Going to Vieques in 2011 was one of the most sublime and wonderful experiences of my life. I never felt like I was at an undiscovered treasure more than I did there: The beaches, the biolumniscent bay, the feral horses, the view over the bay in Esperanza, all of it so breathtaking.
We hat this experiment set up in one of our lecture halls once a year. They had to fence off the area and it had to relax for days, but we were able to replicate the measurement during our introduction to physics lecture.
> the concept of electric potential (which he called the "degree of electrification"), an early unit of capacitance (that of a sphere one inch in diameter), the formula for the capacitance of a plate capacitor, the concept of the dielectric constant of a material, the relationship between electric potential and current (now called Ohm's law) (1781), laws for the division of current in parallel circuits (now attributed to Charles Wheatstone), and the inverse square law of variation of electric force with distance, now called Coulomb's law.
(Wikipedia)
Wonder what went wrong to need so many rediscoveries by others. Reminds me of Gauss.
> Because of his asocial and secretive behaviour, Cavendish often avoided publishing his work, and much of his findings were not told even to his fellow scientists. In the late nineteenth century, long after his death, James Clerk Maxwell looked through Cavendish's papers and found observations and results for which others had been given credit.
At that time, you have three big candidates: terminology, language barriers, and speed of propagation.
I might also include a certain scientific isolation. Not in the sense of isolationist tendencies, rather that there were a lot of blind men reaching across the elephant and their hands had yet to touch.
What’s particularly frustrating is that the only thing that separates one from the other is the inclusion of a $20 reversing valve[1], and some software that can use it.
Well, that and you tend to split heat pump systems instead of pumping around warm air to pick up efficiency. And the design of the condensers, etc, is a little different for efficiency and to cope with e.g. condensation outside.
The AC unit can do heating if you just run the pump in the opposite direction. It is just a feature the manufacturer did not bother to install/wants extra money for (it is literally a single $20 part for the valve).
Obviously they are not the most efficient heaters as they are not designed for it but they would still work.
The Well-Grounded Rubyist is my favorite Ruby book because it really drives home just how internally consistent the Ruby object model is. It gave me a deep appreciation for the aesthetics of Ruby.
This. Ruby’s syntax sugar makes it easy for newcomers to miss the elegance of what’s actually happening with everything being an object and every expression reducing to passing messages between objects. When you dig in and really understand what’s going on, the lightbulb moment is very neat.
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