It looks like the current road tax frameworks of many countries use either CO2 emissions or car price as a main factor for road tax, which presumably correlates with weight - except for EVs. Seems like at least the CO2 bit will have to change with EVs becoming more mainstream.
Montreal (and presumably inspired from elsewhere) are moving to car weight as a metric for pricing parking permits (begin of a trend in that direction, I think).
Although they do use different thresholds for EVs and ICEs, not to penalize EVs.
They mostly wanted to tackle the problem of lost space from larger cars, and would have taken car dimensions if the data was available, but apparently weight and size often correlate (previously they use car cylinders, but nowadays there are huge cars with tiny motors).
Yes, the noise level is measured on the ground directly below the flight path of the plane.
Interestingly, it’s not just the volume but also the pattern of the boom that can be altered by changing the design of the plane. There’s a great discussion of this here: https://www.elidourado.com/p/50-years-supersonic-ban
(Scroll down to the images of the sound wave)
There is a great part in “Now it can be told”[0] which discusses the counter intelligence efforts of the Manhattan Project - specifically when trying to figure out how far along Nazi development was. The upshot is: approximately nowhere, IIRC the test reactors never fully worked.
However, in the process of finding out how much progress was made, they talked to multiple French nuclear scientists in newly liberated Paris. One of the scientists figured out that the US had working atomic weapons.
This guy then managed to play this card to such effect (eg by suggesting that he may talk to the Soviets) that he was able to extract a lot of concessions from the US.
Now we have a nuclear armed France which IIRC was rapidly accelerated by tech transfer negotiated as a result. Pretty wild.
I also looked into this and ended up being successful when searching for photography lights and corn cob LEDs. Corn cob bulbs at 40-60 Watts each are cheap (~20USD in the UK), provide ~4K lumens each, and 2-3 are bright enough to get to daylight levels. Would highly recommend if you want to see whether it makes any difference, and/or which colors temp works best.
> Most importantly, it gives the highest yield per acre of any oilseed crop – almost five times as much oil per acre as rapeseed, almost six times as much as sunflower and more than eight times as much as soybeans. Boycotts of palm oil will only lead to its replacement by other crops needing far more farmland and likely more deforestation.
Strangely enough, which I didn't know when first writing this post, is that my aunt knows this lady as they overlapped during their tenure as professors at the university of warwick
Spell-checkers are a huge distracting pain. My first official act on any kind of text-producing equipment is to turn the damned things off.
For typos and suchlike, I know I ought to run them manually before going public with anything - HN comments included - but usually I either forget or can't be bothered, because I know the real errors will drown in a sea of red underlining - me using strange words or simply writing in another language than the checker is set up to expect.
Interesting point re the zone-programming and being a cowboy programmer.
I don't think that 'in the zone'-programming has to produce bad code, though (if that's what you are saying). I'd argue that it depends on what gives you a reward. If you take pride in your code then you will find it rewarding to write tests and decent comments etc., and more importantly make a habit of doing so.
A lot of people who write bad code think that they can get away with it because they are 'smart'. These same people then spend a ton of time trying to find bugs.
It sounds like your colleague is 'finishing' features by accumulating tech debt. While this may impress non-technical management, from my experience, it wouldn't make it into a high-quality production code base.
From people I've worked with, it seems like most people go through phases of extreme productivity ('being in the zone'). The code quality may suffer somewhat during those times, but they don't throw all good practice out of the window (not compiling for days, no tests?!?).
