Perhaps this is obvious, but if you liked this article, check out the works referenced in it! The Eighth Day of Creation, The Machinery of Life, A Computer Scientist’s Guide to Cell Biology, and GEB are all outsanding.
“You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal’s length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only to a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force”
Maybe branch out. Become a general programmer/engineer instead of a JS programmer. Maybe even work with some hardware and firmware too. We live in an era where there is no need to specialize; the gates are open. I feel like most learning of a given discipline happens in the beginning; the rest is diminishing returns.
I remember learning about these in elementary school. We were sitting in assembly in a room called "The Pod". Listening to rules and administrative things. On the list of banned items never to bring to school, along with drugs, guns, and knives, beepers were listed. I wasn't sure what they were, but from the context and too many cartoons, I assumed they were an explosive device that beeped a few times before blowing up!
I'm floored they don't get a military-style cost-of-living-allowance. Similar situation of being assigned to live in arbitrary places, but (pending short term problems caused by slower or inaccurate COLA adjustments than rent changes) it's not a problem for US military members, since their pay varies by location, specifically to avoid the problem the article highlights.
The GS schedule has location adjustments. They don't always keep up with the actual cost of living in a location. The NYC area means there's a 37% boost to pay, but NYC is not just 37% more expensive to live in than baseline.
Yeah, NYC is more like 10x compared to somewhere like New Mexico.
It’s a typical gov’t employment issue. It’s also why so many military bases and gov’t centers (except for HQ type areas) tend to be in the middle of nowhere - the folks who man them can actually afford to live there.
It’s also a huge kickback to Congress/house members (especially conservative ones), since military tends to vote conservative, and those areas also end up quite dependent on military/gov’t funding (Military Town, or industry town).
So they can lock in votes by keeping relatively well paid jobs/income in areas dependent on them doing so, and those people will be relatively happy because compared to other options they do pretty well. Most officers end up owning multiple homes (and renting them out) as they move around the country, for instance. Not sure about now, but even E5s can end up with a house in many of these places, and that’s only like $42k/yr.
The ones that get screwed are the ones low in the totem pole who end up in high COL areas, but those folks are usually pretty ambitious (hence why they are near the HQ/exciting area) and low overhead.
Hey - I've been following the steady stream of articles and discussion here about heat pumps, so I have a question that is tough to answer from the articles.
Is heatpump popularity regional? My understanding was that heat pumps are the technology behind residential AC, heating, and commercial HVAC. Thermodynamic 4 step cycle of a working fluid with expansion, compression etc. Every house I've lived in has had one. The cycle is reversed to cycle between heat and AC; dumping the heat to one side of the system or the other depending on need, as controlled by the thermostat.
What is the alternative? I've seen in (new and old!) England they use natural-gas radiators sometimes, and have no AC, or window AC units. Is that it, and now areas with those are switching more to heatpumps? Or is it new, more efficient heat pumps? Or do I have a misunderstanding of the existing tech?
The houses I've been through in the Midwestern US typically have forced-air natural-gas furnaces and cooling-only non-reversible central AC. Burning natural gas is way cheaper (ignoring externalities) to generate heat than even a heat pump, and can be easily scaled up to provide tons of heat on really cold winter days. Plus, modern heat pumps are high precision, complicated, expensive tech, a furnace is old tech: just a burner and a blower.
My natural gas cost is $0.82/CCF or $0.028/kWh. Electric is $0.161/kWh. That means a heat pump needs to be 575% efficient to break even on energy cost (assuming my furnace is 100% efficient, it's not, a lot of heat goes out the chimney).
People only get heat pumps here if they're carbon-conscious.
In my area in the midwest, nearly every house has a natural gas burning forced-air furnace for the winter and a standalone air conditioner for the summer.
Newer heat pumps have gotten a lot better, and as a result a few people are starting to use them here. Even so most heat pumps are the more expensive type that rely on geothermal coils. We have extreme seasonal temperature changes that make older heat pumps impractical. For about two weeks each winter, our overnight lows are around -20F (-29C) and we often see wind chills around -40. Summer temperatures regularly reach 100F (38C).
I would venture to guess that most residential heating in the world is provided by non-heat pump sources.
In many parts of the United States, my understanding is that it would either be natural gas fired furnaces with forced air, oil fired furnaces (with forced air? not sure), radiators (with water heated by gas or oil fired furnaces), or electric resistive heating elements (e.g. baseboard heaters).
UK is almost exclusively hot water radiators heated by natural gas boilers (or oil boilers in rural areas not on the gas grid).
There is a push by government to switch to electric heat pumps driving hot water into larger, cooler radiators (as this is more efficient for the heat pumps), backed by a £7500 grant for the pump and installation (with limited take-up).
Thanks for the info on this! It sounds like my experience has been biased by coincidence. Ie, I've only lived in a house that was wired for gas once! (Northern VA). My childhood home (Also northern VA), both places in North Carolina, and Florida have all been heat-pump based, with no gas line.
My apartment in the UK was even weirder: It had something called a "Economy 10", with an electric heater (resistance?) in a concrete slab under the floors that would run at night, then release heat slowly throughout the day. (No A/C)
In the US heat pumps have only seen widespread adoption in the last decade or so and even then mostly in new construction applications. Most houses still use either window or central AC units and then some other mechanism for heating, oil or gas furnace, electric baseboard, etc.
It's surprising that it was left out. Ie, the workaround makes sense, but this is a peripheral that is sometimes built into MCUs themselves. For example, most (all?) STM32s include an RTC... with the caveat that if you are using them for canonical use cases, you will need external hardware in the form of a dedicated 32kHz oscillator, and possibly a battery.
For a lot of micro-controller timing uses, they aren't required; for example, hardware timers based on the primary clock source, or the Cortex-M systick, but for maintaining accurate dates and times over long periods, the RTC is the right tool. It can also output the dates and times in a convenient format as well, as long as you find named register fields convenient!
An RTC really needs a battery, and even a smaller battery like a 1220 takes up a fair bit of board space -- space that could be used for another connector or more functionality. And even if you have an RTC, you still have to handle the edge case where the battery dies or is removed and the clock resets. Critical low-level internet services probably shouldn't require clients to already have the correct time.
I use an external RTC with a Raspberry Pi for some sensor systems I work with. Its purpose is to give a reasonable chance of having the correct time for recording data in remote locations where no internet connection is available at startup. For a Pi that only provides network services (and thus always needs a working internet connection), I probably wouldn't think to bother.
RTC is just an electronically readable Casio watch, it's not even responsible for keeping real time while OS is running. All it does is always incrementing regardless of motherboard power state so to provide time as OS loads.
Hey - total tangent, but... I'm playing through Horizon Forbidden West. It's the first game on PC I've played that supports the DualSense (PS5 controller)'s haptic motors and adaptive triggers. They are something else when integrated properly with game events and sounds. It would be cool if this were integrated into more games!
Funny, I wish most games gave more options to turn them down. Some newer games are REALLY excessive with it. I encountered one game recently that felt it was necessary (no way to disable) to make the controller vibrate every single time you used the d-pad in the UI.
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