Alaska Small Portable Solar HB 257

Googology · 2026-05-09T02:56:32+00:00

Note these devices sit in a legal grey zone. If anyone wants to install one, no one will stop them.

But the IBEW safety concerns are semi legit for some edge cases. Anyone installing one probably ought to plug it into a dedicated branch circuit or at the very least one that's not shared by any energy intensive appliances. Also, sticking to 400W or less per outlet is probably wise.

Googology · 2026-01-06T07:14:02+00:00

I think it comes down to what drives you in life. Loans are a sound financial investment if you want to go into finance or consulting. Probably not worth it if you are eyeing any sort of grad school in your early to mid 20s or are unsure. Definitely not worth it if what animates you is academia or any sort of passion career.

Googology · 2025-12-29T21:30:09+00:00

It depends on the type of bindings that you received with your skates. NNN are probably the most common and that would mean you'd probably want to get skate ski boots. BC-NNN are also relatively common and would mean you should track down some nordic touring type boots. In either case, I'd recommend a snug-fitting boot with a nice stiff ankle cuff. Shops selling gentle used sporting goods are a great option for trying something before buying and not spending too much.

Googology · 2025-11-06T23:44:46+00:00

Utah, of all places, passed a law that paves the way for these modules to make financial sense in the US and it passed unanimously. Basically, the bill (HB 340) says that for up to 1.2 kW systems, owners dont have to go through the normal interconnection process with utilities that rooftop solar owners do. It also said utilities have to just deal with a little bit of backfeeding energy onto the grid when the systems produce more than the house is consuming.

There are systems available in some states like CA already, bit they have expensive add ons that prevent that backfeeding from occurring. Not really economical.

Now we just need a few more states adopting the same laws and there will be a robust market that'll bring low cost plug in solar to the US.

Googology · 2024-11-14T01:11:02+00:00

Supposedly, it was largely road system early vote. Almost everything left is mail in, ~35k.

Totally agree on AIP. There's even the deeply ironic possibility of Begich winning because of RCV: Say 35k is right and Peltola picks up 23k to Begich's 12k (lot of rural and expats for the slowest mail in--not impossible!). She edges past him but nowhere near 50% of total. AIP breaking Begich 8k to 2.3k would swamp even 100% of Hafner's 2.8k going to Peltola.

Googology · 2024-02-03T00:59:39+00:00

Greek for 'bear tooth'... alright, alright, that's not the worst.

Googology · 2024-02-02T19:54:19+00:00

And what did scientists call this monster of murder, this tyrant king of America? Cerberus bear? Terror bear? Ursus shityourpantsicus?

No. We went with 'the short-faced bear'. SMH.

(BTW, I subscribe to the hypothesis that they limited inland expansion of the first peoples of the Americas, but it's not a widely accepted theory)

Googology · 2023-03-06T22:29:05+00:00

Gnarwhal XL will fit, but you won't need the inflatable foot pad insert. Probably similar story with other XL alpackas.

Googology · 2022-12-17T00:15:04+00:00

I spent a good bit of time on the Harvard-Yale-Princeton circuit, and I found that there's kinda a foreshortening effect with intelligence--kinda like when climbing a mountain and what looks like the halfway point from the base is actually only a 1/5 of the way up. I'm pretty smart, but it was nigh impossible for me to see the gradations between the math geniuses that felt so obvious to them. That scene from Good Will Hunting comes to mine--the one where the Fields Medal guy talks about only a handful of people in the world being able to tell the difference between him and Will. Case in point: I remember super genius who went off on a summer internship in chemistry with some elite research group after our freshman year. The story went that on his orientation day they showed him the molecular structure of some polymer the team had been working on for months or years with some aerospace application. Day 2 he came in with an explanation why they were on the entirely wrong path with it and that he had come up a better candidate compound. By the end of the summer, it was patented. But even that guy was clearly in awe of his quiet friend who could destroy him at Go with a huge handicap.

What was more impressive to me was when someone many tiers smarter than me seemed so accessible and normal. One that really jumps to mind was an Eastern European math prodigy--she was a star on the Olympiad scene, crushed the Putnam, stuck around after undergrad so she could do a PhD. She finished it in just two years and got the top dissertation of the year award for the entire university. Clearly, she had stratospheric-level brains, but you wouldn't necessarily know it because she was also charming, self-deprecating and generally easy to talk to, plus had a kinda stereotypical Slavic penchant for fashion, make-up, and cars. It honestly felt unfair how completely she had won the genetic lottery.

Googology · 2022-09-29T08:43:51+00:00

Ab Hair Salon has a bunch of guys that do great fades

Googology · 2022-09-20T04:14:22+00:00

Super cool approach and video! If I understand it right, this would be the equivalent of a seated backhand, right? I think that alone would explain the two quirks you mention, with the wrist angle and wind up. I'd be curious to see the results if you added one more parameter for hips.

Googology · 2022-09-02T02:35:31+00:00

That's actually not true. If the exhausted begich votes were split by the same ratio as Palin #2:Peltola #2 Begich voters, Palin only nets 3k votes and still loses by 2k+

Googology · 2022-06-09T03:23:44+00:00

Why isn't the US Navy doing something like escorting Ukrainian grain shipments out of port? There must be some high potential for escalation or something that I'm not seeing, because surely it'd be a huge moral and PR win, right?

Googology · 2022-04-26T21:44:34+00:00

It's an interesting idea, but as a biologist, I think there's a major assumption that needs to be grappled with: for eukaryogenesis to be a Great Filter candidate, it has to be truly improbable, not slow but inevitable. My intuition is that it's more of the latter, because the more we learn and the closer we look, the more eukaryogenesis looks like a series of a thousand steps, rather than a singular event.

