elihu

45 ms·

481.
by elihu 4y ago
What's the best case wireless energy transfer efficiency that anyone is expecting with current technology, or with technology that reasonably assumed to be attainable in the near future?
482.
by elihu 4y ago
I'm not sure if structures like that can be made that would also provide adequate protection from radiation. My default assumption is that any early Mars colony would be doing almost everything underground, because that's the saf
483.
by elihu 4y ago
What would people do there in their airships? It seems kind of anti-climatic to settle a planet without ever actually being able to descend to the surface.
484.
by elihu 4y ago
One of the arguments in favor of Mars versus the moon is that at least it has a normal Earth-like day/night cycle. Solar power on the moon means having to have batteries that last through the 14 day nights. Mars is cold, but I don&#x2
485.
by elihu 4y ago
I think as soon as people are moving to Mars, you'd at a minimum at least need some kind of commonly agreed-to standard around land ownership. I.e. maybe each new settlement implicitly owns all the land in a twenty mile radius. If yo
486.
by elihu 4y ago
I think Sudan, Egypt, and Libya would be contenders. I suppose there's probably a general principle at work that if your country's borders were decided not by geographical or cultural boundaries but rather by an occupying bureauc
487.
by elihu 4y ago
It's plausible. I don't know how Musk looks from the point of view of, say, a pro-Trump Republican, but from my own biased point of view he doesn't come across as a serious businessman with conservative or libertarian leanin
488.
by elihu 4y ago
A huge part of Tesla's value is based on their brand. They have great manufacturing capabilities that incumbent automakers struggle to compete against, but if a large portion of their target market stops wanting to buy a Tesla because
489.
by elihu 4y ago
Writing code can be an art form, but I think there's a lot of software out there that really does need to be developed with the same amount of rigor as you'd use to design a bridge or a building, because people are depending on it
490.
by elihu 4y ago
> I think MIDI is very well suited to build on top of, without needing to change the spec. I disagree. I think MIDI uses a basic abstraction that's awkward for anything that's not piano-like, and attempting to fix it by laying
491.
by elihu 4y ago
That's the problem. If you want to make something that isn't piano like, you run right into a brick wall -- there's no way to send the note information you want to send in a way that's understood by any random MIDI synt
492.
by elihu 4y ago
> "The standard is 40 years old and good for another 40, it’s so perfectly suited to the task." That's true, if you consider the task at hand to be allowing any piano-like keyboard controller to connect to any synthesizer
493.
by elihu 4y ago
> What most surprised me about NIF's ignition announcement was that this was even news. I'd assumed for years that most if not all tokamaks and stellerators could already achieve at least some brief fusion, just not to a useful
494.
by elihu 4y ago
Don't feel bad if it doesn't make sense, the article gets quite a bit wrong. At each intersection, a ray tracer might spawn a refraction ray, a reflection ray, and a shadow ray towards each of the lights. The reflection and refra
495.
by elihu 4y ago
I haven't kept up the latest in graphics research. Is the idea that you have a machine-learning system that learns a sort of rough internal representation of the 3D model based on the rendered image (or multiple successive images), an
496.
by elihu 4y ago
I think it's become kind of an ambiguous term that depends on context. If you're talking about algorithms, "ray tracing" usually means Whitted ray tracing, but it could also mean the whole family of algorithms that are
497.
by elihu 4y ago
> "So there you have -- path tracing, the fast cousin of ray tracing. Looks almost as good, works a heck of a lot quicker. " Yeah, that's pretty much exactly wrong. Path tracing exists not because it's faster (it isn&
498.
by elihu 4y ago
It might. I think most people expect tokomaks to be more practical, but generating power from inertial confinement is at least theoretically possible. It might even be reasonably cost-effective if someone can figure out how to manufacture
499.
by elihu 4y ago
It's not overly pedantic to expect headlines to not be the exact opposite of a true statement. Contradicting the first sentence with the second sentence doesn't make the first sentence any more true.
500.
by elihu 4y ago
I haven't had a problem with it yet, but that's not to say I won't. One suggestion (which I didn't follow) is to make sure the whole pond is at least a couple feet deep everywhere. Having shallow ledges just gives heron
501.
by elihu 4y ago
I have a taro plant that I bring inside in the winter. Basically, I just transfer the pot to a large tub of water, where it can be mostly submerged. I let the water level get pretty low last winter so only the bottom few inches of the pot
502.
by elihu 4y ago
I'm not the person you're replying to, but I have a pond too. Mosquito dunks are one way to deal with mosquito larvae without resorting to a conventional pesticide. Another is to have some kind of fish. Mosquito fish are probabl
503.
by elihu 4y ago
It's kind of interesting how the plants compete. In spring and early summer, azolla usually dominates. Once the water lettuce and water hyacinth get going, the azolla starts to die off and is largely replaced by duckweed. Eventually
504.
by elihu 4y ago
> The fusion startups are spending down investors' money with zero possibility of payback (Helion conceivably excepted), because if they did get Q>1, they have no workable way to harness it. ITER will not even try to produce one
505.
by elihu 4y ago
I've built ponds before, so I was already familiar with the process. I don't know how much water you'd lose from soil percolation; I've always just used a liner. EPDM rubber is what most people use. It's not terri
506.
by elihu 4y ago
I don't think depth matters that much, except that with a deeper pond you have less risk of it drying out completely in a dry season. More important is: how much rain do you get, how warm is your climate, what is the average humidity,
507.
by elihu 4y ago
If I understand correctly, tritium is the result of bombarding lithium with neutrons. I'm not sure how tokomaks are expected to work; do you just add lithium and expect the tritium to get where it needs to go to keep the reaction going
508.
by elihu 4y ago
Going by what wikipedia says, wood ash can have carbon. If I understand correctly, how much depends largely on how hot it burned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_ash#Elemental_analysis
509.
by elihu 4y ago
"Particularly in hard rock mining, for every tonne of mined lithium, 15 tonnes of CO2 are emitted into the air." Estimates seem to vary, but this is claiming that there's about 12 kg of lithium in a 70 kwh Tesla battery: htt
510.
by elihu 4y ago
Most EVs have a single-speed gearbox. A few have multiple gear ratios, but it's not common. (It's not unusually for ICE vehicles converted to EV to retain a manual transmission, but conversions aren't being done in large num

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