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Am I missing something here or did the Snellen system fall out of general use? What do numbers like -10.25 mean?

My father learned English as his first language and came out with some gems: HIV headlights = HID headlights condom = condominium buffet pronounced as bufh-it turlet = toilet three = tree furry = fury That's just off the top of my head. I've been meaning to compile a complete list of his...

I've had the same glasses since my early 20s. That's when my parent's insurance stopped paying for glasses or eye exams. Given that I only need glasses when watching TV, I haven't had much incentive since to get an eye exam or a new pair. I might finally look into it soon given how ratty my...

Unfortunately my mom is going through the early stages of this and it's been taking its toll on me physically and mentally. My siblings aren't really able to help much but they still expect 1/3 of everything when mom goes. Not sure how much longer I'll be able to keep working, either. Pretty...

I think the way it often worked 30 years ago, or even today in places like Europe, is that the business informs its customers in advance it'll be shut down for x weeks while essential staff are on vacation, or at least that certain functions will be unavailable during that time. Here in the US...

For what it's worth whenever professors gave us assignments in advance I tended to finish them early. It was lots of fun watching everyone else with their hand up their behinds trying to finish things up before winter or spring break while I was more or less coasting. Same thing back when I...

The only time I'm aware of it is slowing for corners on descents and (less often) slowing for sharp corners on level roads. I hardly ever use my brakes even just riding recreationally. I typically see things I need to slow down for in time enough to just coast down.

My guess is yes because electric companies in general have a lot of surplus capacity at night. The distribution grid itself isn't the problem. A lot of it is designed so in theory every home could be drawing 10 or 20 kW at the same time. So long as the electric company can supply it, you're...

It's not that they're better at dealing with heat but rather that they just don't make as much. The early LEDs were maybe 10% efficient. Nowadays 30% to 50% is normal. Because you have more lumens per watt you need 1/3 to 1/5 the amount of power to make any given amount of light. And only 50% to...

Why would it? The only type of streetlight which can easily be filtered out is low-pressure sodium. NYC and most other cities don't use that because it's an eerie, monochromatic yellow light with a negative CRI. HPS is just as problematic to filter out as whiter lights. Also, the LED lights send...

Yes, exactly. For that reason I'm thrilled NYC is replacing the HPS streetlights with 4300K LED. Believe it or not some people are actually complaining the new lights are too bright, or too white. I guess people can get used to even bad light like HPS. I'll give them a year or two to adjust, and...

Not me. I prefer 4500K to 5500K with high CRI. I don't like anything less than about 4500K but I could probably live with it if it's 3500K or higher. Can't stand anything below that. Way too yellow for my tastes.

I never bought it but you're probably thinking of this.

This is why I never answer numbers whch aren't familiar to me. I'll usually do a Google search right after they call, and if they're a known scammer I just block them so they can never bother me again. If they're calling from an area code where I don't know anyone, I just block the entire area...

This made my day. It's a pity phone service providers don't offer it as an option.

I share your love of 4:3 screens. Right now I'm using an LG 1600x1200 20" monitor my neighbors gave me second hand as my primary monitor. I have a little more room for something larger. My ideal would be perhaps a 24" or 25" 4:3 OLED screen with 4096x3072 resolution. Barring that I'll just hold...

Those are passive heat sinks. By definition the heat flux per unit area will be pretty low. Thermal tape is more than adequate here. Thermal epoxy mainly offers an advantage in high heat flux applications, such as a microprocessor or a thermoelectric cooler on a fan-forced or liquid heat sink.

I'm just saying this has been one of the reasons some people have come out against it. Obviously unisex bathrooms are a better answer here but the general prudishness of American society has prevented their widespread adoption. More times than I care to think about. This is NYC. Sometimes...

There is a good reason some people are against this. What's to stop me from using the women's room just to sneek a peak and saying my "gender identity" is female? These transgender bathroom laws in my opinion are opening a huge door for voyeurs. Then again, given some of the people passing them...

The Republicans lost me when they were taken over by the religious right and their obsession with abortion, birth control, and so forth. With all the problems facing this country it frankly annoys me that we waste so much time debating what are at best fringe issues. It annoys me even more when...

Compared to most of the legislation the NYC City Council passes what Congress passes seems erudite by comparison. The latest gem they inflicted on us is a 5 cent tax on plastic grocery bags.

It could be worse. I read somewhere the US government lost money running a brothel. I don't see how that's even possible.

I'm mostly referring to rules which let businesses outsource, relocate overseas, and so forth. Basically, I'm talking about the rules businesses now use to avoid taxes. If you didn't know what the tax consequences of outsourcing from India or Mexico might be in six months you probably would just...

Also worth mentioning is we removed launch authority from submarine commanders a while back. No one man, whether the President or a rogue submarine commander, can start WWIII. I think the intention here is to use this tactic mainly for economic matters. I'd personally like to see lots of...

One of the comments to that video said it best-this is why caricatures are supposed to be in 2d.

