There's a functional mechanical switching relay, the kind triggered off of the clicks of a rotary dialing wheel, attached to two phones at the communication museum in Frankfurt https://www.mfk-frankfurt.de/ and you can dial one phone from the other, and see the relays move as you enter the numbers.
My dad worked at the phone company and as a kid in the late 1970s I went into the switching room with him on a Saturday morning (he was the district boss and would bring donuts in for the folks that had to work weekends). Forty years later and I still remember lots and lots of clicking and a heady smell of ozone.
Saildrone's forecast app is like Dark Sky but even better and more beautiful. They don't have an android app yet, just iOS, but I believe one is in development, and they have a full-featured in-browser client. No affiliation, but I know someone who works there who showed me their app.
I used to troll my old housemate (web frontend guy) by saying something along the lines of "Oh, Node.JS? Yeah some people I work with use that, but they're mostly moving over to Pangolin with Clamp on the backend." (substituting Pangolin and Clamp for any other nouns)
I work in electronics and laser stuff, where we use german-style compound names like "multi-pixel photon counting" and "erbium-doped fiber amplifier." Even in low-level compute, packages are named descriptively e.g. FreeRTOS. Lots of acronyms, but very few cute single-word nouns to name things. I've only observed that trend in relatively high-level software.
Look at the calendars of venues that you like. Their whole job is curation, and they book lots of local bands. Throw one song from each band playing at each venue for the next month into a playlist and listen through it a couple times -- almost surely you'll find new artists you didn't know about, and guess what? Their show is just around the corner.
If you live in Florida, you can go down to the pawn shop, buy a gun, drive over to the airport and start shooting at planes. Doesn't take much sophistication to cause a lot of harm.
USB is kind of a physical standard. I have a few things like an alarm clock that uses USB, but I feel like the lower build quality is way more obvious than if it just had a wall wart.
The problem with calling USB a DC power standard is that it often doesn't work. I have a lot of trouble trying to charge my PS4 controller using random USB cables when it's attached to my PS4--I'm not even introducing an a/c adapter. I've had things like Qi chargers where I had an insufficient a/c adapter so they behaved poorly. If I'm at an airport and need a quick charge on my phone I'm definitely not going to use their USB port because if it works it'll likely charge slowly.
USB-c is worse with all of this. With a/c power it's only an issue when traveling to other countries and in many cases a physical adapter is good enough.
Slightly OT, but have you managed to actually find an acceptable quality USB power bank (PD/Type C or otherwise) that actually supports this "UPS mode" of operation? Most of the one I have tried cannot simultaneously output and input, or introduce a second of switching delay in between.
Some discussion about pass through charging on the Anker forum boards [1]. Pretty much everyone I know who carries a power bank only remembers to charge it at the same time they want to use it, so pass through charging capitalizes upon this consumer behavior to use the power banks more frequently.
The possible dark pattern I see operating instead is manufacturers are opting to ship power banks charged up to the retail shelves, and likely don't mind if people keep buying more new units because they can't wait for the units they already have to charge up?
I tend to keep all my gear plugged into chargers whenever I'm stationary because I know all of them have charge protection circuits and I have a work profile closer to that of a digital nomad than an office-worker, so I'm an outlier with that common consumer behavior of only charging when one must.
“Let”... he was just as distracted as I was. Not a single plane in the sky and smooth afternoon air for a change. Tuning in the ILS for me and being my eyes out the window safety pilot. Complacency got us.
On the flip side the chief was a hardass and would make me call the tower and get clearance to land before beginning my descent while running the pattern. Other schools / instructors always made a call on short final to remind the tower we were still out there but the chief would fly a 10 mile downwind before he would descend and turn base without clearance. Now I think he really did know something
The unpainted steel of the DeLorean made it a pain in the ass to repair. You can't pull dents, apply body filler and repaint, you basically need a whole new panel if you want to restore damage.
The part of the demo that was actually impressive was the part where they took sledgehammers to the body panels and didn't leave dents. I think it'll be fine.
It is staggering only until you realize that the majority of land in the US is too arid to grow crops and was once called the Great American Desert -- basically most of the land west of the Mississippi. Such land grows primarily scrub and is ideal for livestock such as Bison and Cattle that are able to eat the vegetation that grows there naturally as a result of the limited rainfall available. That we have water intensive agriculture west of the Mississippi is only because we are depleting aquifers. It's not sustainable, and using this land for livestock is about the best thing that can be done with it. It's also what this land was used for prior to being settled -- large open plains on which Bison roamed.
The gist of your point is correct, but "West of the Mississippi" is the wrong dividing line. You have about a state and half of excellent land west of the Mississippi. It is all about the mountains - From when the mountains start just past the West coast, they cause clouds to dump their moisture on the west side. The east sides are arid, for a couple hundreds miles or more. And because we have multiples ranges of mountains, the western third of the nation is arid... with pockets of agriculture just west of each mountain range.
Indeed, calling the Dakotas/montana as "desert" is... misleading.
Tundra maybe, but its not really a desert. And the plains are a great spot for grazing critters like Bison. The land there is their old stomping grounds, they fit in there like jelly on peanut butter sandwiches.
It's not just "a couple hundred miles past the mountains". It's basically even with the western edge of the Gulf of Mexico. East of there, there's enough rain. West of there, there's not.
You are right that "West of the Mississippi" is not the actual boundary, which is why I said "majority of the land". The actual boundary curves, being farther west in the Gulf and almost touching the Mississippi in the North, but "Western half of the US" is as good a description as any.
Point being, a lot of people who grow up in the Eastern Half of the US think the Western half has a similar climate, when it really doesn't. It really is an arid climate and the difference between East and West is rather stark.
Here you can take a look at a map of precipitation:
Yep. In Texas, we have both FM (farm to market) roads, but also, as you head further west, toward the Mexican border and the landscape turns a beige-tan hue of brown, we also have RM (ranch to market) roads
Introduction of horses changed the landscape. They damage the roots when grazing. Bison and cows don't. Many of these desert scrub areas may have had much more grass cover pre-columbus.
According to Allan Savory and some other respectable scientists the problem arose because the plants evolved to support huge buffalo populations and depended on them to clean and fertilize the ground. As their population declined, there was no more mega-herds migrating annually through the prairies and smaller groups of animals had different grazing patterns. Plants couldn't adapt to the new situation quick enough and the balance got broken. Less cover meant more evaporation, drier soil, erosion and rain washing off the soil rich in organic matter, and it all spiraled down to the land turning into semi-deserts. Allan Savory thinks (and he proved this method successful in practice) that the solution is to have large flocks of grazing animals moving around periodically, which stimulates grass growth and grass protects the soil and helps other plants to colonize the area.
There is some evidence that the huge Buffalo herds did not exist until Indians died off after Columbus "discovered" America. Pre-Columbian indigenous societies hunted the Bison enough to keep their population in check.
One important point to keep in mind is that "land" varies a lot, and "pasture" can mean anything from dense grassy pasture with >1 cow per acre to arid pasture >100.
They aren't convertible to cropland in the same way. Even in terms of "rewinding," one acre doesn't equal another, for most interpretations of "wilderness value."
This is why the amazon-2-pastureland problem is so serious. Every acre of amazon rainforest reoresents a lot of habitat.
Are they counting BLM (federal) land where they allow cattle to graze? A lot of land is federally owned but the BLM allow ranchers to let cattle graze in the summer/warmer months.
https://youtu.be/_xI9tXi-UNs