If you take a positive spin it on, it could be heavy manipulation for the environment.
1. Buy Bitcoin to put added focus to it
2. Stop using it and cite environmental impact
3. Swap to something more environmentally acceptable in an attempt to tilt Bitcoin from the crypto throne or push them to change the amount of mining going on.
I’m not sure how beneficial it is to give him the benefit of the doubt, but it’s a view I haven’t seen it the threads before.
You should check out Hans Rosling's lectures [1]. Statistics points towards the fact that as people become more wealthy, they have less children. It should stagnate around 11 million people by most models.
Making a BMS is by no means simple or cheap in the range of cents.
It's hard to make good cells, but creating a good BMS, designing an easy way to at fuse wires, creating cooling bands and figuring out how to do so on a huge scale is just as hard
I do explosions with liquid nitrogen almost daily at my job as a science demonstrator. We've had one accident where a bottle exploded in the hands of a college of mine. He got a good scar up his arm, but nothing deadly. He had to get sewn, but that was about it.
Most often though, if you fill up the bottle with too much nitrogen, it won't explode. It'll just freeze up and slowly disperse through whatever cracks are present. If it didn't explode over night, it probably wouldn't have at all.
I suspect it might have started to fizzle due to air leaving the bag, or due to a small leak, which is pretty harmless. Nitrogen explosions of half-litre bottles are very large, and can shake the ground 20-30m away. I can test it later today if time permits and upload a video, but overall, it would've been much clearer if it went off.
Edit: to people saying the cap is the weak point: 9/10 times it's the bottom that gives in first.
I have some experience with dry ice in closed containers.
Every now and then some friends and I will get some dry ice, a bunch of plastic bottles and other containers with a screw-on lid and have a laugh making small explosions.
Basically you take a bottle, fill it 1/4 with water and 1/2 with dry ice and screw the cap on. You then have around a minute before it explodes.
A 1/2 liter coke bottle will make a nice whooompf and a 20 liter plastic gasoline can (the largest we have tried) will make a bang that can be heard maybe half a mile away. They very rarely sizzle out, and the ones that do probably have a defect, or we didn't get the cap screwed on properly. There's some time pressure, so you don't stand around checking before you throw the container. I would imagine that a metal container will make a pretty big bang (higher pressure before it ruptures) and may throw out some nasty debris.
Back when I did this a few times a year, 20oz soda bottles made the best boom. 2-liter bottles couldn't take as many PSI and water bottles... well, they're not designed to contain pressure. They'd fail at the cap, usually.
That may no longer hold, since 20oz bottles feel flimsier these days and all have low-profile caps. Haven't tried in a while.
Also, PVC pipe burried in ground, drop dry ice bomb in, drop another bottle with some water in it on top = dry ice mortar. Those little plastic bubble things that toys in vending machines come in? A little dry ice, a little water, close it, place lid down. POP, the bubble part flies a meter or so in the air.
I will note for anyone trying this that the parent's ratios are very different from what I used. Crushed dry ice to 1/10-1/8 full, about twice that much water. Unusually warm water (say, from near the surface of a pond or lake in late August) will greatly reduce time-to-boom, so beware. Too little water and it'll freeze before boom, greatly delaying or even preventing it. Very annoying. Attaching to something heavy (but NOT shrapnel-genrating) and sinking in ~5-10 feet of water is fun. Huge bubble, explosion can be felt on land nearby.
I used to do this too when I was a kid at my grandmom's house. They'd order steaks from TV commercials and receive them in the mail bundled with dry ice. It started as making foam messes with soap, water and dry ice... But soon I was filling up 2 litre bottles with ice and water and making bombs. It all ended when the police arrived because neighbors thought a gunfight was happening in their quiet residential neighborhood. Needless to say, they weren't very happy with me.
Big difference, I think, is that in your case you're mixing it with water, so it will warm up a lot more quickly. In the OP's case, he just had the dry ice in there with no water, so presumably it would melt more slowly, and there may be enough time for the carbon dioxide to escape through tiny gaps or cracks in the cap.
> to people saying the cap is the weak point: 9/10 times it's the bottom that gives in first.
It may be the case for a typical water bottle but thermoses have much larger caps. The maximal force that a cap can hold is proportional to its perimeter (~r), the force itself is proportional to the area of the cap (~r^2) and the pressure. So larger caps can blow off by lower pressure. I would bet that for a thermos the weak point is the cap.
I had a teacher who worked in a psych ward. She insisted that everyone has a trait of each mental issue you could name - you just don't get a diagnose until it's a big enough issue for the person.
