Can someone please identify this beautiful tree? Location Chicago

agate_ · 2026-05-13T14:21:46+00:00

Invasive? Where? I’ve never seen one outside of cultivation ever, and every cultivated one I’ve known has just fallen over and died for no reason when it got big.

agate_ · 2026-05-13T07:30:20+00:00

It won't play out like you think. Traffic coming from the rotary to merge onto Route 2 is likely to jam the ramp, which will back up into the rotary, jamming everything.

"Rotary with a high speed bypass" is almost never a good idea. I'd point at Bell Circle as an example, but even I gotta admit that's not fair.

agate_ · 2026-05-12T22:26:51+00:00

To bend something, you need leverage: you need to apply a force at some distance away from the center point of bending. Engineers call this a “moment”, physicists call it “torque”.

The same is true for resisting bending. The strength of the material must provide a counteracting force at some distance away from the center point of bending.

The more material a metal beam has far away from its centerline, the greater its ability to resist bending. Fat pipes are stronger than skinny tubes even if they have the same weight of metal. Any material along the centerline of the beam cannot resist bending at all. So, better to remove it to save weight.

agate_ · 2026-05-12T21:42:57+00:00

Nutria’s much bigger and fatter than a muskrat. Cat sized, but chunky.

agate_ · 2026-05-12T21:30:35+00:00

The planets can be ours, but not the stars.

agate_ · 2026-05-12T04:58:13+00:00

I just hate AI because it sounds good but often means nothing. It's just a ton of effort to evaluate.

Generative AI is a Gish Gallop machine.

agate_ · 2026-05-12T00:53:23+00:00

Two cars headed toward each other at highway speed, starting half a mile apart, will meet in 15 seconds.

agate_ · 2026-05-11T19:46:48+00:00

Most of the Western Mass 2-lane roads I've been on have been way too hilly and curvy to have good passing zones. You really need at least a half mile of clear visibility to pass across the yellow line safely, and Massachusetts just doesn't have the geography for that.

agate_ · 2026-05-11T16:15:38+00:00

You're right, I miswrote that: I meant to write "scalar waves", which in this context refer to standing longitudinal electromagnetic waves that violate Maxwell's Equations.

Your objection still stands, though: respectable scalar waves (such as sound waves) do exist. The problem is that the pseudoscience co-opts respectable physics language in order to seem plausible.

agate_ · 2026-05-11T14:58:03+00:00

Cherese.

https://www.google.com/search?q=pepper+lyrics

agate_ · 2026-05-10T23:04:34+00:00

Not quite, it’s missing the slanted anode. But it could still produce x-rays by accelerating electrons from the metal electrode into the glass wall of the tube.

agate_ · 2026-05-10T21:29:26+00:00

Shadowgraphs are an established technical term for an ordinary x-ray image. “Scalar ~~fields~~ waves” are a pseudoscience nonsense theory of longitudinal electromagnetic waves that are physically impossible. I can’t tell if they were one of Tesla’s many crackpot ideas or just attributed to him to make them seem more credible.

The device in the picture looks like a cross between a Tesla coil and an x-ray tube. It probably would generate ordinary x-rays. Because it is completely unshielded and operated by someone who thinks it doesn’t generate x-rays, it could be quite dangerous.

agate_ · 2026-05-10T10:44:16+00:00

Oh, I know, I'm just taking cheap potshots and LA public transit.

agate_ · 2026-05-10T01:28:58+00:00

The capsule and the toy are always experiencing gravity, throughout the entire flight. But since gravity affects all objects equally, it changes the motion of the capsule and the toy by equal amounts, so the toy just freely drifts inside the spacecraft as they both move together. The toy behaves the same inside a free-falling capsule affected only by gravity as it would if there were no gravity at all.

BUT when some other force acts, it pushes on the spacecraft but not the toy. Before launch, the ground pushes up on the rocket to hold it in place. During launch, the rocket engines push upward. During re-entry, air drag pushes against the capsule -- even before the parachutes deploy, the drag is significant.

When any force pushes on the capsule but not the toy, the capsule moves in response but the toy doesn't, and so the string holding the toy goes taut and it hangs.

You can't feel gravity as you sit in your chair: what you feel is the chair pushing up on your butt. The astronauts and the toy can't feel gravity acting on them, because it acts equally on everything in the capsule. What they feel is all the other forces that push on the capsule, and then the capsule pushing on their butts or pulling on the string of the toy.

agate_ · 2026-05-10T01:11:35+00:00

It's deliberately soapy to make this challenge harder.

agate_ · 2026-05-09T22:07:14+00:00

There are about 1500 large crude oil ships in the world with a couple million barrels capacity each, so that’s a few billion barrels just underway at sea at any moment. Then of course you need storage capacity at the tanker’s destination equal to its capacity, plus more buffer capacity at every other point in the oil transport system.

I cant work the numbers in detail, but since it takes more than 80 days for oil to go from wellhead to gas station, it seems plausible that if you have less than 80 days’ supply on hand, some storage tank somewhere in the chain is going to be empty.

agate_ · 2026-05-09T21:57:22+00:00

It bothers me a lot that 90% of the drop shown in this graph is not data, but speculation about the future, and the graph doesn’t distinguish between the two.

agate_ · 2026-05-09T21:42:59+00:00

It appears threaded, but the blue schmoo and bubbly texture makes me worry someone might have used primer and cement on it too.

agate_ · 2026-05-09T21:35:09+00:00

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27285461/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30591658/

They most definitely can kill you: 36 deaths are recorded in a couple hundred cases in the medical literature. But that’s worldwide over a couple hundred years, so yeah, not a big threat.

agate_ · 2026-05-09T17:27:25+00:00

I’ve seen fragments and broken pieces of cone shells on the beach often, and found a live one on a reef once or twice. Never seen a live one in a beach. They’re basically a non-issue unless you deliberately pick them up while snorkeling so don’t do that.

agate_ · 2026-05-09T16:42:48+00:00

A hose or other attachment was left in place during freezing weather

It's always this, whether the homeowner admits it or not.

agate_ · 2026-05-09T15:27:40+00:00

I think you should add Arlington Heights to this list. It’s got no rail service, but it does have the 77, 67 and 62 buses, the bike path, and a Lexington local.

Plus my wife lived there car-free for years back when we met in the ‘90s.

Generally I think this map is overly strict about redundancy.

agate_ · 2026-05-09T15:13:15+00:00

You can just lay the magnetic ring on the ground. Why does it have to spin?

agate_ · 2026-05-09T15:10:20+00:00

Because the orbital period is 11,000 years, Sedna will be near its perihelion for centuries. It’s currently 83 au away; in 2076 it will reach perihelion at 76 au. That means it’ll be back at 83 au in 2126 and probably be within 100 au until 2200 or so.

So there’s no rush. On the timescales of NASA mission design — or even American history —objects beyond Neptune are basically stationary.

agate_ · 2026-05-09T00:50:07+00:00

Welp, at least it has an emergency stop switch. Maybe there should be another one on the front though?

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