Tell me something I don't know

I didn't think I'd be learning about the birds and the bees from a pedal building forum, but here we are.
 
How about this:

An unloaded induction AC motor will draw significantly less current than the same motor under load. Basically...if you aren't driving anything with the motor, thus the motor is free spinning on its own, your amps drop like a rock.

An unloaded constant-torque electronically commutated motor (ECM) will draw significantly MORE current than the same motor under rated load.

I say constant torque, because constant speed motors do not suffer from this same affliction.

What does that mean? If you have a newer big efficiency AC system in your residence, and you aren't changing your filter, your electrical bill will steadily rise until your motor smokes. That clogged filter will make the fan motor work harder and harder until it clonks out.

If you have an older system with a phase split capacitor motor and you dont change your filter, your fan motor will start to draw less and less but your airflow will fall off a cliff. With less air volume passing over the coil you increase the likelihood that liquid refrigerant will pass unevaporated through the evaporator and make it's way back to the compressor, causing oil dilution and migration from the crankcase, increased friction on the now less than optimally lubricated compressor bearings, and eventual bearing failure.

So, change your filters, folks.
 
OK: more fun facts.

Methamphetamine is classified as a schedule II drug in the United States. That means that it is considered a drug with a high potential for abuse WITH a legitimate medical use, putting it in the same category as Valium, Adderall, and Vicodin. It is sold in the US under the name Desoxyn.

The idea that Fentanyl can cause an opiate-naive individual to overdose simply through skin absorption from touching the drug is a myth, an urban legend. This didn't stop a socal police dept from publicizing a video of a rookie falling over while standing a few feet away from a suspected baggie of the drug as a PSA about the dangers of Fentanyl recently, and it was featured on multiple local TV news channels.

The video shows what appears to be a sincere reaction in the moment, but the evidence against an "overdose" being the cause of the officer's collapse is substantial. Aside from there absolute impossibility of overdose occuring from simple proximity, the video shows officers treating their collapsed comrade with narcan, or intranasally applied naloxone.

Naloxone is an opioid antagonist. It's a powerful antidote that shoves ANYTHING that is currently bound to an opioid receptor in the brain off that receptor, and forms a blockade preventing ANYTHING ELSE from binding to that receptor. To watch someone get dosed with it that is currently under the influence of an opioid will send them immediately into withdrawals, and the effect is not unlike that scene with the adrenaline syringe in Pulp Fiction.

In the video that was released, the collapsed officer did not respond in any way to the application of Narcan.

Far be it from me to say that I have the absolute truth...but I have a theory that I believe to be far more likely.

The officer was not overdosing, he was having a panic attack. And his panic attack was not unjustified: this myth about the dangers of Fentanyl is terrifying...and pervasive in the cultural zeitgeist. He likely thought his own life was in significant danger, and mistook the symptoms of a panic attack for that of an overdose. It's a self-sealing ouroborus...the fear gives itself to panic, and the symptoms of that panic feed the panic as they are seen as evidence of the danger.

Fentanyl is indeed a dangerous drug, but it is dangerous enough on its own without adding this mythical superpower to it's reputation. Myths can have real world consequences...and untruths can endlessly reinforce themselves in our minds.

Humans are weird.
 
MORE!

The Dunning-Kreuger Effect is one of my favorite things to talk about. Ever since I heard about it, I see it EVERYWHERE. Including in myself

The idea is that confidence has an inversely correlated relationship to competence. That is to say: when an individual is uninformed, they tend to GREATLY underestimate the difficulty of a task...as they gain experience they typically start more accurately aligning their expectations with reality.

Yeah...inexperienced people are typically more outwardly confident than folks who have allowed experience to temper their expectations.

HUH. THAT EXPLAINS A LOT.
 
MORE!

The Dunning-Kreuger Effect is one of my favorite things to talk about. Ever since I heard about it, I see it EVERYWHERE. Including in myself

The idea is that confidence has an inversely correlated relationship to competence. That is to say: when an individual is uninformed, they tend to GREATLY underestimate the difficulty of a task...as they gain experience they typically start more accurately aligning their expectations with reality.