Of course. The difference between "personality trait" and diagnosable illness is whether or not it causes you or others significant problems. There is no difference in kind, only in degree.
It differs from person to person. I've met people who know that they suffer from schizophrenia, some who are unaware, but know hearing voices is abnormal, and some who has no idea.
There's a big difference between the three. The first, the ones who know and care about it - you probably won't even notice he/she is suffering from it, unless they tell you. The others.. yeah.
Source: used to be a med student and a trained hospital sitter.
How on Earth is ten days enough to test anything in regards to diet? Pretty sure humans don't notice much change in that time, let alone enough to measure? Day to day numbers fluctuate by a lot, so wouldn't it have to be tested over a longer period for it to be valid?
> Various doctors, dietitians, and food scientists
> have been reviewing our formula and providing
> suggestions as they see fit. We have been listening
> to them and testing these changes in our beta
> program. Each modification requires making a new
> batch of Soylent by hand, shipping them to our
> beta testers, and gathering their feedback, a
> process that takes at least 10 days per revision.
The idea that the dietary advice of a doctor could meaningfully be tested in a few weeks by a beta program of laypeople with no scientific controls is utterly ridiculous.
Even if you had a large beta program and ran each revisions for 100 days, the feedback would be garbage unless you had proper controls and measurements in place.
>The idea that the dietary advice of a doctor could meaningfully be tested in a few weeks by a beta program of laypeople with no scientific controls is utterly ridiculous.
But you are assuming the purpose of the test is to test the merit of the dietary motivator for the change, the testing described here might just be user acceptance tasting. That is, does this this change make it taste bad? Give you gas? etc
They are probably treating it like more of a smoke test. In 10 days you can certainly get a good idea about changes in flavor, texture, preparation, etc. You also ought to get some feedback on whether a formula change resulted in any immediate health concerns.
Keep in mind that this may be the only form of nutrition the 'beta testers' are getting, and possibly have been getting, for a significant amount of time.
If you're eating normal food then some deficiency in one component of one meal may be masked by a surplus in another, and in particular if you eat a varied diet then that deficiency could start and stop within one meal. If instead your sole source of nutrition is suddenly deficient, it's not a stretch to think that you could notice a difference within 10 days.
I'm not trying to defend the product, I just don't think it's inconceivable that 10 days is long enough to notice a big problem with a formulation change.
Even the (not very scientific) test from the EU Food-Safety-Agency make 90-days trials on animals (and that does not tell a lot imho).
If you want to know, if you are allergic, a short test should be sufficient. If you wanna know, if allergies might be initiated from the food, 10 days don't do much good. If you want to know, if some known things (nutrition, et al) are missing from the "food" 10 days won't do you much good and might only be detected in really rigorous blood-tests.
If you want to check for problems with unknown unknowns (and there are a lot of things we yet do not know, regarding food and our bodies) 10 days are nothing more then a nice joke. (Sorry, but living with a biologist make me quite cynical, when it comes to things, that might just endanger us.)
A really scientific method is something else. They might stumble upon some things, but I'd like to know, if every beta-tester gets his blood-work done before and after every test. How does the testing process in the first place look like (blood tests as said? just taste? subjective feeling after n-days of new soylent version? and so on).
> so everyone will get their complete amino acid profile
No everyone will get a one size fits all amino acid profile. And then comes the problem, that humans aren't "one size fits all". They will probably get a solution, that fits one, two or probably max. three sigma of the targeted population.
To be fair, I love food, so soylent would not be for me. I really think, that a cheap food-replacement that does give most people mostly everything they need in terms of nutrition, might really do a lot of good, if distributed in times of disaster or in regions with problematic food distribution (third world). But that is not the targeted audience as I see it.
It seems to be people who do not value food, but have enough money on their hand, to replace it with this product.
(This is completely off-topic, but you only needed about 1/3 of the commas you used. For instance, "if you wanna know, ..." does not need a comma. Your final sentence does not need any commas. Etc.)
"The onset of symptoms of scurvy depends on how long it takes for the person to use up their limited stores of vitamin C. For example, if the diet includes no vitamin C at all, the average onset of symptoms is about four weeks"
I assume he meant that the input from doctors etc is for nutritional reasons but when they ship out to testers they are taking the nutrition changes at face value and are only concerned about feedback from testers on whether it affected the taste/consistency/gives them gas etc.
They're at the point of making changes to "taste, texture, and smell" - the dietary side of the formula is nailed down already, and I am willing to believe was tested more rigorously.
