I've lived on the westside of LA for ~20 years, so one secret I like to let people in on: there's no water shortage. There's a literal ocean of it. I can see it right out my window.
And all that it takes to turn seawater into potable freshwater is energy.
We don't have a water problem. We have an energy problem.
For all of LA County, it would take 500–750 MW each year to use seawater for all our freshwater needs.
Or put another, with a single nuclear power plant, we would solve all LA's freshwater needs -- forever.
It's not only energy though. Desalination takes space, and you have to do something with the salt. Last I saw, to have enough DeSal capacity for all of California, you'd have to replace every beach with DeSal plants to have enough capacity, and then you'd still have a salt problem.
You could put the salt on boats and dump it back much further out in the ocean, but that too takes energy.
You don't have an energy problem, you have a political problem. Fresh water is wasted on thirsty plants destined for agriculture (like alfalfa), by rich farmers who inherited water rights put into law ages ago. It's very simple to solve water usage in California, it just requires a governor that has a tiny amount of grit and cuts into their water rights.
It's crazy how to some, building a whole nuclear reactor and dozens of desalination plants seems like a simpler solution than making a couple of very wealthy farmers a bit angry for a while. Capital really is all-powerful in the States, it even holds power in the very minds of its citizens.
I don't have a scientific study at hand, but historically many revolutionaries and resistance fighters were family men and women with children who precisely cared for their children's future.
The real benefit really seems to be that the electric motors have a much smaller failure rates than mechanical ones running near their top rpm. The hybrid motor can run at a much optimized RPM, so the idea is that this will improve the overall safety margin of the overall design. I could be wrong, but that's what the video said.
So basically like diesal-electric trains? My understanding that's almost certainly outdated was that the issue with electric planes was weight due to batteries, so added mass from a generator sounds bad.
At cruise, yes. However during takeoff and go around they run at higher RPM to develop more thrust. Using batteries for takeoff and only using fuel for cruise or backup power is smart.
I think it's even more than that. The hybrid engine has to run one single RPM to drive a generator, it can be vibration insulated, probably needs to be only smaller because it doesn't have to provide the high max power the conventional motors have etc.
It's why I believe hybrid cars that use a gas motor only to charge the batteries are more reliable and more efficient.
But "is far more likely to fall near the present" = "is far more likely to fall near the present". The author makes the claim about probability distribution themselves, then does the opposite.
You're right, yet I agree with the website's approach. The goal of this site is to educate users about how people lived, not educate them about stats. IMO. I would have chosen the same algo.
It's clear to me that an even bigger HC crowd would howl "Oh, how boring, look at him choosing pretty much only still alive people" if he had done the 'uniformly random" selection. C'mon!
> The goal of this site is to educate users about how people lived, not educate them about stats. IMO.
And IMO, a website that's 95% stats by volume very clearly is about stats. If the goal is teaching anything, it's teaching stats. It literally does animations showing the random process, and explicitly says how likely each outcome is, even sorts by likelihood in some places.
Again, I wouldn't have as much of a problem with that if the website itself didn't explicitly say that recent births are more likely than non-recent births.
Personally, the one 1990s person I've got was far more interesting than the dozen of 5th-15th century children that all died of one sickness or another before the age of 2. If anything, it's the dying of dysentery that should be non-uniformly random.
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