Just to be clear, plowing and tilling are not the same thing, and this article implies the researchers might be using it interchangeably. They bundle different soil-disturbance practices together, irrelevant of their uses, and potential compaction impact. Of course, tilling can also just be used as a generic term for all of the soil management in farms, but this is never explained.
It is also unclear if the paper is removing traffic compaction or it is part of their results. when an MF 8700 with 23,800 pounds rolls around it will compact things. A lot. I have a lunch box to prove it.
Would love to see no-till vs shallow till vs deep plowing. For this paper, they should have introduce and have primary conclusion around the technical data gathering as a novel idea, not draw conclusion from the collected data.
The physics and sensing seems rigorous. Understanding of agricultural taxonomy, farming, is coarse at best. 40 hours of total data during rain is a wee bit short. 2cm depth for the fiber is only going to sense near- or surface. Most crops go deeper than that. Single-site experiment on a single type of soil is very narrow.
To me, plowing (like a chisel plow or moldboard) is to break up soil, and 'folds' old crop like corn stalks back in. It is also the first step for never-used land prep for growing stuff. Usually, beginning of season, compacting, or new site. 8 to 20 inches deep. can flip the soil upside down.
Tilling gets the soil ready for seed, aeration, crumble large lumps and fill larger gaps on the surface, or mix fertilizer/compost into soil. 4 to 12 inches deep.
Discing aka harrowing (disc harrow) usually will cut the remaining roots a few inches deep, often done post plowing. good for putting last years leftovers just a few inches under. 4 to 6 inches.
Note that it seems that as the field size gets smaller, the tilling vs harrowing seems to flip? At least how people consider using them.
(edit: I am all over with this one, but I think the gist comes through.)
If you check the paper, it doesn't say "plowing" anywhere. Just tilling. And these are the parameters:
> Tillage had been applied at three depths commonly used in farming—no tillage, 10 cm, and 25 cm—while compaction had been imposed using two tire pressure levels—70 kPa for both front and rear tires, and 120 kPa for front and 150 kPa for rear tires.
What one has to keep in mind as well, that even though tractors are really heavy they spread that weight across a large area (using low tire pressures and having massive tires to begin with). So, iirc, the per area impact is even lower then a human. It impacts a lot larger area, though!
Plowing vs tilling is also very much about soil erosion and depends very much of the location you are in.
Compaction is sublinear with weight, make the tractor heavier so it combacts more makes a small difference where the tires are - but you can now pull something bigger (assuming horsepower) and that means less of the field is touched by tires and in turn less compaction. compaction is worse where the tires touch but they touch less.
the above is also why tires are better than tracks in many cases. The tire has more compaction, but when you turn it touches less land and so overall is better than a track.
of course every soil is different. For details of you particular land you need an expert who knows your soil.
I often do to, so this reply is not a criticism of your general point, however in this case your would have been better informed to read the actual thing and not the comment you replied to!
Yeah. But with a finite lifetime, and an effectively infinite supply of content on the internet - quick & dirty attention-rationing algorithms are unavoidable.
dnsmasq on an RPi Zero 2W is the backbone of my self-hosted setup. Combined with Tailscale, it gives me access from anywhere to arbitrary domains I define myself, with full HTTPS thanks to Caddy.
At home, I put all of my network infrastructure software in one basket because that seems like the right path towards maximizing availability[1]: It provides one point of potential hardware failure instead of many.
For me, that means doing routing, DNS, VPN, and associated stuff with one box running OpenWRT. It works. It's ridiculously stable. And rather than having a number of things that could break the network when they die, I only have 1 thing that can do so.
That box currently happens to be a Raspberry Pi 4 that uses VLANs as Ethernet port expanders, but it is also stable AF with a [shock! horror!] USB NIC. I picked that direction years ago mostly because I have a strong affinity towards avoiding critical moving parts (like cooling fans) in infrastructure.
But those details don't matter. Any single box running OpenWRT, OPNsense, pfSense, Debian, FreeBSD, or whatever, can behave more-or-less similarly.
[1]: Yeah, so about that. If the real-world MTBF for a system that relies upon 1 box is 10 years, then the MTBF for a system relying on 2 boxes to both keep working is only 5 years. Less is more.
It's both, and more, in a way. But it's primarily a DNS tweaking tool, and does not support things like zone transfers. Which you usually don't need with a small-scale personal setup anyway.
