I would like to say, having lived in villages very similar to these in Transilvania, Romanian farm houses absolutely have internet, smart phones and internet.
WOW. Thanks. The images I saw showed the houses as nearly all log cabins where the logs were not painted, and I didn't see anything that looked like electric power lines. Can get Internet from just cell phones although of course need a source of electric power to charge the smartphones.
Maybe those areas of Europe are catching up, in the technology that is worth having, with England, the US, etc. I wish them well and hope so.
This looks more like the traditional poor peasant's houses (photos from 1933) and they're made of mud bricks (not sure what the english term actually is) with some wood reinforcement in the walls.
Store the silage in silos or on the ground covered with plastic.
Scale is nicely large: In total for the one farm, to store on the ground, cover an area maybe the size of a football field, 100 yards by 40 yards, maybe 10 feet deep.
All of that is in productivity per person way above what I saw as a child or young adult in visits to US farms.
I just followed the URL given in this thread and commented on what I saw in LOTS, dozens, of pictures and compared with some of what I know about how the US has solved the problem of gathering and safely storing summer hay for winter animal feed.
In the URLs I followed, nearly all the houses I saw were what in the US are called log cabins and had old logs and no paint.
I didn't see any "mud bricks".
From what I saw, there was no sign of electric power. Thus there would be no "land line" telephones either; from that I concluded no "telephones" -- I didn't think of the old satellite phones, cell phones, or the new versions of phone and internet via constellations of satellites.
Maybe everything I saw was just for tourists. Okay. I saw a LOT of pictures; maybe they all were for show.
In that case, John Deere should open some branch offices (if they haven't already) and sell some of their terrific, highly computer controlled, automated farm equipment, in particular for converting hay fields into bails of hay. Or for planting, growing, and harvesting wheat, corn, or soy beans.
But John Deere can change the culture of a farming community: Their equipment can be highly productive but also highly expensive. The pair can mean that a father and his two sons can run a farm of 5000+ acres. E.g., my father in law's farm was just 88 acres. He raised a family on that (40,000 chickens per batch) and got all three of his children through college. And as electric power came along, he led in the effort and became the head of the local electric utility and lobbied in Washington, DC for the relevant legislation (REMC -- rural electric membership cooperative). He did well: One of his daughters was Valedictorian in high school and Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, NSF Fellow in college, and high end research university Ph.D. One of his grand daughters was Valedictorian in high school, Phi Beta Kappa in college, got her law degree at Harvard, started as a lawyer at the high end New York City law firm Cravath-Swaine, got an MD, and now is practicing medicine.
But the 88 acres doesn't work very well now; what he did was tough; it would tougher now. Due to progress in productivity such as from John-Deere, there has been massive consolidation of those little farms into farms of a few thousand acres operated by remarkably few people, for growing wheat, corn, soy beans, or grazing cattle for milk or meat.
So, maybe Romania is doing the same, the hay stacks put together by hand with wooden tools are just for the tourists, and John Deere is getting a lot of business. Good for Romania.
The idea is interesting and the website is designed very nicely, but the subjects themselves are extremely lacking. For example the "level 22" Simple Harmonic wave is simply three graphs of a sine function with no other explanation. What is there to learn from that?
This is something I've noticed as well. Sometimes ingredient lists are a mile long. Less so here in Europe than what I've seen in America, but nevertheless it is shockingly less natural. I have always though that it makes more sense to just create vegan foods from what you have rather than recreating the things you are choosing not to eat.
Warning though, I am not a part of the vegan club, so it is all just opinion.
To some extent, it's an attempt to partake in the wider food culture while still following stricter ethical guidelines than those food cultures developed in.
Most of the vegans I know can nutrition themselves capably using non-imitation food, but still want to be able to have a pizza on occasion.
As much as some in the hackerverse like to pretend it doesn't, eating is both an emotional and an expressive experience for some people. Expecting everyone to be a rational actor in the food world is approximately as reasonable as expecting them to be rational actors in the dating world.
I'm vegan but I do agree. However, myself and other vegans I know do only use these alternatives on occasion. They're definitely not a part of our daily diet. I probably have vegan cheese once a month at most.
Being vegan is a big change, and I ate meat for 29 years, so sometimes my body wants something non-vegan and it's nice to know alternatives exist.
I never really went vegan to be 'more' healthy anyway, so I eat similar to how I did before.
The ingredient list of an apple is also miles long if you are forced to write it out, you just aren't.
There are a million different things "processing" can mean. It can be as innocuous as just chopping something up, or complicated like pickling. Not all of it is bad.
