played out for their peers. Of course, they could also be peers of the parents of the other authors.
I’ve also met some folks who had English names that phonetically sounded similar to their original names. I wonder if there’s an east Asian first name that sounds like any of the versions of Katherine.
From my anecdotal experience origin is a big factor: of adults I have known to choose a name for themselves americans overwhelmingly pick unusual or ornamented names, whereas the other group (typically asian, first language has a different set of basic sounds) pick stereotypically common and plain/short names. I don't really know anyones specific thought process on the matter though, maybe I'll have to start asking for curiosities sake.
Anecdotal, of course, but the goal can be quite different for both groups.
English people choosing English baby names often want them to be relatively unique or stand out in some way. At the very least, they don't want them to be _overly_ common.
Manny people I've talked to that have chosen a name after immigrating are kind of aiming for the opposite. They want to fit in. They already feel that they stand out, and generally try and minimize that.
There's also the fact that for some groups, they're choosing the name at a time when they may not be very familiar with English names or culture, and may not have much in the way of local resources they can or feel comfortable with drawing on, so the main indication they have that they haven't chosen some absurd name is "hey, lots of people here are named that".
Not sure it's still the same scenario with today's far more connected world, but even 20 years ago you could guess with some accuracy that someone was east-Asian from their "English" name being ~50 years out of date, popularity wise.
> he was administered 28 vials of antivenom intravenously at a cost of $3,400 per vial.
As someone who lives in Australia, who grew up with aggressive and deadly snakes, what the actual hell? Nobody is out of pocket in Australia following a snake bite and we have many more species and all of the geographic remoteness of the South Western US. Is this just another case of a side effect of the state of the USA healthcare system?
If you're in Sydney, Australia, head an hour north to visit the Australian Reptile Park. It's a small zoo that additionally specialises in snakes and spiders that can kill you. It is the sole source of the venom that gets used to make Australia's anti-venoms [1].
The Australian Reptile Park may be related to the cost aspect, in that their program provides a ready supply of the raw materials needed for anti-venom.
Incidentally they collect funnel web spiders for venom production and have a collection network, whereby people can harvest funnel web spiders from their backyards and drop them into collection points around Sydney [2].
Cost is a recognised factor in anti-venoms, and there is ongoing research to reduce their cost [3].
That site left too much to the imagination as to how they collect the spider venom. Or is it from a dissection to collect the entire venom containing organ?
Was also smirking that the snake venom collection the visuals were either of a person wearing no gloves or easily punctured latex.
They antagonise the funnel-web until it begins striking and the venom is dripping from its fangs, and then they use a liquid dropper to suck that venom up. It is wild.
Stats from the video: 1 vial of antivenom requires 20 milkings. Worst case, a treatment requires 10 vials. This is part of the reason antivenom is expensive. Seeing this process, one can appreciate the attraction of a manufactured pill.
As embarrassing as that sentence is, it is highly unlikely he left with a $95,000 bill, nor is it likely his insurance company actually paid anywhere near that for the vials. The prices that end up on healthcare bills may as well be in another currency, since they tend to be used as placeholders subject to all kinds of contractual math down the road.
None of which is to say that our healthcare system ISN'T a mess, it is.
Yep, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/09/the-c... points out that 70% of the billed cost of antivenin is hospital markup. This isn't even part of expected profit... it's fully expected that this will be discounted for those that are insured. But you never really know what your insurer will pay and there are stories of people dying from refusing treatment, worried about their out of pocket cost.
Given he’s most certainly on Medicare Advantage at 74, and the context of the article, I think that’s the sticker cost from the manufacturer, not the patient-billed cost. His bill was, most likely, in the hundreds.
Minor nit. Medicare Advantage is an optional thing people can buy into. The standard is Medicare A&B although you can also buy Medicare Supplemental (Medigap)to cover some of the deductibles (and foreign travel) and D for prescription drugs.
Totally! You caught me assuming MA given the baseline enrollment is slightly higher, and that number is also slightly greater in CA, but valid thing to note.
QANTAS has, for the last 10+, had a CEO who was not part of this culture and did everything he could to drive costs down. He laid off huge swaths of engineers, outsourced key maintenance contracts to the lowest bidder and left the airline with an aging fleet that needs billions spent to replenish. He was recently fired by the board for essentially destroying the reputation of the airline within Australia, with their practice of cancelling flights at short notice, illegally sacking thousands of staff during COVID and taking 100's of millions of dollars from the Australian government to keep staff employed during the airline's grounding during COVID and handing it all to shareholders.
It is a situation very similar to the downfall of Boeing.
The destruction of Qantas as a quality airline is entirely driven by exactly the same MBA/shareholder-value bullshit that destroyed Boeing and others.
Financial engineers should be banned from operating businesses. They are not focused on the quality of the business, from which profits are derived. They work backwards from their financially engineered results to drive down "costs", even if those "costs" are entirely essential to the operation of the business.
Qantas (and its subsidiary Jetstar) are having to recover their engineering, customer service, and other "costs" to actually achieve the operating business that their expensive tickets require. Currently they are being priced out of operating in Asia, not because they have too expensive operations, but because their board and CxOs were entirely driven by shareholders, not the ongoing operation of the business.
It's funny, I would have bet my house that rock is an insulator.