Yes, it is nothing like 2022 yet. But the concerning thing is that this may be just a beginning of a protracted event, plus the world, and especially Western Europe, is less resilient today to the disruptions in gas supply.
One of those is an absolute value (urea $) and one is a rate of change (food price inflation). Maybe I’m being dumb, but why are they tracking almost 1:1, both with linear Y axis?
I can compare Urea $ to Crude Oil $ and get an even closer 5 year correlation. Are we actually indexing against something else here?
Edit: that is, perhaps urea prices are driven mostly by energy costs, which in turn drives inflation rates.
Yes. Nat gas -> ammonia -> urea. Theres some efficiencies that vary by site but its a hundred year old process of a true commodity. The price per therm _is_ the input.
Was listening to a fertilizer analyst the other day. She thought corn:urea was the better comparison. Nitrogen is the cost of marginal yields. And corn:urea shows the farmer being squeezed between their commodity output price and the required input cost. At some point its just not cost effective to grow corn, so you go soy, and reduced supply should pish up future prices. Oh look! More commodity price inflation pressure!
And that was specifically due to the (ongoing) Russian Invasion of Ukraine. After the 2022 spike, most large countries began building alternative supply chains to reduce impacts from these kinds of hits.
For example, the US and Europe largely doesn't use urea unlike Brazil, India, and China.
This is also why Asian countries have been investing heavily in Hydrogen energy despite HN's hate boner to the technology.
Edit: can't reply
> Is it really hydrogen energy if your plan for the hydrogen gas is turning it into ammonia? Would give you another use for it, I suppose
The whole point of building a hydrogen energy market is becuase hydrogen electrolyzers are dual use, and the methodology to leverage and produce "green" ammonia is similar to "green" hydrogen.
A non-LNG method to mass produce ammonia has always been called out in most countries Hydrogen energy roadmaps such as Japan [0], China [1], and India [2].
A lot of the hate for hydrogen is for a vehicle fuel where it's strictly inferior to batteries, partly because it's such a pain to handle, and partly because it's a "submarine" for natural gas derived H2.
Evolving hydrogen from electrolysis and then immediately turning it into ammonia is a much better idea; ammonia is easier to handle than H2 gas and already has a market.
The Economist was recently citing hydrogen as "deep tech" [1] (meaning long R&D cycles, sometimes unproven techniology no short term profitability, heavy investment, industry-wide transformative power).
Most of your sources have plans focused on hydrogen production, but I'd be interested to see specific targets or plans regarding specific uses like fertilizers. There are some in the Hydrogen Roadmap Europe, but it seems focused on transportation [2].
> I'd be interested to see specific targets or plans regarding specific uses like fertilizers
It's primarily in Asia and North Africa. For example, India has begun building a 7GW green hydrogen project specifically for urea production [0] and as a technical demonstration. An Egypt-Germany-Norway JV is also expected to be completed by 2027 explicitly for this usecase [1]
There were plans to build a hydrogen plant near Whyalla in South Australia, a famous steel-making site; see e.g. [1]. The tl;dr uses were export (I expected ammonia but the whole thing was vague enough to include hydrogen) on boats, reduction of iron ore ("decarbonisation", apparently requires magnetite) and while all the financial engineering that didn't happen was going to happen, energy storage for the grid, soaking up S.A.'s over-abundant solar.
Someone observed that this was the entirety of the presently-outgoing (but sure to be re-elected) state regime's story about reducing electricity bills in the state.
2022 was abnormally high, caused largely by the disruption of gas supplies to Western Europe after sanctions on Russian gas and the destruction of the Nordstream gas pipeline.
Really interesting. It made me curious to dig in and learn that urea production starts with natural gas. And if you add natural gas to the chart as well urea and natural gas prices generally track together without a lag either way, except natural gas doesn't have the recent uptick seen in urea.
I guess the recent move in urea likely isn’t coming from energy costs, something fertilizer-specific, exports, shipping, or supply?
> I guess the recent move in urea likely isn’t coming from energy costs, something fertilizer-specific, exports, shipping, or supply
One of India's SOEs recently paused Urea production at some plants due to NatGas issues from the ongoing conflict [0].
Additonally, India began reducing purchasing of Russian LNG in late 2025.
India also launched a tender to purchase urea on the global market in February [1].
This led to a double whammy for urea in the short term given how Indian agriculture is heavily Urea dependent (around 70-80% of all fertilizers used in India are Urea).
But the same SOE recently announced it's restarted operations earlier today [2] and India has restarted spot purchases of what appears to be Russian LNG [3][4] that was originally destined for Europe (especially Hungary and Slovakia).
