Although it now seems as if that was massively inaccurate, things were very near to turning out completely differently in the first days of the war: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlttS0N7uVA
"A study using a complex mathematical technique claiming to cleanly isolate the effect of X and Y. I can't really follow what it's doing..."
This is a frustrating type of issue. Dismissing something with "I don't understand this, but I don't believe it" isn't the sort of thing I want to be doing. However, I don't have any desire to waste time trying to understand what someone has done (and did they really understand what they were doing themselves?) when it's clear that the effect isn't cleanly isolated in the data and no amount of mathematics is going to change that.
Yeah, I'm always a bit suspicious of apparently effective dietary changes which result in a calorie reduction - often different people report completely different dietary changes helped them, but one thing they all have in common is being in calorie deficit.
There are plenty of studies showing that caloric restriction calms inflammatory responses which are responsible for the majority of common diseases. Without balancing the energy intake, I'm always slightly suspicious that any improvements with changing what I eat are actually caused by the change in how much I eat.
I dont think this is an either/or question. I think people struggle with multiple levels of explanation, which is almost always the case in biology, psychology, and behavior. There is also a huge amount of biologic variability between people.
As a result, some people may find it more pleasant and easier to balance energy intake with different dietary styles.
I don't see why that means there's anything off. Just because most of us can't produce enough energy per unit time to maintain this pace doesn't mean that it's not the most efficient pace per unit distance.
Anecdotally, when I start (or re-start) running I find the pace I can run at increases quite rapidly. That makes sense with this data - although my fitness is only increasing slowly, being able to produce slightly more power actually gives a disproportionate increase in pace because the higher speed is more efficient per km.
AFAIK most do. A few prefer brackish waters (like the American croc), but crocs in the saltie ranges tend to avoid them (as they’re full of salties), and crocs like the Nile, the Slender-Snouted, the Mugger, the Orinoco or the Dwarfs range way too far inlands for brackish waters to be their main habitat.
Yeah, the potential loading is annoying.
I remember wondering why predestrian/cycle bridges were always so annoyingly narrow despite having low loads.
The issue is of course that they have to be strong enough to support being crammed with hundreds of people when everyone is there to watch the local fireworks/rowing race/anything else that's happening, even if that happens almost never.
> “Where are you from? I haven't seen an "annoyingly narrow" ped/cycle bridge in Sweden or Belgium.”
I’d say most of London’s busy pedestrian/cycle bridges and tunnels are annoyingly narrow.
Even taking cyclists out of the equation, they can get congested at times, particularly with tourists stopping to take photos from the middle etc.
So a cyclist can either be polite and move at pedestrian speed, which is annoying for the cyclist. Or weave and dodge pedestrians at speed (typically Deliveroo/UberEats riders on e-bikes) which is annoying and dangerous for pedestrians…
This is interesting! But how does a dense crowd of people compare to a queue of lorries carrying cement or building materials in terms of mass per square metre?
Let's try to find some data ... ... ... A fully loaded Hanson cement lorry seems to be 32 tonnes / 2.55 m / 9.15 m, which is about 1.4 tonnes per square metre. That corresponds to 20 x 70 kg people per square metre, which would be a disaster whether or not the floor gives way, unless it's a very special kind of crowd (acrobats or something).
Love this quote: Friday marked the 32nd anniversary of the walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, an event The Chronicle's Peter Hartlaub once referred to as "the largest clusterf— in Bay Area history where no one actually died."
> "There were cheers as some people started to hurl bicycles over the railing," he wrote. "A stroller tumbled down and sank beneath the waves 220 feet below. 'Throw the baby, too,' people yelled, laughing.
I can recommend this film from one of the last commercial sail ships rounding Cape Horn in 1928 during some big storms, narrated by an experienced captain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLzBDhilDL0
That sounds massively expensive. Being very generous and assuming that the piston is the length of the hole and can rise out completely, then the energy storage is still only a few times that required to pump all the water out of the hole. It doesn't start to compare to the volume behind a hydro dam (which may then have a large vertical drop to the generator further down-river), but is still much more complex.
Another proposed idea for places that have deep seas or lakes is pumping air down into a storage at the bottom of the water. This storage can even being a flexible plastic - there isn't any high loading on it because the pressure balances out. The issue with that tech is that it's not that efficient, as compressing the air going down generates a lot of heat - some of that could potentially be recovered, but there's a trade-off with simplicity. Also if the containment fails then a lot of air bubbles to the surface, potentially sinking any ship on the surface at the time.
As ben_w points out elsewhere in the thread, renewables are so cheap that losses matter less than you think.
Put another way: Today in Denmark, electricity is free. Literally 0 cents (øre) before taxes and transport fees (of about 5 cents, 36 øre). Just before Christmas it was about $1 (700 øre) per kWh. There's no inefficiency where it would be bad to store energy with swings like that.
It's surprising how well these ships sail; although square sails are often thought of as only being effective going down wind, they sail somewhat into the wind fine. And of course, you don't have to worry about a bad gybe removing your rigging.
I was in Norway a few years back and took a tourist trip in a 2/3 replica of a Viking boat found in a burial mound - the crew took us up the lake, turned round and came straight back - it was remarkably nippy and seemed to handle very well. I'd be interested to read how the much larger ship here performed under sail.
For square riggers the problem is rather tacking, because then you're backing the entire sail area and putting strain in the wrong direction for the rigging.
The rigging is built to withstand immense pressure from behind and the side, not from forwards. For larger square riggers they do wearings when the wind starts to pipe up to mitigate this.
From talking with people involved everyone was surprised how incredibly well she sails. But it was a lot of learning to get to that point with the bottom reefing and strange sheeting points affecting the balance.
How weatherly the ship is (how close to the direction of the wind it can sail) seems like such an important performance spec on a sailing ship, but it never seems to be listed.