But, as an example, the Impossible Burger notably has more fat and significantly more salt than its meat-based brethren. Sure, it may be purchased due to a perceived variety of other benefits (sustainability, animal rights, etc) totally unrelated to the healthiness of the product, but it's objectively not a healthier option.
The Impossible Burger has about 12% fat which is quite lean. As far as I understand, the meat in most burgers is around 20% fat. Adding things like breadcrumbs, eggs or onions to the patties will of course change the amount.
> The Impossible Burger has about 12% fat which is quite lean. As far as I understand, the meat in most burgers is around 20% fat.
Depends on the beef. I looked the numbers up before I commented, and a simple beef burger made with lean ground beef weighs in at 11% fat, slightly less than the Impossible version (though yup, I admit, basically equivalent, which is what I should've said).
Not sure what you mean - distance directly away from an observer correlates with time (things further away look younger due to the finite speed of light), but in general it's just a measure of distance. It's right there in the units - light (speed) years are m/s * s; that is, metres. I'm not aware that astronomers use ly as a unit of time, unless that's changed since I studied it for my undergrad, although that was admittedly some time ago.
I don't think it is so simple. As a rule of thumb, sure.
But space is supposed to have been expanding while the light was in transit, so 13 Gy-old light has travelled way more than 13G light-years, and the object that emitted it is "now" dizzyingly farther away even than that. (Scare quotes, because simultaneity is meaningless at such a distance; and it must be outside our light-cone, so can't really meaningfully be said to exist in our universe anymore.)
I am not clear at all on how light experiences expansion of space, as that seems to require time, and light travelling in vacuum doesn't experience time.
Light emitted only a billion years ago has traveled only a little more than a billion light years. But what's a few million light-years, extra, among friends?
Well you're touching on some deep and difficult stuff here. There are many others who understand and can explain all this better than I, but I'll do my best to comment usefully, however before I do - none of what you said here has any bearing on the original question of whether 'light years' are units of time. They're not. Anyway, all this stuff is fascinating, so here goes:
> But space is supposed to have been expanding while the light was in transit, so 13 Gy-old light has travelled way more than 13G light-years, and the object that emitted it is "now" dizzyingly farther away even than that. (Scare quotes, because simultaneity is meaningless at such a distance; and it must be outside our light-cone, so can't really meaningfully be said to exist in our universe anymore.)
Close but not exactly - the point where the light was emitted is now 13G light years away, because by definition, a light year is the distance light travels in a year. The object emitting that light, however, was accelerating away from us and "now", that is, following the expansion that occurred during the time the light was in transit, is more like 42G light years away. When the light was emitted, the object in question was much closer than that. The expansion of space has changed the definition of a metre and therefore effectively moved us and the object apart. A (crappy) visualisation of an object A emitting a photon P at point X towards an observer B (first, later, and now are of course in implied scare quotes):
first: AXP-B
later: A----X-P--B
now: A-----------X-------PB
The distance XB is the distance P has travelled in total, 13G light years in our earlier example.
> I am not clear at all on how light experiences expansion of space, as that seems to require time, and light travelling in vacuum doesn't experience time.
This is a great question and took some research for me to get close to being able to answer, but the best I can do here is to link some related discussions [0][1][2], and summarise that photons don't experience anything because they have no frame of reference, so it's meaningless to ask whether or not or how they experience time, or indeed anything else. Photons always move at C in every frame of reference (remember there is no such thing as an absolute velocity for an observer, it's always relative to a reference frame), so there can be no frame of reference comoving with a photon in which time can be measured (and indeed, in every reference frame, time appears to move at the normal rate - time dilation only occurs between two frames). What we see on Earth is that a photon is "stretched" by the expansion of space and therefore red shifted - and as I guess you know, that's a key marker astronomers use to calculate the distance a photon has travelled - more red shift means more distance. As very distant objects are accelerated out of our light cone, they are red-shifted so far that they eventually disappear - in fact, far far into the future, the same will be true of everything in the universe, meaning that any being looking up hundreds of billions of years from now will see no galaxies outside their own.
> Light emitted only a billion years ago has traveled only a little more than a billion light years. But what's a few million light-years, extra, among friends?
As explained above, not so. Light travels at one light year per year. Expanding space is changing the meaning of distance but not the speed of light.
Suffice to say, then, light emitted a billion years ago has travelled substantially farther than a billion x 9.46e12 km, according exactly to how much the bit of universe it traversed expanded on the way.