Edit: can't reply
I'm not a god damn LLM and I do not use AI to write my comments. If you can't engage with an argument, then fuck off.
Not sure which natural gas that’s referencing, but looks to be a US index (Henry Hub or so) - note the peak corresponds to a cold snap, not the Iran war. Natgas is tricky because it’s: difficult to store and difficult to transport (aside from well-established pipelines), so you have a massively disjointed market between various deliver markets (look at NY Henry Hub vs Dutch TTF), and also a massively disjointed market between delivery delivery dates (natgas calendar spread trades has been nicknamed “widowmakers”)
I guess it is users' accounts, so service accounts are exempt? I would hate to see a headless server rebooting and waiting for an age verification from a service account at a power or water sanitation plant...
Maybe all laws should have a "dev environment", starting with the politicians. All their systems will demand their age and proof of age for say 12 months? Toaster, washer, dryer, cell, dishwasher, car, calculators, etc. Then, if they still want to pass the law, 3 months of red teaming by the "general public" for all the systems that have their data. And, if they still want it, go for it.
> The DB48X project intends to rebuild and improve the user experience of the HP48 family of calculators
They just updated their license to exclude California residents. The law is so vague there is a possibility to apply it against the project, per project team.
i did not even think of that! As the current law reads, will smart devices with OSes require age verification? Many IoTs are just tiny Linux versions running on a small processor. This makes all smart GE washing machines, dryers and refrigerators illegal in California.
come to think of it, maybe there is something good about this law. :D
I have played this game on the road so many times, just by myself. Airports, hotel lobbies, waiting for taxi, and more. I never played it online though. It is my "TV" to disconnect my brain from the day to day work troubles and hustles. It is not as boring as sitting front of a TV and just consume; it forces me to strategize a bit, use at least a tiny bit of my left over brain cells.
I cannot tell if this is /s or real. there is an entire genre of art that specifically about functionality - functional art. Chairs, tables, buildings, vases, textile, and so on can be beautiful art yet functional.
> Why does i2p (per the article) expect state sponsored attacks every February?
Because The Invisible Internet Project (I2P) allows government dissidents to communicate without the government oversight. Censorship-resistant, peer-to-peer communication
> Where are those forming from, what does the regularity achieve?
At least PR China, Iran, Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait. censor communication between dissidents.
> How come the operators of giant (I’m assuming illegal) botnets are available to voice their train of thought in discord?
How would you identify someone as 'operators of giant botnets' before they identified themselves as 'operators of giant botnets'?
Likely it's just a coincidence — there were other Sybil attacks that are not in February too, so the chance that you'd get 3 in Feb isn't all that low.
That’s a great question… Currently we’re in the main Chinese holiday period with the Lunar New Year/Spring Festival/Chinese New Year, so perhaps people traveling back home from foreign lands might use the service more during this time?
I know no one using this in China. And people who can afford to travel (and have visa and passport) will have foreign sim/phone. The timing is just a coincidence
It is also unclear if the paper is removing traffic compaction or it is part of their results. when an MF 8700 with 23,800 pounds rolls around it will compact things. A lot. I have a lunch box to prove it.
Would love to see no-till vs shallow till vs deep plowing. For this paper, they should have introduce and have primary conclusion around the technical data gathering as a novel idea, not draw conclusion from the collected data.
The physics and sensing seems rigorous. Understanding of agricultural taxonomy, farming, is coarse at best. 40 hours of total data during rain is a wee bit short. 2cm depth for the fiber is only going to sense near- or surface. Most crops go deeper than that. Single-site experiment on a single type of soil is very narrow.
To me, plowing (like a chisel plow or moldboard) is to break up soil, and 'folds' old crop like corn stalks back in. It is also the first step for never-used land prep for growing stuff. Usually, beginning of season, compacting, or new site. 8 to 20 inches deep. can flip the soil upside down.
Tilling gets the soil ready for seed, aeration, crumble large lumps and fill larger gaps on the surface, or mix fertilizer/compost into soil. 4 to 12 inches deep.
Discing aka harrowing (disc harrow) usually will cut the remaining roots a few inches deep, often done post plowing. good for putting last years leftovers just a few inches under. 4 to 6 inches.
Note that it seems that as the field size gets smaller, the tilling vs harrowing seems to flip? At least how people consider using them.
(edit: I am all over with this one, but I think the gist comes through.)
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