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(Is there such a thing as a non-shoe cobbler?)

Shoe repair isn’t exactly a hobby one can simply fall into. Often, it’s the family business, passed on to the next generation. The store front, along with the machines, the customers, the skills are all transferred. “It’s wild to think that you used to be able to go to a trade school and take a course on shoe repair with a professor and a textbook,” Fortune says. “That’s not a thing anymore — you’re totally on your own.”

Getting into shoe repair is opaque, but Fortune had an in. His background in the fashion industry certainly gave him cursory knowledge of the trade, but it was a childhood friend whose family ran a shoe repair shop that really gave him a leg up. The shoe repair shop was in need of a refresh and Fortune pitched in to help. That’s where the shoe repairing journey started.

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It is the hardest known glass with the highest thermal conductivity among all glass materials.

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Making this paint really reflective, however, also made it really white, according to Purdue University. The paint reflects 98.1% of solar radiation while also emitting infrared heat. Because the paint absorbs less heat from the sun than it emits, a surface coated with this paint is cooled below the surrounding temperature without consuming power.

Using this new paint to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet could result in a cooling power of 10 kilowatts. “That’s more powerful than the air conditioners used by most houses,” Ruan said.

“Great. Where can I buy it?”  Well, you can’t.

“The paint is not available on the market yet,” Xiulin Ruan, the lead researcher on the project, told USA TODAY Thursday. “We are currently partnering with a large corporation towards commercializing the paint, and hopefully it will hit the market in a couple of years.”

UPDATE: Ultrawhite BaSO4 Paints and Films for Daytime Radiative Cooling

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According to XDA-Developers, Arm-based Windows has only been made available on devices with Qualcomm SoC’s because of a previously unknown deal between the two companies.

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Are non-white people getting smarter? Or are they just waking up at last?

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It’s not easy being an editor. Sometimes, for example, an author might submit a three-page biography describing himself as “a renowned thought-leader and writer” and “one of the most creative analysts, visionaries, and political strategists of his generation.” A good editor might politely insist the author tone it down a bit to avoid coming across as a self-important psychopath. Matthew Dowd’s editor evidently did not think it was worth the hassle.

Feel the burn….

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Ryan Guillen had been a Democratic member of the Texas legislature, representing a sprawling district south of San Antonio, for nearly two decades. This week he jumped ship for the Republican Party, blaming Democrats for leaving him, not the other way around.

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After Bill Gates told a UK think tank earlier this month that the Covid-19 vaccine ‘helps you with your health, but only slightly reduces transmission,” a flood of people pointed out that the billionaire vaccine proponent had essentially said the quiet part out loud – admitting that the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines ‘don’t work well’ and was ‘an explicit acknowledgement that the mRNA and rAdV vaccines for COVID are not working well.’

“We didn’t have vaccines that block transmission. We got vaccines that help you with your health, but they only slightly reduce the transmission. So, we need a new way of doing the vaccines,” is the exact quote.

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“We have very rigorous navigation safety procedures and they fell short of what our standard was,” said Houston, referring to the boat’s leadership triad. The incident occurred Oct. 2, and roughly a month later the service announced the commanding officer, executive officer and chief of the boat were all relieved of command.

“That safety investigation board is not complete yet. But we know enough right now and as soon as this event happened, we shared it with the operational force, so they knew what happened,” Houston said, speaking at the Naval Submarine League symposium today.

Steve Sailer.

A widespread view is that, yeah, sure, human genetic evolution used to be important, but then we invented culture maybe 10,000 years ago when we invented agriculture, and since then it’s been all cultural evolution. C0chran and Harpending argued instead in the Ten Thousand Year Explosion that recent rapid cultural evolution brought about moreselection pressure for genetic evolution. Today’s new paper is in line with their view.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

On the other hand, what else have you got?

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Major endorsements from former president Barack Obama and Rep. Jim Clyburn (D., S.C.) failed to deliver Democrats a mayoral victory in Columbia, S.C., a city the party has controlled for decades.

Daniel Rickenmann, a Republican businessman, on Tuesday defeated Democratic attorney Tameika Isaac Devine by 4 points to become Columbia’s next mayor. A slew of prominent national Democrats, including Obama, Clyburn, and Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison, backed Devine in the race.

‘Tameika’? No need to ask how she ‘identifies’.

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Mice get all of the good stuff.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do. Not sure that I’d want to, considering.

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Funny how that works.

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The primary difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats never forget which side they’re on.

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A Russian test of a direct ascent anti-satellite weapon has created a field of around 1,500 pieces of space debris, putting global systems and even the International Space Station at risk, the US government confirmed Monday afternoon.

For hours Monday, the Pentagon was careful not to confirm anything as rumors swirled — and expert sleuths poured over data — about Russia having knowingly created a new debris field by destroying on of its satellites. One military source told Breaking Defense it “looks like” the debris was caused by a ground-launched missile; that same source claimed around 1,500 pieces of debris have now been thrown wildly into orbit.

