This will be a TL;DR for many of you, but I thought you might enjoy as it is relevant to this story.  Excerpt from my book about personal near-death experiences that I’m writing:

Well at least if you step on one it won’t hurt nearly as much.

I can’t believe the number of stars you’re getting on this ill-informed post. 

No, it doesn’t. California may be the largest producer on a state by state basis, but it does not produce “most of the food in the US”

Remember when the story came out about the bridge collapse cause in Florida? I got a lot of crap for saying that college teaches engineers to be good at number crunching but there’s more to engineering than that. Lot’s of comments about how “obviously they sucked at number crunching, because the bridge fell down”

Exactly simplifying analysis will get people in trouble all the time. There’s a funny (to an engineer) essay called “a Structural Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown” I read way back when. Every single thing the author says makes perfect sense. Stuff like considering a single strap of fabric, assuming a force based…

Whatever. It’s abundantly clear the hub is cantilevered from the spokes parallel to the horizon.

My thought was this would be a self limiting problem in a car in Dallas in the summer. Just park it in the sun for a hour and you will top 150 degrees. 

It’s worse because we’d be sinking money into something that doesn’t work rather than something that helps. You’d be losing more energy in the transmission than gaining in higher irradiance. Power generation needs to be relatively local, just because of the physics.

But there are far more efficient ways to store and use energy for overnight periods.

Batteries are obviously the most simple and obvious, but if you start getting creative there are lots of more environmentally friendly ways to store energy. You can pump water uphill during the day using solar power, and then use…

that’s cool and all, but have you seen 3dBotmaker Diecast racing?

This points out the HUGE problem we have with society here in this country right now. For years and years if there were signs that said stay out we stayed out except for a few asshats that would not abide. But now with YouTube and Instagram and a young generation of people that have never been told no this problem has…

Desert sand formations tend to grow very slowly and in areas with very little rain like Death Valley, can be preserved intact for centuries or longer. Though not as spectacular as other natural formations they contain valuable information relevant to fields like geology and climatology because they function as time…

Agreed. Also Overlanding:

Don’t you kind of hope that there are postage-paid return envelopes inside, and that Mr. Cain could send them all back?

There’s a difference between “it broke while harvesting and I need it back in service ASAP” and “it stopped while harvesting because the cabin air filter reached its service hours limit and an authorized service tech needs to come out and replace it with an OEM filter and reset the timer to get it working again.” And…

The new systems literally will NOT recognize components, unless a John Deere Representative comes out and runs their recognition USB key to unlock the tractor.

This would be like if you needed to change the brakes on your car and could only go to the dealership, because the moment you removed the wheel, the engine…

also, ain’t none of these actually $1

I love it when people post color coded maps without the key....