Yeah...inexperienced people are typically more outwardly confident than folks who have allowed experience to temper their expectations.

HUH. THAT EXPLAINS A LOT.
Love this one but we need a chart too
1.-Dunning-Kruger.png
 
I really love space and have been interested in science most of my life, but I never had the aptitude/drive/whatever to pursue it in school. I was an early adopter of Discovery, TLC, and the History channel, though, before they all became reality tv channels, and that's about the level I'm capable of really understanding.

One of the most interesting thought experiments that I love thinking about is the Fermi Paradox: the idea that given the statistical odds of Earth-like planets (class M planets for any other Star Trek nerds) existing in our solar system it is unusual that we wouldn't not see any evidence of them anywhere. The Fermi Paradox brings up some possible reasons for this, most of which are pretty terrifying.

My favorite write-up on it is from Wait, But Why if you want to check it out: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html
 
I really love space and have been interested in science most of my life, but I never had the aptitude/drive/whatever to pursue it in school. I was an early adopter of Discovery, TLC, and the History channel, though, before they all became reality tv channels, and that's about the level I'm capable of really understanding.

One of the most interesting thought experiments that I love thinking about is the Fermi Paradox: the idea that given the statistical odds of Earth-like planets (class M planets for any other Star Trek nerds) existing in our solar system it is unusual that we wouldn't not see any evidence of them anywhere. The Fermi Paradox brings up some possible reasons for this, most of which are pretty terrifying.

My favorite write-up on it is from Wait, But Why if you want to check it out: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html
I feel like Idiocracy adequately settles the Fermi paradox. Any advancing civilization reaches this great filter, which we starting to hit right about now.
 
Fentanyl is indeed a dangerous drug, but it is dangerous enough on its own without adding this mythical superpower to it's reputation. Myths can have real world consequences...and untruths can endlessly reinforce themselves in our minds.

Humans are weird.

Indeed.
 
I feel like Idiocracy adequately settles the Fermi paradox. Any advancing civilization reaches this great filter, which we starting to hit right about now.

Strong disagree, simply because I have a good deal of trouble with applying Idiocracy to, eh, the real world.

Intelligence is a nebulous idea, difficult to measure, which changes over time and is strongly impacted by an individual's environment and conditions during childhood development.

Idiocracy, while a fine middle-brow flick, gets most of it's ideas from *eugenics*, which is a throughout debunked and disproven area of study that fell out of favor sound WWII, for reasons that will become obvious:

The idea behind eugenics is that some individuals are inherently superior to others in moral character, intelligence, and value to society, and that these traits are passed down *through genetics*. Meaning, you inherit your moral character, intelligence, and value to society from your parents.

No doubt there is a genetic component to intelligence, but it's *completely* invisible to modern day study of the human genome, and likely has SIGNIFICANT presence in what is known as *epigenetics*. That is: traits that are only expressed when certain environmental conditions are met. It's complicated. I genuinely don't know, the people who study this don't know, and generally the individuals that claim to know are looking to sell us something.

Eugenics was used for decades, along with other quack studies like phrenology, to justify all kinds of tragedies, both individual (forced sterilization of people judged to be "of poor moral stock) and widespread (the Holocaust).

Its fine fodder for a "what it?" movie, but it has a history thay carries a BIG OL' red flag when it comes to using it as a template for how human beings and the world operates.

*Steps off soapbox, thanks for listening to my lil speech*
 
Strong disagree, simply because I have a good deal of trouble with applying Idiocracy to, eh, the real world.

Intelligence is a nebulous idea, difficult to measure, which changes over time and is strongly impacted by an individual's environment and conditions during childhood development.