I don't know about that. (Fast forward to last 20 seconds)

Well, the fact so much of the Republican party is trying to stop Trump tells me all the pigs who usually feed at the trough stand to lose big if he wins. Putting aside all the negatives associated with him for a minute, I can say a Trump presidency at least wouldn't be boring. You probably won't...

A lot of the reason for the gridlock (and the rise of things like the arch-conservative Tea Party and religious right) has to do with the present system of government giving too much voice to sparsely populated rural states. There were reasons this was done back when the republic was founded to...

The odd thing is the superdelegates should really consider switching sides at this point. Most general election polls show Bernie doing better than Hillary against Trump. At this point either will beat him, but 6 months is an eternity in an election year. And if some new scandal with Hillary...

It looks like you and others did make a difference. Bernie is still a longshot but if he keeps racking up wins the superdelegates may switch sides.

Ouch. I looked at some data. You've doubled your population since 1967. By comparison the US population has increased by a bit over 50% since then. It's even worse when you consider the US has abundant natural resources compared to Oz. BTW, provided you're selective about who you let in, and...

My guess is OLED will be available in smaller sizes first. I personally have nothing against large monitors but for me a 40" monitor would need to be 8K for me to be happy with the pixel pitch. The Dell monitor you linked to has the same pixel pitch as my 20" 1600x1200 monitor, and DO clearly...

Of course. Intel is just like a lot of other American companies. There's no shortage of skilled American workers, just a shortage of ones willing to work for low wages. I guess now they have no more use for their $7 an hour H-1B programmers.

I'm personally holding out for 4K OLED. Any technology which inherently emits light has to be better than any type of backlit LCD. A 4K OLED monitor in about 24" size would be perfect for my needs.

Of course there are loads of applications which require lots of computing power. I tend to think those aren't necessarily major drivers of advancing the state-of-the-art because those applications are often served by supercomputers consisting of lots of off-the-shelf CPUs. I'm not sure there's...

That's an excellent point. I've noted at this stage SSDs are offering "good enough" storage at a low enough price point for 90% of the population to be satisfied. Although mechanical drives are still larger and less expensive per GB by an order of magnitude, most people are not screaming for...

Given how expensive each new die shrink is, my guess is eventually you'll have everyone making semiconductors sharing a fab, perhaps even sharing IP. It's getting to the point where no single company can bankroll everything. As for R&D, I really think we've reached a point of diminishing...

You'll be hearing about Big College for sure when the student loan debt bomb explodes, which is likely to happen very soon.

Yes, exactly. From the link: Overall, at the very least, we`ll have to get used to being a country of lower average levels of achievement. For whatever reasons, Mexican culture and human accomplishment don`t go together.

That's exactly the problem with Hillary-no surprises and therefore a continuation of the status quo which we can all see isn't working out very well. While I don't necessarily agree with SD that government always creates problems, it has in fact created a lot of problems which otherwise wouldn't...

There's the real estate bubble also which is driven by a combination of low mortgage rates plus lack of places to invest. Lots of people with money put it into real estate, especially in places like NYC, driving prices through the roof. It'll be disaster when that bubble finally bursts...

Not banned but I think at this point nearly everyone here knows everyone else's views on a variety of political topics. No point repeating the same things for the umpteenth time. My take on this year's presidential race is that it's scary both front runners have been compared to Hitler. I'm not...

There's always scaling in three dimensions after that like they're already doing with flash memory. It won't get you higher clock speeds, but it'll get you more parallelism and more transistors on a chip. I think at this point we may need a new CPU architecture to move forward, perhaps...

Intel has no real competition in the areas it serves at this point. They're probably letting AMD stay alive just to avoid the red tape that would come from being a monopoly. When you've already cornered a large market segment, you can't really grow much. The only way to increase profits is to...

In an interesting development consistent with this thread's original theme, Cree has released the XP-G3. Datasheet. Note the S5 bin (172 lumens @ 350mA and 85°C). And this isn't vaporware. These parts are actually available. Efficiency of the top bin would be 180 lm/W @ 85°C and 190 lm/W @ 25°C...

The landing reminds me of those old sci-fi movies from the 1950s where the rocketship lands on its tail on some alien planet. Next, they need to build a flying saucer. :) That would be less of a problem keeping up when landing.

Makes sense to me. Along the lines of forcing the market, I'm not aware of Tesla actively meeting with legislators with the idea of creating captive markets for EVs. For example, if large cities like New York decided to convert city owned or regulated fleets (i.e. taxis, buses, garbage trucks)...

Licensing Tesla IP might actually be the better route for them. They could continue to do what they're relatively good at, namely produce relatively low volumes catering to niche markets, and let the big boys make EVs for the masses. They won't have much competition in their niche, plus they'll...

Yes. Once the major automakers take electric cars seriously, meaning that such cars comprise the majority of their production, Tesla will be screwed by simple economies of scale. You can't hand assemble battery packs made from thousands of 18650 size cells and be competitive when EVs hit...

It depends whether you need high or low thrust. If you're getting to LEO, you need high thrust, and nuclear rockets deliver roughly twice the specific impulse of chemical ones. Once you're out of Earth's gravity well, you use much lower thrust but a nuclear rocket can supply that thrust for...