I highly doubt that the US rail network is twice the size of the EU one by most metrics, I guess different methods for counting length were mixed there (e.g. how is single-track vs double-track counted).
This is taking europe as in the EU, as anything else is annoying.
It'd also be pretty interesting to get the frequency of passenger rail derailments vs freight derailments to more accurately compare the numbers given the high amount of passenger rail in EU. As a very rough idea, the first document I found giving any indication about the distribution had 2 dangerous freight derailments and 3 dangerous passenger train derailments in germany for 2021 (https://www.eisenbahn-unfalluntersuchung.de/SharedDocs/Downl... P. 16ff.).
The EU also differs from the US in that that cargo trains are much shorter, leading to more trains needed for the same amount of freight cars. So the question is does the rate of derailments scale with the number of individual cars or with the number of trains?
EDIT:
Looking at the floridarail.com link, they say that the US has a broader gauge than europe. Since almost all of the US is standard gauge and almost all of europe is standard gauge or wider, this is just wrong. It's also news to me that europe (specifically germany) doesn't allow toxic chemicals to be transported over rail. The article seems a bit iffy.
>So the question is does the rate of derailments scale with the number of individual cars or with the number of trains?
You have to take in a much larger number of factors than that.
The railroad industry is currently pushing their new just in time paradigm which has been leading to attempted strikes in the US (Uncle Joe says no) by the railroad workers. The railroad operators are pushing for longer trains, less engineers per train, and less inspection time per car while also playing computerized shipping optimizations that put the number of 'hazards' on a train just below the regulated minimum number of cars so they don't have to declare it.
It's just ironic that this incident that got national news happened so quickly after the railroad co's got their no right to strike validated. It looks like it could very well be their undoing.
Most derailments are in train yards. Few cause injuries, fewer cause deaths, and only a handful involve hazardous substances. I don't say that to downplay the mess in OH/PA, but just to make sure the base-rate is understood.
And if you want to compare to europe it looks like US freight rail volume is at least 6x as large. Also no idea if/how they count "fender bender" derailments in switching yards. US standard is >$12k in damage according to TFA.
A couple months ago I watched an amateur train nerd on youtube cover a derailment that dumped a load of bitumin/tar into a river and destroyed a bridge. This kind of thing happens pretty commonly. No national news covered it, only a couple of local news stations, at least from what I could find on youtube/googling.
It's confusing to me why this specific incident got so much attention.
Link? That sounds like a channel I’d be interested in
And this got the attention it did because it’s far more severe then one load of tar/bitumen in a river - and far more toxic made potentially worse from the choice to. Burn it off to clear the tracks faster
It isn't really clear in the video, but that is a 4 layer board and there is another ground plane layer elsewhere. The heater loop doesn't connect to any components.
To what else then ? Leaving it unconnected would be worse, leaving it at ground level makes it at worst act like small capacitance to ground for nearby stuff
"Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One, also known as SL-1 or the Argonne Low Power Reactor (ALPR), was a United States Army experimental nuclear reactor in the western United States at the National Reactor Testing Station (NRTS), later the Idaho National Laboratory, west of Idaho Falls, Idaho. It experienced a steam explosion on the night of January 3, 1961, killing all three of its young military operators, and pinning one of them to the ceiling of the facility with a reactor vessel plug. The event is the only reactor accident in U.S. history that resulted in immediate fatalities.
+1 for HamStudy.org which is an excellent resource. They include "explainer" cards for each question which often contain links to other material which are a great jumping off point for going as deep as you care to go on any individual topic.
I used the hamstudy website almost exclusively for getting my license and was able to pass all three tests (General, Tech, Amateur Extra) in one sitting. I had to set for a physical test at a local club's monthly meeting, but now organizations like GLAARG are proctoring remote tests via zoomso you can gest more or less 'on demand' from home.
> [follow] a convention of including unit names in identifier names.
appending units to identifiers helps, but it relies on a developer's eyeballs to spot any errors. It would be infinitely preferable if the type system would simply enforce this for you and developers not have to expend cycles reasoning about this stuff themselves.
If you stick to just a few units throughout the system (ideally, use a consistent base unit everywhere and convert any external measurements to it), you can avoid the rest of the problems.
Static typing is great, of course, I just don't agree that this can't be solved to almost the same level with languages with dynamic typing.
The keyword is “almost”, and whether you need stricter typing depends how much you care about software correctness (or to be pedantic, the class of problems that the typing system can fix for you in the language in question).
but it relies on a developer's eyeballs to spot any errors.
I'm assuming a relatively normal/sane environment where code is reviewed at pull request time, and there is a test suite.
developers not have to expend cycles reasoning about this stuff themselves
It is not my experience that `launch_rocket(distance_km:)` requires any extra cycles whatsoever.
I mean, as a coder, I'm going to have to be cognizant of the type anyway, even if we're doing `launch_rocket(distance:)` in a strongly typed language where `distance` is something of type `RocketLaunchDistance` or whatever.
I'm not arguing against static/strong typing in general or anything. Definitely lots of times when it is the clearly superior choice.
The "Morse Expert" App available for Android/iOS does a pretty good job of decoding CW 'in the wild'. It can adapt to different sending speeds and does a decent job with non-ideal character/element spacing.
Do you have a link for Morse Expert? It sounds like exactly what I want, but I don’t see any exact name matches when I search for it in Apple’s U.S. App Store.
$1068 at 85% efficiency is $907 "effective" heating dollars. $971 at 94% efficiency is $912 so that passes a basic sanity check.
The major improvement is efficiency c es from runnimg higher volume at lower temperature differentials. This allows the "cold" side of the furnace/boiler to condense the water vapor in the combustion gasses and capture its latent heat.
I considered the Stanley and HF options and opted for the Stanleys. The HF lid is polyethylene, a little milky, and a little bendy while the Stanley lids are polycarbonate, clear and somewhat stiffer. Neither option will do a good job of preventing small parts from migrating between compartments so I never 'briefcase' carry.
Nice! That's my exact plan if I ever get a real garage. I labelled mine on colored masking tape which is a nice way to quickly get to the right contents.
The US rail network also >2x longer than Europe[3] (360,000km vs 151,000km).
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/198443/us-class-i-freigh...
[3] https://www.floridarail.com/news/6-key-differences-between-a...