Idiocracy, while a fine middle-brow flick, gets most of it's ideas from *eugenics*, which is a throughout debunked and disproven area of study that fell out of favor sound WWII, for reasons that will become obvious:

The idea behind eugenics is that some individuals are inherently superior to others in moral character, intelligence, and value to society, and that these traits are passed down *through genetics*. Meaning, you inherit your moral character, intelligence, and value to society from your parents.

No doubt there is a genetic component to intelligence, but it's *completely* invisible to modern day study of the human genome, and likely has SIGNIFICANT presence in what is known as *epigenetics*. That is: traits that are only expressed when certain environmental conditions are met. It's complicated. I genuinely don't know, the people who study this don't know, and generally the individuals that claim to know are looking to sell us something.

Eugenics was used for decades, along with other quack studies like phrenology, to justify all kinds of tragedies, both individual (forced sterilization of people judged to be "of poor moral stock) and widespread (the Holocaust).

Its fine fodder for a "what it?" movie, but it has a history thay carries a BIG OL' red flag when it comes to using it as a template for how human beings and the world operates.

*Steps off soapbox, thanks for listening to my lil speech*
I have a different take on the movie--although I haven't seen it in a while, so maybe it's not what I think it was.

But in my interpretation of this film is that it had nothing to do with human's intelligence or innate abilities, but rather that we as a society choose to be this way, despite our intelligence (making it even that much more tragic).

And to tie it to the real world, we know we are facing a climate crisis, but instead of solving it, the most-educated people on the planet are working on algorithms to better serve ads and self-driving cars, while the wealthiest people on the planet are focused on shooting penises into orbit.
 
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I see myself agreeing with both @Stickman393 and @spi on the whole idiocracy stuff. I totally reject the world view that there are “superior” people and that those who don’t fit certain criteria should be “corrected” in some way. And I do agree that as a society we often have ignored science, the common good, or even common sense for various, typically non rational, reasons. But I still hold hope that it’s just like a sine wave: peaks and troughs of progress happen all the time in various aspects of society (launching penises in space for fun is probably a trough, but there are some peaks to be happy about here and there…).
 
I have a different take on the movie--although I haven't seen it in a while, so maybe it's not what I think it was.

But in my interpretation of this film is that it had nothing to do with human's intelligence or innate abilities, but rather that we as a society choose to be this way, despite our intelligence (making it even that much more tragic).

And to tie it to the real world, we know we are facing a climate crisis, but instead of solving it, the most-educated people on the planet are working on algorithms to better serve ads and self-driving cars, while the wealthiest people on the planet are focused on shooting penises into orbit.
Word. I can jive with that! I always get a little bit twitchy when Idiocracy comes up: I mean, I enjoyed it, but HOLY SHIT I sure hope no one's basing any part of their their worldview on that opening scene.

Which...I mean...is a part of the problem from way I see it: Propaganda, groupthink, and tribalism. Much like how the Matrix and it's red pill has been co-opted by propagandists, Idiocracy has been as well. It's used by bad-faith actors in the media sphere as a cultural touchstone, supporting the idea that "you are the chosen few who can see the truth, the rest are just sheeple". With the added implication that these folk are both less human and a threat to your very way of life...

Honestly, self driving cars and penis rockets are easy because they're less controversial than something like, oh, say, climate change. And climate change is controversial because...well...propaganda.

I'll admit that I'm probably a little too twitchy with these things. A fun side hobby of mine is examining conspiracy theories...cause some are genuinely fun. Paul is dead? Love it. Aliens? Cool! Let's talk about those!

Ohh, so the Raptors from Jurassic Park are an actual alien species and their government is organized into a monarchy? Wild. I'm not buying it, but I appreciate the swing!

Hold up...reptiles are living beneath the Earth's surface and controlling people with pheromones? ehhhhhhh......

Wait...you have a stand-in alien race that have traditionally Jewish features and they're the bad guys in your cosmology?

...listen...man....I gotta go....

Its not as fun when you find out that a whacky conspiracy theory is really just propaganda in a Trojan Horse. But holllly shit a lot of them are.

At least we don't have to worry about that with Paul is dead. One hopes...
 
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