Starting a Fire Safely with Gasoline
"Some advice on how to safely start a fire with gasoline, reducing risk of injury to yourself and others."
Breadboard vs Perfboard
I used to build all my finalized projects with old fashioned perf board, solder and jumper wires. But solder is kind of a pain - it's much too easy to accidentally bridge the pins and sometimes it grows whiskers - and when you add components or sensors or make wiring mistakes - you end up doing a lot of soldering and desoldering. Bad solder joints can lead to endless frustration when you have noise in the signals.
Breadboard like this is inexpensive when buy direct from China, plus is so much more flexible and actually is pretty reliable and long lasting once the wires are seated. Changes are super easy - just unplug the wires, no desoldering required.
And it seems like with the latest in low cost microcontrollers (costing less than $5) - fewer external sensors are needed as more things are on board. For many projects I a just a handful of sensors and things like power transistors or relays and power supply is all that has to be done off board.
Taken on Sunday December 6, 2020 at Albany, NY.Sun Filters Through Mountain House
Temporal Map
That qgis temporal (time) map I posted earlier this morning on the blog about positive Coronavirus cases is pretty neat.
https://www.facebook.com/andybarthur/posts/10101846691562549
But they are kind of a pain to make right now as the feature is very incomplete in QGIS:
- No print layout design tools are available for export in qgis so you have to manually screenshot and paste the legend as an image and are limited in formatting options
- No ability to create GIF animations directly from qgis, must export multiple images and create the GIF animation in GIMP
- The shape file you make it from must use a date format field, it can’t process strings yet
- You can’t do a linkage on the fly but instead do the linkage manually which leads to the creation of very large Shape files or GeoPackages due to repeated shapes in the file for each time period
Freezing over
Pollution from car tires is killing off salmon on US west coast, study finds | Environment | The Guardian
In recent years, scientists have realized half or more of the coho salmon, also known as silver salmon, returning to streams in Washington state were dying before spawning. The salmon, which reach 2ft in length, are born in freshwater streams before making an epic journey out to sea where they live most of their adult lives. A small number then return to their original streams to lay eggs before dying.
Fears for a million livelihoods in Kenya and Tanzania as Mara River fish die out Read more The cause of the die-off has remained a mystery but a new study, published in Science, has seemingly found a culprit. When it rains, stormwater carries fragments of old car tires into nearby creeks and streams. The tires contain certain chemicals that prevent them breaking down but also prove deadly to the coho salmon.
No one who got Moderna’s vaccine in trial developed severe COVID-19 | Science | AAAS
Continuing the spate of stunning news about COVID-19 vaccines, the biotech company Moderna announced the final results of the 30,000-person efficacy trial for its candidate in a press release today: Only 11 people who received two doses of the vaccine developed COVID-19 symptoms after being infected with the pandemic coronavirus, versus 185 symptomatic cases in a placebo group. That is an efficacy of 94.1%, the company says, far above what many vaccine scientists were expecting just a few weeks ago.
More impressive still, Moderna’s candidate had 100% efficacy against severe disease. There were zero such COVID-19 cases among those vaccinated, but 30 in the placebo group. The company today plans to file a request for emergency use authorization (EUA) for its vaccine with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and is also seeking a similar green light from the European Medicines Agency.