Almost any ethnic grocery store will do since they cater to immigrant communities that are likely to be lower income. Here in SoCal some are cheaper than others but they're all way cheaper than Ralphs/Vons/Trader Joes/Costco/etc (I don't shop at WalMart so I'm not sure how they compare)
There are also native stores that are increasingly entering into low cost produce like Grocery Outlet and then there are the usual like Food4Less but they tend to eventually move upmarket.
Even if it's not completely true, maybe some introspection is required?
I understand developing new theories is important and rewarding, but most physics for the last three decades seems to fall within two buckets. (1) Smash particles and analyze the data. (2) Mathematical models that are not falsifiable.
We can be pretty sure that the next 'new physics' discovery that gives us better chips, rocket propulsion, etc etc is going to get a nobel prize pretty quickly similar to mRNA.
Those two buckets only contain the work in physics that have a sustained presence in popular media. But take gravitational wave astronomy as a counterexample. It doesn't make it into the news much, but I'm pretty sure the entire field is less than ten years old.
So then you could argue that that's what the folks who are smashing particles and building new models are trying to get to.
Smashing particles helps test existing theories and hypotheses. We do it with particle accelerators because that's one of the ways of getting to the uncharted territory, which is where you need to be if you want to push the boundaries. And maybe remember that the sexy stuff that makes it into the news isn't the whole of the thing. The LHC is also, for example, doing practical climate science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_experiment
And building new mathematical models is part of figuring out how to make sense of observations that don't quite fit the current models. That is a messy process, and I think that our retrospective perspective on what that process is like might be colored by survivor bias. We remember Einstein and his theory of special relativity. We mostly don't remember the preceding few decades' worth of other attempts by other physicists to resolve conflicts between existing non-unified theories (in this case Newton's and Maxwell's models) or making sense of things like the Michelson-Morley experiment. I don't really know that history myself, but I would not at all be surprised if many of those efforts were also having trouble figuring out how to produce testable hypotheses.
And also, big picture, I think that it's important for any lover of science to remember to celebrate the entire enterprise, not just its headline successes. Expecting consistent results is tacitly expecting scientists to have some way of knowing ahead of time which avenues of inquiry will be most fruitful. If we had access to an oracle that could tell us that, we wouldn't actually need science anymore.
> They already got a Nobel prize, one of the quickest in history.
From some aspects, it was late. Gravitation waves were predicted decades ago. It's almost unfair to predict something but then have engineering take decades to catch up to be able to prove/disprove the theory. This is just commentary on the notion of being right decades before the world is ready for it. Of course, it can go the other way where one is assumed to be right but then isn't (e.g., many components of string theory).
Just because there happens to be economical viability for a field currently doesn't mean that field needs less introspection. Exactly what research contributions the people who are throwing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of GPUs at the next random "research" problem at the top of the queue at Microsoft or Google are making to deserve a Nobel?
Too often there is near zero intuition for why research in AI yields such incredible results. They're mainly black boxes that happen to work extremely well with no explanation and someone at a prestigious institution just happened to be there to stamp their name on top of the publication.
Big difference between research in AI and any non-computational/statistical/luck-based science.
That's an interesting definition of "most physics". I mean, I find high-energy physics as fascinating as the next guy but there are other fields, too, you know, like astrophysics & cosmology, condensed-matter physics, (quantum) optics, environmental physics, biophysics, medical physics, …
The corners of physics I have some contact with (climate/weather modelling and astrophysics) seem pretty dynamic to me. Each generation of CMIP models seems to be significantly better than the previous.
If you needed rescuing from there, or if a nearby village was affected by a natural disaster, this flying space trash is what's saving lives.
It makes sense for the vast majority of people to prefer that against the slight inconvenience in editing out satellite tracks faced by a tiny tiny community of ground bases astrophotographers.
No it's really not. Please don't think suburban USA can be extrapolated to the middle of bloody nowhere.
I might be able to get a message off, but how the hell do you contact the emergency services and who the hell is going to rescue me in a country with one rescue helicopter that was out of action at the time?
In circumstances like that it's better to actually get some mountain safety training, have some procedures and other comms equipment in place. And importantly travel in a group with the right equipment (including 4 legged transport devices).
As for the astrophotography that was opportunistic.
I have an InReach Mini 2. It is not necessarily useful. It depends on where you are. Don't make any assumptions about it until you've done research.
You'll find some places have only voluntary services and the phone is likely only manned on week days on limited hours. If you're lucky there might be a gmail address you can hit. No joke.
Low orbit satellites are unnecessary for emergency/comm. Fewer, dimmer, satellites at higher orbits are actually cheaper, but LEO constellations are now subsidized by the military industrial complex (there is other value to be low).
> Fewer, dimmer, satellites at higher orbits are actually cheaper
GEO satellites are pretty pricey. Each Milstar satellite cost $800 million, others in the same category are also in the hundreds of millions, WGS-11 was over $600 million. Starlink V2 cost $800k per satellite.
And if you spent $800 million on a constellation of 1000 Starlinks, you'd have better coverage and bandwidth than the entire 6 satellite Milstar constellation put together for 1/6th the price.
Digging around for more recent prices, GEO is around $100-300 million. That's still orders of magnitude more per satellite than LEO. At the low end this means you could get 100-400 Starlink V2s up there for the price of one GEO. One GEO that only covers part of the globe, versus 100-400 satellites providing global coverage.
Satellites have to pass through the Van Allen belts in order to get into such higher orbits, which may expose them to a not insignificant amount of radiation, especially if the final orbit injection is not done in a single impulse. Then, once they are comfortably out in their higher orbit, they have to endure yet more radiation without the aid of the Earth's magnetic field, and require more cooling capacity due to spending much less time in Earth's shadow than an LEO satellite.
They're also overlooking the actual prices of GEO satellites versus LEO. LEO is much cheaper than GEO, there's a reason DOD and others are moving towards it and it's not that it's a fad. GEO has a few specific benefits but cost is not one of them.
It's definitely terrible that half of mobile users can't run code without the permission of their platform and the other half could eventually lose the ability to do so.
But the stakes are lower because the phone is a time-wasting/consuming device and not a general purpose/productivity device like a desktop.
> NASA pays the same price per seat in the Dragon as the Soyuz because they prefer not to fill up all the seats.
That is incorrect. There are now a maximum of 4 seats in Crew Dragon.[1]
While it's true that NASA had plans to take down 6 Astronauts in an emergency, 2 of them would have basically been strapped to cargo pallets. Not something NASA would engage in under normal circumstances.
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1. > After SpaceX had already designed the interior layout of the Crew Dragon spacecraft, NASA decided to change the specification for the angle of the ship’s seats due to concerns about the g-forces crew members might experience during splashdown.
> The change meant SpaceX had to do away with the company’s original seven-seat design for the Crew Dragon.
> “With this change and the angle of the seats, we could not get seven anymore,” Shotwell said. “So now we only have four seats. That was kind of a big change for us.”
Every problem has an ‘obvious’ solution on the surface after thinking for ten seconds.
Data centers/supercomputers/similar facilities have agreements to ensure uninterrupted power.
The grid would sooner cut off residential power than risk running foul of SLAs.
Most developing countries are very familiar with this, the technical term ‘load shedding’ having entered common parlance because of the frequency of power cuts faced by consumers.
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