I’d suggest it’s a problem with your browser that it respects the zoom restrictions, regardless of the page’s choices. Browsers are meant to be user agents – agents for the user – not agents for the page.
One of the surprising things about visiting the mountains to do various outdoor activities in nature is how often the air quality is worse than it is at home in an urban area. A big part of this is that "home" is the SF Bay Area and we have consistent winds blowing inland from the ocean, which blows our air pollution to other people (and the air gets noticeable worse when this doesn't happen), but also the air quality is often shockingly poor in rural areas. Wood stoves, diesel generators, and the like in spots where the pollution gets trapped can do a lot even with low density.
On average the air quality is worse in cities than in rural areas, but at least in the United States the difference is smaller than you might expect. In countries that do not take urban air pollution seriously it gets very bad, of course.
It depends. Pollution can be higher in the cities, or it can be higher in areas with high wildfire risk, or it can depend on specific geography which traps polluted air. You have to look at each case individually.
For example, in my state there is a specific more rural area which has a high incidence if heating with wood stoves, and they have higher air pollution that other more urban areas.
Another possibility is that urban areas are richer on average, and therefore might have better air filtration systems in homes and businesses than poorer rural areas. You can't tell without actually gathering the data.
There's a lot of interesting confounding factors from an air quality perspective wrt urban vs suburban vs rural. Leaf / lawn blowers. Driving vs walking/public transit. Ground level vs up high. Tradewinds (west coast vs east coast vs AZ dust storm / wildfires).
It would be if it was only pollution but my understanding it’s pm2.5 in general. Rural areas can and do have high pm2.5. Look at the map. It could be agriculture or dust or flora.
The maximum COP for a peltier device is 1, in practice it’s far below that.
Heat pumps go way beyond a COP of 1; an open-loop cooling system with an evaporative cooling tower can have a COP of 7. A closed loop heat pump alone can have a COP of 4.
Peltier devices are a dead end for moving heat around outside of specialized applications where you can’t drag around two heat exchangers, a valve, and a pump (like active cooling clothing). It’s impossible for them to even approach the efficiency of resistive heating (COP of 1).
I thought exactly the same thing. Peltier's themselves don't really have a pathway for becoming as efficient as steam turbines but there are other methods currently in research.
One promising idea is to use sodium vapor in a fuel cell style device:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpowsour.2017.10.022
Sounds like concentration meditation. (The Buddhists call it "samatha")
Concentration causes your perception to penetrate things. What you observe dissolves, its former appearance a mere veil, parted, to reveal another appearance. And then that veil is parted. And so on.
The process could be described as a penetrating, blooming or revealing.
There is limit to the "power" of concentration and what things it can help achieve. If meditation could help unravel the secrets of the universe, it would have helped the meditator reveal that the hardware responsible for consciousness is actually composed of neurons. All meditation might help is to remove the fog from the hall of mirror that is consciousness. To know more about the universe, one has to experiment on it and meditation can't do that.
or maybe it would reveal to the meditator that consciousness is nonlocal and what we perceive as our self is an illusion created by the systems of symbols and language which overlays our perception and through which existence filters and there is no self there is no other there is one whole and it is all conscious
It's a presumption that the universe is not a product of the mind. Without which you can not establish that the 'secrets of the universe' are not inside the mind.
