The secret is to use solar panels which absorb a broad range of light, (with low efficiency) and re-radiate it onto the plants at exactly the wavelengths used by the plants ( red and blue)

Because even though they’re quite bright, they’re also really, really tiny for their mass.

The funny thing about “black” holes is that only the radiation from inside them is hidden. Since they would be consuming gas no matter what, they will never appear black. There will always be some radiation spun off into space, and quite a lot of it if they’re consuming a great deal of matter.

I love it when journalism majors decide they can write for a geek blog, but don’t even know the basic units of measure or have any technical expertise. 433 MHz is radio. UHF. This is audio from a speaker. Facepalm. That is a transducer that can vibrate in the range of something like 2 Hz to 40 KHz. That’s ten thousand…

Both. Flash memory is written a page at a time. So, your computer reads a full page (256kb, usually) and then alters it in memory to reflect the changes to that page, and then writes the entire page back to the drive. This means even files you aren’t changing can be completely FUBARed by yanking the drive during a…

In the Olden Days of Yore, before turning off your computer, you had to park the heads of the hard drives using a program. This moved the heads to the home position, where they were well away from the drive platters, so that the power-down event did not result in the loss of air cushion between the head and the…

How to tell if you need to Safely Remove (eject) before pulling the drive:

I have an old WARN 9000 winch and a used car battery you can borrow. The next time, just loop the cable around the midsection of the car, turn on the winch, and pinch a wasp-waist on that SUV.

Robots do not freak out. There are, for every robot, certain measurements of the parameters of its operation which have valid and sensible values. But number space contains OTHER values, which would NOT make sense, and then there’s the entire set of WRONG values, which are sensible but incorrect. Some robots do not…

You’d have to have a gyro on board to do that, would require 100 times more battery mass and quadruple the mass of the overall camera even without battery.

If you have no idea what you’re talking about, and are utterly unwilling to read up enough to form a valid opinion, the best thing to do is to hold your peace.

They have been promising improvements to the moderation tools, and not actually making any, and they’ve been deleting posts and banning users who comment about the heavy handed tactics of censorship. Some of those censorship moves have been directed towards people that we all don’t like, but many of them are directed…

Uh, because the ones that found the traits associated with ovulation enticing were more likely to procreate? Is it not utterly obvious?

Oh, man, I’m gonna get electricity-generating tires and put wind turbines on the roof and MY CAR WILL DRIVE FOREVER. The only renewable energy my car has right now is the extra oomph I give it by pushing on the dashboard when I want to go faster.

It’s lighting. They’re dark grey. Not pretty at all. But very cool electrically.

Phone AGPS is that inaccurate, but actual GPS transceivers typically have 3 to 9 feet of accuracy. And no matter what your neighbor does that you don’t like, if you think firearms are the solution to it, please move into unincorporated spaces with the rest of the deranged gun-as-cock-substitute nitwits. My father…

You might not know this, but it’s considered rude to accuse someone of this, especially when you don’t bother pointing out what you think is wrong with what he said. At very least, it’s intellectually lazy of you to do so. Please put more efforts into your comments, or participate more silently on the internets.

There are many types of sushi that contain no fish. Tamagoyaki comes to mind.

My mind’s eye is very vague, but sometimes, if I concentrate and relax simultaneously, I can see quite a lot of detail in my imagination. When that happens, it’s quite startling. Weed helps.

Keep in mind that nothing SpaceX does with a rocket after it’s already pushed a load to the space station is actually a failure. For comparison, everyone else crashes their motors directly into the planet without the slightest attempt to control its descent or landing point.