Informative headline, for those not wanting to figure out the wsj paywall:
>Faced with an influx of visitors, India's picturesque village of Jibhi has shut down the local liquor store and tried to restrict loud music, smoking and barbecues
Yes, the assisting crane is a mobile crane where the boom pivots up and down about the base. Some have booms that need to be disassembled piece-by-piece, so you just pivot it down until the top is resting on a flatbed trailer, then unbolt it.
These mobile cranes can reach just as high as tower cranes, but can't carry as much, can't reach out over the tops of buildings, and take up more room on the ground. Hence the need for tower cranes.
Another interesting advatange of tower cranes is that they can grow/shrink themselves by using a special jig; that's how they're able to negotiate 200 story skyscrapers. That jigs tends to be too convulted to use for smaller projects, in which case they use a mobile crane as seen here.
Hydro doesn't need pumping to provide load balancing. Just build more turbines [1] than you need for average load - then you can flow extra water overnight and less water during the day while keeping the average the same. This is then equal to the superposition of a traditional and PSH dam, but all in one footprint.
[1] Yes, extra turbines are expensive. But you'd need to build them anyways for a PSH facility.
The bridge looks to be precast concrete box-girders (hollow rectangular beams with plenty of steel reinforcement around the edges). The 'gravel' is the asphalt roadway (often this will be cast-in-place concrete) that's poured on top of the precast girders. The purpose of pouring the asphalt/concrete roadway on top is as a sacrificial wear element to prevent the structural beams being worn down by traffic.
Japan and California are pretty comparable in terms of science and engineering for earthquake resistance. There are some differences on the public policy side, which influence how the engineering requirements are implemented, but Japanese buildings are not intrinsically safer. Note that the 1994 Northridge (Calif.) and 1995 Kobe (Japan) earthquakes were about the same side - the Japanese quake was ~10x as costly and ~20x as deadly (mostly due to population density around the epicenters).
Isn't there is a slight difference - the maximum expected Japanese earthquake (9.0) magnitude is much more powerful than the maximum expected California earthquake along the Calaveras/San Andreas (8.0)? Cascadia looks to be another 9.0 fault line but the epicenter would be closer to Seattle/Portland than California.
Building standards were first implemented in Japan in 1952 and were revised in 1981 and 2000. Apologies for not having an English source, but of the people who were killed because of the house or building that they lived in, 98% were living in a building/house that did not meet the standards of the 1981 revision to the building codes.
Yeah. While I don’t support NIMBYism, YIMBY-types seems to love to use Japan as their counterexample, without understanding that Japanese homes tend to be built somewhat dangerously and without regard to earthquake safety.
Current building codes are intended to design to a 10% probability of collapse in the "Maximum Considered Earthquake", which is roughly a 2475-year event. The 2475-year event has a 2% chance of occurring during the (assumed 50 year) lifetime of a building.
Nah, the building is (mostly) just as good at the end of that time. It's just a convenience to make the probabilities easier to conceptualize. If we designed buildings such that the design earthquake had a 5e-6 daily chance of occurring, we'd just be confused.
If there is a 10% chance of collapse every 2475 years, that is ~1.1/10million per day chance, or 0.11 micromorts. That assumes 100% death during a collapse, and that the person spends all day in one of these buildings.
0.11 micromorts/day is very low, which makes the design criteria reasonable. Of course, I suspect our ability to predict infrequent events with any degree of accuracy is unlikely.
> 7% of Scott Kelly's DNA was changed due to his year in space
> Humans and chimps share 96% of the same DNA
Seeing as how Scott Kelly is not severely mutated (or dead, as the article says), this should be an indication that something is wrong with the reporting.
I heard about this on NPR yesterday afternoon. In their interview, this bit of misinformation was specifically called out:
> Now, there's been a little bit of misinformation about this study. Scott is still Mark Kelly's identical twin. And he did not have 7 percent of his genes altered by space travel.
Sure. But the headline leads the reader in a different direction despite "change" not meaning what people think it means: "NASA Study Finds Astronaut's Genes Changed While In Space"
Yes. I haven't actually read any of the articles with that 7% headline as it seemed to me that they likely got something completely wrong - I've seen plenty of videos/photos of Scott Kelly since he got back to Earth and he was clearly not horrifically deformed or unhealthy in any way (nor has anyone who's spent significant time on the ISS come back that way).
I think this idea that businesses are only allowed to have one revenue stream seems a bit strange. Other businesses that are supported by payments and ads include: magazines, cable TV, movie theaters, newspapers, public transit, air travel, and amusement parks. If Hulu thought that people would pay twice as much for ad-free content, then I'm sure they'd offer it.
They do offer it and I pay it but it's thankfully not twice as much. I'd probably still pay it because they have great content. Though I watch a half hour a day on average and certainly have no need of it.
>If Mr. Musk were somehow to increase the value of Tesla to $650 billion — a figure many experts would contend is laughably impossible and would make Tesla one of the five largest companies in the United States, based on current valuations — his stock award could be worth as much as $55 billion
Except that as the article says, he already owns 20% of Tesla, so his current shares would rise in value by $110B. He could fail to meet any of performance targets and still be pulling in a billion dollars a year in capital gains.
>Faced with an influx of visitors, India's picturesque village of Jibhi has shut down the local liquor store and tried to restrict loud music, smoking and barbecues