No, the other way around - the distance light would have travelled if the universe had stopped expanding at the time it was emitted would have been a lot less than a billion light years. The light ended up travelling a billion light years because of the expansion.
Try a thought experiment. You're driving at 60mph between two towns on a straight road that's 10 miles long when you set off but is growing in the direction of travel. You arrive an hour later - how far have you travelled?
You contradict yourself. In that billion years, either the light travelled (1) a distance we call "a billion light years (a measure adjusted to account for expansion of space during transit)", or (2) it travelled "more than a billion light years (a measure that neglects expanding space)". In either case, substantially greater than 9.46e24 meters.
If the road grew while I was on it, then it would take longer than an hour to get there. If it took an hour to get there anyway, I went faster than 60 mph. If I went 60 mph for an hour and got there, then the road did not grow.
You can fool with "light years" as a unit all you like ("instantaneously 9.46e12 m, but more as travel time increases"), but you don't get to fool with meters. If no numbers change, expansion is meaningless, the only thing that changes is light wavelengths. Then you are just talking about tired light.
> If the road grew while I was on it, then it would take longer than an hour to get there. If it took an hour to get there anyway, I went faster than 60 mph. If I went 60 mph for an hour and got there, then the road did not grow.
I'll start with this because it's the easy one and I think you've maybe just misread. The road is 10 miles at the outset. Your speed is 60mph. If the road doesn't expand, the journey would take 10 minutes. Instead the journey takes an hour - 60mph for one hour is 60 miles. So in total you've travelled 60 miles. To switch back to our 'light travelling through space' discussion, by analogy - light travels at C; if light travels for 1 billion years, it travels a distance of C * 1 billion == 1 billion light years. When it set out on its journey towards us, the distance between there and here was less. Therefore it has travelled 1 billion light years to reach us only because space was expanding. It hasn't travelled more than that, it can't - the speed of light is a constant in every reference frame. X years at light speed is necessarily X light years.
> You contradict yourself. In that billion years, either the light travelled (1) a distance we call "a billion light years (a measure adjusted to account for expansion of space during transit)", or (2) it travelled "more than a billion light years (a measure that neglects expanding space)". In either case, substantially greater than 9.46e24 meters.
(note that I think you mean 9.46e21 meters, since conventionally, 1 billion is 1e9; I'll run with that figure for consistency).
For the record, option 1) is what I'm saying. However, one billion light years is 9.46e21 meters, so I'm totally stumped as to what you mean when you say "In either case, substantially greater than 9.46e2[1] meters". Those are the same thing. What am I missing? Light travels one billion light years, 9.46e21 metres, in one billion years. That's it. Where am I misunderstanding you or contradicting myself? I'm honestly confused.
You're both right and talking past each other. The light moved between two points that if measured at the start was fewer light-years apart than the time it took to cross the gap, or a greater number of light-years if measured now.
I think the most correct and relevant thing to say is that the light moved 1 light-year per year and covered exactly the specified distance, if you integrate the distance over the trajectory of the light as it moved across the universe. Inflation simply changes the geometry of the space before (or after) the light passes through.
> I think the most correct and relevant thing to say is that the light moved 1 light-year per year and covered exactly the specified distance, if you integrate the distance over the trajectory of the light as it moved across the universe.
Yes, so light travels X light years in X years, not substantially more than that which is how I read (or misread) the parent comment. Language is fun I guess.
While astronomers are obviously very much aware that light-years is a measure of distance, "seeing further away" is a stand-in for "seeing further back in time." New telescopes are rated by how much further away they can resolve in terms of light-years because that is a direct translation into how close to the Big Bang they can resolve.
What I'm saying is that it is extremely useful that being able to resolve objects 13.2 billion light-years away means being able to see back 13.2 billion years in time. The units are 1:1 convertible, and astronomers therefore frequently interchange them in casual conversation.
I guess "physics based approach" could mean a few things (for context, my background is physics, not CS), but quantum chemistry [1,2] definitely stands in a very physics-y area while involving QC very directly. There is also QC for solid state physics, for more or less the same reasons you'd use QC for chemistry (scaling problems with the classical solutions).
On the other hand, quantum control (physically manipulating your quantum computer) has a lot of physics in it, but also crosses into EE. Likewise, looking into physical systems that can behave as a quantum computer is physics and EE. However I'm very much unfamiliar with that part, so I can't say anything there.
I've had this done with some custom birkenstocks before. They heat molded the cork insoles to fit my feet. They were very comfortable and well worth the money and time saved from not having to break them in.