That debris figure, as well as Russia’s role in the situation, was officially confirmed by State Department spokesman Ned Price, who said “Russia’s dangerous and irresponsible behavior jeopardizes the long term sustainability of our space and clearly demonstrates that Russia’s claims of opposing the weapons and weaponization of space are disingenuous and hypocritical.”

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

The New York Times has now published its fourth story on the investigation of James O’Keefe and Project Vertitas in connection with their possession of the diary of Ashley Biden. The otherwise questionable authenticity of the diary can be inferred from the involvement of the FBI. It has somehow become a federal case in the Age of Biden.

Today’s story is “Project Veritas Tells Judge It Was Assured Biden Diary Was Legally Obtained.” Subhead: “But a search warrant in the case suggests the Justice Department believes the diary kept by the president’s daughter Ashley Biden was stolen.” The story is by Times reporters Michael Schmidt and Adam Goldman with the assistance of researchers Susan C. Beachy and Matthew Cullen. That amounts to four cooks in the kitchen to produce what turns out to be thin gruel.

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People in California, take note.

(Ponder a 1400 square-foot house that looks like a sawed-off Quonset hut but costs $350,000.)

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No clue as to how much they’ll cost. I suspect it won’t be cheap.

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I rather suspect that it will be a wholly-electric car, which is a deal breaker for me. (Unless they crack the fusion power plant problem.)

Check it out.

If you’ve got wind, you’ve got power.

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My friend who reads the New York Times alerted me to this article about rural America’s continued movement away from the Democratic party. I’m glad he did. The article is well worth reading.

The most noteworthy thing about the Times’ piece is the numbers it presents from Virginia:

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The company’s move comes as other gun makers have been ditching the northeast amid growing hostility there and moving to more politically welcoming states.

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A northern California town has declared itself a “constitutional republic” in response to Covid-19 health restrictions imposed by the governor, in the latest sign of strife between the state’s government and its rural and conservative regions.

The city council in Oroville, located at the base of the Sierra Nevada foothills about 90 miles from the capital of Sacramento, adopted a resolution this week stating it would oppose state and federal orders it deems to be government overreach.

Oroville leaders said the designation was a way of affirming the city’s values and pushing back against state rules it doesn’t agree with, although a legal expert said the designation was merely a gesture and did not grant the city any new authority.

And the sheep push back.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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Imagine being able to design a new organism as easily as you can design a new integrated circuit. That’s the ultimate vision behind the computer-aided design (CAD) program being developed by the GP-write consortium.

“We’re taking the same things we’d do for design automation in electronics, and applying them to biology,” says Doug Densmore, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boston University. One of Densmore’s startups, Lattice Automation, is leading the effort to develop the CAD. He says the first version will be available by the end of the year.

One of Densmore’s hopes for the project is that it will help computer scientists see a way to get involved in genetics and biology. “There are some really brilliant computer scientists out there, who might say, ‘I don’t get what this is doing biologically, but I like the coding,’” he notes.

Be the first on your block….

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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Metafabric is the latest development in a broader emerging field of textiles for personal heat management, clothing that can heat or cool the wearer. Researchers hope that these textiles will not only enhance personal comfort, but reduce injury and death from extreme heat. They might even help slow climate change by reducing the need for air-conditioning and heating, which accounts for about 10 percent of global electricity consumption.

Paul Mirengoff from Power Line.

Loudoun County, Virginia seems to have become the epicenter of the school policy battle within our culture wars. Events from that county are also playing a role in the upcoming Virginia gubernatorial election — at least I hope they will. This post is about two developments from Loudoun County that have been reported elsewhere, but may have escaped widespread notice.

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Some people are born with hearing loss, while others acquire it with age, infections or long-term noise exposures. In many instances, the tiny hairs in the inner ear’s cochlea that allow the brain to recognize electrical pulses as sound are damaged. As a step toward an advanced artificial cochlea, researchers in ACS Nano report a conductive membrane, which translated sound waves into matching electrical signals when implanted inside a model ear, without requiring external power.

 

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A team of engineers working on Twitter’s own ML Ethics, Transparency and Accountability (META) unit scraped millions of tweets of thousands of elected officials from seven different countries: US, Japan, UK, Canada, Germany, Spain, and France. They tracked how likely these posts made between 1 April 2020 and 15 August 2020 were to be placed in a higher rank in users’ personal Twitter feeds using Twitter’s algorithms.

Tweets posted by politicians from right-wing parties were amplified more than those from left-wing parties in all countries except Germany. The effect was strongest for Canadian and British politics. For example, content from UK Labour MPs was amplified 112 per cent as opposed to the 176 per cent amplification of Conservative MPs’ content; and Canada’s Liberal party politicos were amplified 43 per cent versus 167 per cent for the Canadian Conservative party.

