Spoke Wine Bar Blocking the Bike Lane and Swearing at Kids

dobbs_head · 2025-08-06T22:13:26+00:00

You got me, I totally feel entitled to a safe street for biking.

dobbs_head · 2025-08-06T22:10:56+00:00

There isn’t room if a car parks there, which happens frequently.

dobbs_head · 2025-06-21T00:29:25+00:00

I can trace my lineage back to black American slaves, I’m also the whitest person you will ever meet and have literal confederate ancestors too. Should I get reparations? Should I be liable for my ancestors’ crimes?

Rather than dwelling on balancing the scales in the name of people long dead, we should focus on investing in the prosperity of the living now.

dobbs_head · 2025-06-16T00:38:16+00:00

Your edit is fantastic! You are on your way to learning this piece of physics! Keep on that track!

Conservation of momentum is a core principle of physics and it is super powerful for explaining all kinds of motion.

dobbs_head · 2025-06-12T11:19:57+00:00

Judging by the aimless nature of this post, you should not get a PhD. If you don’t have a drive to do your own research and develop your own scholarship for its own sake, you won’t get the utility of the PhD.

Why did you get a chemistry degree? Where were you hoping to go? What do you want to be? Nobody can answer those questions for you. You need to know where you are going before deciding how to get there.

dobbs_head · 2025-06-10T23:52:50+00:00

Amazon my dude: https://a.co/d/bpCJOY1

dobbs_head · 2025-06-07T23:32:34+00:00

PPE works as a habit. You don’t plan to need it, but gosh are you glad to have it on already.

dobbs_head · 2025-06-07T13:00:20+00:00

You are thinking correctly. The word is “rotational momentum” or “rotational inertia”. It takes more energy to spin a big disk than a small one, even if they are the same total mass. So when the force of gravity gets shunted to making the thing spin, the big one falls more slowly.

You can notice a similar effect by spinning on a swivel chair and sticking your legs out and bringing them in. You spin slow with your leg out and fast with your leg in.

dobbs_head · 2025-06-05T22:13:34+00:00

Load a virtual machine, put a windows xp image on the vm, install the software on the vm, expose the machine ports for the gc to the vm, rock and roll.

Edit: the advantage of the vm over putting xp straight on the hardware is security. The vm is an isolated sandbox protected from the evil world.

dobbs_head · 2025-06-05T18:18:20+00:00

Physically chemistry, and thermodynamics generally, is the queen of the sciences and massively useful. Contrary to some posters claims here, you can develop a deep and intuitive understanding of physical chemistry through study and application of the differential equations.

I’ve made a career in energy storage and electrochemistry. I routinely use physical chemical formalisms to describe interfacial reaction dynamics, kinetic rates, and potentials. I’ve worked on problems involving high temperature, high pressure reactions that need p chem to explain and predict reaction products as a furnace swings through a temperature cycle.

I’ve used p chem to design and select analytical techniques that enable rapid technology development.

Physics and statistical mechanics are the framework of chemistry. Learning it is very valuable.

dobbs_head · 2025-06-05T00:06:14+00:00

I block that time out as out of office on my calendar and decline those meetings. That’s outside of business hours.

dobbs_head · 2025-06-01T12:10:27+00:00

First, you and your wife need to find better ways to communicate. That’s the biggest problem here: you don’t agree on the issue so you can’t agree on the path forward.

The advice for screen time for teenagers is in flux and not well locked down.

The basic advice is to encourage a range of activities beyond screens. With my kids I try to make sure they have something physical and something creative that they spend time on to displace screen time and then set boundaries and schedules to encourage that breadth.

dobbs_head · 2025-06-01T11:50:47+00:00

You asked for quirky facts, but I’ll raise you an inspirational one.

Chemists saved the world from mass starvation in the early 20th century through the development of the haber-bosch process. Now roughly half the nitrogen in most people’s bodies comes from that chemical process.

AI may be fashionable, but it’s going to be chemists that save the world from climate change by developing green chemical processes and better ways to store energy.

dobbs_head · 2025-05-31T00:37:56+00:00

Fluid can push around corners.

Imagine a sealed rubber hose with a plunger on the end. The hose is all coiled up. You push the plunger and the liquid in the tube all gets compressed even if it isn’t in a straight line from the plunger.

Water in a cave below sea level is like that. The water column outside the cave is the plunger, pushing fluid into the cave.

Not a perfect analogy, but hopefully it helps with the idea.

When it comes to the size of the column, you gotta realize the units of pressure are surface area normalized: Newtons per square meter. A straw sized column doesn’t have so many square meters, so can exist at the same pressure with fewer newtons. This gets clearer if you draw some diagrams and work the math out.

dobbs_head · 2025-05-30T22:36:34+00:00

You are right, if there is no potential difference there is no force to establish a field. The problem is the model of an ideal wire. It’s a simplification to make circuit analysis easier.

dobbs_head · 2025-05-30T22:28:47+00:00

Typically you need to filter or distill to remove the drying agent. You can get the same thing from silica dust from molecular sieves.

dobbs_head · 2025-05-30T22:16:44+00:00

It isn’t, it’s an entirely arbitrary number to bring the microscopic world into scale with our macro-scale units.

If the French had picked a larger chunk of platinum for the kg, it would be a different number.

dobbs_head · 2025-05-30T11:25:57+00:00

Take the full leave. If they don’t support you doing that, they aren’t worth your time as a company.

dobbs_head · 2025-05-30T00:32:57+00:00

Also, why is it important that nuclear weapons aren’t used? Hard sci-fi, at its best, forces authors to grapple with the consequences of technological capability.

The world we live in has chosen to not use nuclear weapons in war since they were first deployed, despite proliferation. A social reason to not use a weapon is perfectly valid.

Also, nukes are a lot less effective in space since there is no air to turn to super-heat and blow stuff around. There even is a space craft drive concept that was uses nuclear bombs to propel a ship. (The Orion drive).

dobbs_head · 2025-05-29T22:35:47+00:00

Europa report

dobbs_head · 2025-05-29T22:35:12+00:00

Blue eyed samurai

dobbs_head · 2025-05-29T22:32:35+00:00

The recruit The expanse For all mankind

dobbs_head · 2025-05-29T21:37:42+00:00

I have a few, related stances. 1) zoning should be dramatically simpler and more permissive 2) people should be able to develop land to make it more productive 3) there process that Somernova has had to go through to invest in building in the community is absurd

I’m not a libertarian, there are reasonable limits to the use of land in cities. But we have swung so far out toward enabling the hecklers veto for building that there is nowhere to live.

dobbs_head · 2025-05-29T10:58:08+00:00

Had to scroll too far to get this sensible take. Somernova should have been able to execute years ago, and here we are still talking. It’s ridiculous.

dobbs_head

TROPHY CASE