Oldest profession.

is it really easier and cheaper to store the energy needed for a home in a chemical battery?

Yes. A 5kwh battery is about 50kg and smaller than a carry-on suitcase. String 6 of them together and you’ve got 30 kWh stored with no moving parts. Anker has that for about $15,000, maybe $30k installed.

How much does a 3-story elevator cost? What about one that can capture the stored potential energy on the way down, and not break down?

This data analysis seems to suggest that yes, July through October have higher birth rates in the United States, with maybe 10% higher births than similar days between April and June.

Potential energy (in joules) is mass (in g) times height (in meters) times 9.8 m/s^2 .

So in order to store the 30 kWh per day that the typical American house uses, you’d need to convert the 30 kWh into 108,000,000 joules, and divide by 9.8, to determine how you’d want to store that energy. You’d need the height times mass to be about 11 million. So do you take a 1500 kg weight (about the weight of a Toyota Camry) and raise it about 7.3 meters (about 2 stories in a typical residential home)? (this is wrong, it’s only 0.001 as much as the energy needed, see edit below)

And if that’s only one day’s worth of energy, how would you store a month’s worth? Or the 3800kwh (13.68 x 10^9 joules) discussed in the article?

At that point, we’re talking about raising 10 Camrys 93 meters into the air, just for one household. Without accounting for the lost energy and inefficiencies in the charging/discharging cycle.

Chemical energy is way easier to store.

Edit: whoops I was off by using grams instead of kg. It actually needs to be 1000 times the weight or 1000 the height. The two story Camry is around a tablet battery’s worth of storage, not very much at all.

In other words, really low probability with a substantial risk that even if you do hit it, you’ll have to share the jackpot with others?

Maybe where you’re sitting. But my frame of reference has had slightly different time dilation than yours.

The decimalization of money is its own fun history, with a lot of different countries undergoing their own transitions at different times.

The Spanish dollar, which was the world reserve currency in its heyday, was divided into 8 reals (see how pirates used to refer to money in the form of “pieces of eight”) but issues with the supply of silver led to the introduction of the lesser real de vellón, which eventually settled at 20 to the dollar after over 100 years of uncertainty and confusion.

I don’t believe that “watt hours” are more convenient than joules

Clearly you’ve never had to do the calculations where these things come up, where hours are a much more common unit of measure for time than seconds, so that multiplying and dividing by time is easier when working with hours.

it’s more when people are almost using the metric system then fuck it up, like the “Watt Hour” for measuring energy use.

Energy is just so important to physics and engineering that it will be measured in whatever unit is most convenient to convert in that particular context: joules as the SI unit, watt hours for electricity usage, calories for certain types of heat or food energy calculations, electron volts in particle physics, equivalent tonnes of TNT for explosion energy, things like that.

Your starling enthusiast is named Sterling?

That’s one of my pet peeves, when people use relative comparisons to overstate things that have very small absolute differences.

55g of CO2 is basically nothing. A gallon of gasoline represents about 2400g of CO2 emissions when burned. So for a typical vehicle that gets 30 miles per gallon, 55g of CO2 is basically the equivalent of driving 0.6875 miles (1.1km).

It’s less than the carbon footprint of a cup of coffee (60g).

Or, alternatively, eating a single quarter pound hamburger would be about 3 kg of CO2, or 55 hours of video viewing at this rate.

You’re quoting 2 Broke Girls to give cultural critiques to Coldplay?

Throw it away once it’s cooled. If it’s a solidified fat, you can just scrape it into the trash bag. If it’s a liquid oil, then you can throw it into a disposable container (I have a million takeout soup containers on hand at any given time) so that it doesn’t leak everywhere.

Oil is compostable, but only in proper ratios to the overall organic material being composted, so it’s fair game to put into compostable containers for industrial composting, or maybe small quantities in your backyard compost, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you know what you’re doing.

404 is great, too, for coverage of those topics.

Defector is worth a special mention in large part because it’s one of the few places on the internet that still makes me laugh out loud. It’s ostensibly a sports site, but when they stray off topic it’s some of the best stupid shit on the internet.

Defector is fucking great. It’s the team that made Deadspin magical, who all revolted when Deadspin got bought by private equity and run into the ground, and banded together to form an employee-owned outlet whose authors are just all great writers.

The editor in chief of Deadspin, who fought the dumb decisions when private equity took over, ended up resigning in a blaze of glory by posting this article on the site as she left.

She also has a great new book out on how private equity breaks things.

Obvious Plant puts fake products on shelves.

True Wagner puts absurd flyers on telephone poles and bulletin boards.

This is more of a True Wagner situation.