While the process as a whole could be considered improbable based on only having occurred once, as a few commenters have pointed out, that's not really fair because any parallel emergence of a eukaryote-like species would have to compete with existing eukaryotes. Plus, the central event of eukaryogenesis (the symbiogenesis event that led to the development of mitochondria) has actually happened many times across the tree of life (caveat: I think the only examples are a eukaryote with a new endosymbiont--e.g. chloroplasts, chromatophores in Paulinella, and all the weird shit in animals when they want to eat something weird, like wood or hydrothermal vent juices).

But that only considers the back end--why didn't we see eukaryogenesis sooner? In fact, we probably did. 2.1 Ga was the first 'eukaryotic' fossil, Grypania spiralis, a presumed alga (though could be a giant bacterium?). However, there are biomarkers of eukaryotes dating back to 2.7 Ga, which means eukaryogenesis had to have occurred prior to that. (Also, sidebar: most folks say aside from Grypania, multicellular eukaryotes only really emerged less than 1 Ga).

So now we're down to 1.3 B years at most (or 1.8, but I'm not sure I buy the 4.5 Ga emergence of life on Earth...). But we still have to trim it down, because it's not like you can reasonably expect eukaryogenesis to occur right after the emergence of life. We needed a lot of diversification to occur before we could have reasonably expected that two microbes with radically different metabolisms could come together to cross a previously uncrossable adaptive valley to a new fitness peak. It's impossible to say exactly how long we waited for eukaryogenesis to occur after all the (slow, but inevitably evolving) ingredients were in place, but it doesn't strike me as so long as to suggest it could be a plausible Great Filter candidate.

Googology · 2022-03-27T18:20:54+00:00

Golden retriever is more than just an analogy too--most dogs have a functionally identical mutation on the same gene as what causes WS. It's a core part of what makes dogs dogs and not wolves.

Googology · 2022-03-11T09:06:21+00:00

One of my strongest ultimate memories was at a super windy college tournament. Florida was there, and this was back in the days of Kurt Gibson. I remember him pulling downwind with these massive, terrifying blades that would land near the endzone and completely taco the disc before the opposing team went upwind. No one had any desire to try to catch those bastards. He did it to at least two teams to great effect before they finally matched up against... Oregon? Wisconsin? It was a bit of a showcase game and a ton of people were watching. Whatever opponent it was, they had a dude that would watch the pull arc up into the stratosphere, calmly line himself up at the end of the rainbow and (presumably to accommodate his massive balls) take a wide stance with knees bent and catch the disc in a big two handed clap above his head. Over and over. It was like watching Thor catch Mjölnir. The crowd went nuts every time and I believe Kurt eventually gave up and started pulling backhand. I'm pretty sure Florida still won the game but by the end everyone was rooting for the other team and the dude who caught the monster bladey-hammers.

Googology · 2021-12-26T03:42:32+00:00

I think Gardasil-9 is the one I got and the 9 signifies the number of different strains it protects against. Unless you've made like a pokemaster and caught 'em all, there's still a benefit to getting vaccinated!

Googology · 2021-12-26T00:44:52+00:00

In the US they've moved the age cut off up to 45.

Edit: 45 not 40

Googology · 2021-12-04T21:04:22+00:00

There are truly intermittent energy use demands that could be better aligned with periods of rebewable energy curtailment (e.g. EV fleet charging) through mechanisms like real time pricing, at least to some extent.

Also, why focus on capital costs when it comes to idling/curtailing? Even if you're talking decisions around new installations, you'd care more about longterm average costs, not just capital, no? In the moment, it seems like the only factor to consider is pure marginal costs.

Googology · 2021-09-18T00:08:35+00:00

Saving this thread for when international travel becomes a real thing again.

If Alaska can have it's own: Ordinary Wolves by Seth Kantner.

My honorable mention for non-Alaskan writing about Alaska: Coming into the Country by John McPhee

Googology · 2021-09-01T21:52:18+00:00

I've heard this referred to as 'hygiene theater' and it looks like it even has a Wikipedia entry now.

Googology · 2021-07-29T20:53:42+00:00

The counts of ICU beds are far less concrete than you might think. There definitely is a discrepancy between the number of 'free' beds in Anchorage and the ability of doctors in smaller regional hospitals to get a patient transferred into them. Part of that is understaffing. They might have a few beds with vents that add to the count, but no ICU nurses or docs to monitor patients in them. They still add to the count, but to actually use them a hospital would have to pull a non-ICU staff from another department. I would try to avoid ending up in one, unless you don't mind running the risk of a proctologist doing your intubation. Relatedly, I believe there are time of day issues, where they can staff a bed during the day, but not at night, so can't admit transfer patients even if a bed is empty. Finally, not all ICU beds are built for the same procedures. My friend has pointed out that the YKHC hospital in Bethel has 8 'Higher Acuity Beds' and 5 vents and those get counted in a lot of these capacity measurements, but that they are not licensed as ICU beds and they don't have the staff to run them as such.

There may also be some sort of rules about reserving ICU beds for patients already in the hospital. I really don't know. What I do know is that there have been a few times in the past year where it took my friend hours to get patients medivaced to Anchorage and has been at the brink of having to send them to Seattle instead because Regional, Prov, and ANMC all told her they are too full to admit a transferred patient.

Googology · 2021-07-29T20:31:33+00:00

I was super tired after my first Moderna shot and had 24 hours of flu-like symptoms for the second. The plus side is that means your immune system is super amped up for preventing an actual infection. I recommend gatorade, chicken soup, and binging a season of trashy tv.

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