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What happens is that his negatively charged material absorbs hydrogen. When light passes through it, the polarity of the bonds changes to positive, and the hydrogen is released. That’s a much better process than compressing hydrogen to 5,000 psi up to 10,000 psi, as today’s fuel cells need. For example, the Toyota Mirai holds 5.5 kg of hydrogen at that pressure.

This material Plasma Kinetics developed can be used as a disc or as a film that is just one-tenth of a thickness of a human hair. At first, the discs helped the company to explain the technology: hydrogen would be released when the laser hit it as a compact disc would “release music” when the laser reader hit it. However, the nano graphite film proved to be a better means to deal with hydrogen storage.

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Western Maryland state lawmakers have sent letters to officials in West Virginia, asking them to “consider adding us as constituent counties to the State of West Virginia.”

“We believe this arrangement may be mutually beneficial for both states and for our local constituencies,” the lawmakers wrote in the letters, which were sent earlier this month and released publicly on Thursday. The letter was signed by five Republican lawmakers who represent Maryland’s three westernmost counties: Garrett, Allegany and Washington.

It wasn’t immediately clear exactly what legal steps would need to be accomplished in order to make such a switch, but there would likely be many hurdles ahead.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Ponder the fact that nobody is trying to develop meat that tastes like plants.

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A new optical switch is, at 1 trillion operations per second, between 100 and 1,000 times faster than today’s leading commercial electronic transistors, research that may one day help lead to a new generation of computers based on light instead of electricity, say scientists in Russia and at IBM.

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Leptin is a hormone produced by fat cells that carries out a range of functions in the body, chief among them being the regulation of appetite. It does by communicating with the brain region called the hypothalamus to let the person know they’ve had enough to eat, but this relationship can break down in people with obesity.

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California company Radiant has secured funding to develop a compact, portable, “low-cost” one-megawatt nuclear micro-reactor that fits in a shipping container, powers about 1,000 homes and uses a helium coolant instead of water.

Cue Eco-Nazi lawsuits.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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A new book titled “Antikythera Mechanism: The Story Behind the Genius of the Greek Computer and Its Demise” by Greek historian and ecopolitical theorist Evaggelos Vallianatos seeks to unravel the mystery of the world’s first computer.

I’m not sure I’m willing to waste money on a book by an ‘ecopolitical theorist’. I’ll wait for an actual scientist.

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Like us, chefs only have so much energy and working memory at their disposal. Chefs use mise-en-place – a philosophy and mindset embodied in a set of practical techniques – as an “external brain.” It gives them a way to externalize their thinking into their environment and automate the repetitive parts of cooking so they can focus completely on the creative parts.

…

In this article, I’ll summarize what I believe to be the most important lessons we can immediately put to use in knowledge-intensive work today.

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In the new study, published Oct. 14 in the journal Science, researchers uncovered a previously unknown repair mechanism that kicks in after a run on the treadmill. Striking images show how, shortly after the exercise concludes, nuclei scuttle toward tears in the muscle fibers and issue commands for new proteins to be built, in order to seal the wounds. That same process likely unfolds in your own cells in the hours after you return home from the gym.

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While other water generators based on similar technology require high ambient humidity and low temperatures to function effectively, Veiga’s machines work in temperatures of up to 40 Celsius (104F) and can handle humidity of between 10% and 15%.

A small machine can produce 50-75 litres a day, and be easily carried on a trolley, but bigger versions can produce up to 5,000 litres a day.

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Created by Brazilian developer Alan Pégoli, ‘Laundry Lens’ launched a year ago and it’s really simple to use. Just point your camera to the tag on the clothes you want to wash and it will say whether you should take some caution when using the washing machine, iron, or drying it clean.

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If you purchase a Framework Laptop, you’re buying both a capable computer right now and a promise of something remarkable in the future. Cracking the Framework Laptop open for the first time, you’ll find a well-organized and well-labeled set of parts, every one replaceable. If the promise works out, you have an heirloom laptop that’s repairable and upgradable for a decade. If Framework—the company making the Framework Laptop—fails, you might replace it in a few years, as you would any other laptop.

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The quick fix of coal gasification and CO2 storage is all but dead. Projects will continue, and the subsidies will flow if Biden gets his way. But it is greenwashing and greenwasting.

The shiny star to be, Plant Ratcliffe, better known as the Kemper Project, a $6.7 billion integrated gasification power plant, was an experimental boondoggle from the start (mid-2010).

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By uprooting carbon trapped in soil, wild pigs are releasing around 4.9 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide annually across the globe, the equivalent of 1.1 million cars.

An international team led by researchers from The University of Queensland and The University of Canterbury have used predictive population models, coupled with advanced mapping techniques to pinpoint the climate damage wild pigs are causing across five continents.

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Dozens of viruses don’t use the same four nucleotide bases found in all other life. New work shows how this is possible—and perhaps more common than we think.

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They’d be fools not to.

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Able to leap tall metaphors with a single bound….