elihu

54 ms·

601.
by elihu 4y ago
It could be worse. We might have to explain standard music notation.
602.
by elihu 4y ago
Converting trains over to electric is also well worth doing.
603.
by elihu 4y ago
I've seen two episodes. I think some parts are great, and some parts are frustratingly bad. It's fun to see people take Tolkien's world in original new directions, but on the other hand about half the time it just seems lik
604.
by elihu 4y ago
It depends on your definition of "slow" and your use case. If you were on a road trip and had to stop for an hour per 30 miles at a charging station, it'd probably seem really slow. If you're plugging in after you get
605.
by elihu 4y ago
Battery swap stations are an old idea, but it's really hard to actually pull it off. It requires that all the cars you service have the same battery pack, or that there are at most only a few kinds of battery pack to deal with. The p
606.
by elihu 4y ago
The reservoirs we're using as an example are in the hundreds of acres of surface area. That's not "huge parts of the Sierras". If you look at Bath County Pumped Storage Station on Google maps, the bigger reservoir is a
607.
by elihu 4y ago
Part of it might just be that they have lower expectations for Switch in terms of the CPU being able to keep up with a large megabase. They expect players to be able to launch a rocket without any noticeable lag, but one-rocket-per-minute
608.
by elihu 4y ago
That's actually not nearly as bad as I expected, though it assumes perfectly efficient energy use. 18.8 kwh to obtain enough lithium carbonate to make batteries for maybe a hundred cars? That seems like a pretty good deal, if the wat
609.
by elihu 4y ago
> "But every ton of lithium carbonate extracted from underground using this cheap, low-tech method typically dissipates into the air about half a million gallons of water that is vital to the arid high Andes. The extraction lowers w
610.
by elihu 4y ago
This goes remarkably well with a second browser tab opened to Dick Dale playing Misirlou. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKpsuGMeqHI
611.
by elihu 4y ago
It's possible for that to be a thing, but batteries are pretty heavy. Moving hundreds of pounds in and out of your car could be a rather aggravating chore just to avoid a few stops. There's also issues of standardization. You&#
612.
by elihu 4y ago
Power generation creates a lot of heat too. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants usually all operate by boiling and recondensing water, and as a consequence they have cold water as an input and warm/hot water as an output. Tha
613.
by elihu 4y ago
There's a singing group from Portland that used impulse-response recordings from Hagia Sophia to recreate old church music as it would have sounded back when it was controlled by the Eastern Orthodox church. https://en.wikip
614.
by elihu 4y ago
> "If you can decommission debris you can decommission satellites. This has obvious military applications. In fact to properly do this you actually have to get pretty close to other satellites without colliding. By solving the debri
615.
by elihu 4y ago
It is, but I've wondered about whether there are even better materials? Let's say you have a battery immersed in a tank of water (aside from the contacts), and you wanted to match the amount of water to the stored energy of the ce
616.
by elihu 4y ago
As an American I find it a little weird that Biden ordered flags at half staff until the queen's funeral is over -- 11 days in total I think. I mean she is the queen, and she has been the queen since before most of us, and some of our
617.
by elihu 4y ago
That's an impressive site and I remember it being posted to HN recently, but it's a bit overwhelming. I guess the message is that you can do pumped hydro almost anywhere that hills exist, but there must be some "best sites&q
618.
by elihu 4y ago
I've wondered if maybe it's possible to pack batteries with a relatively harmless material that undergoes a very energy-intensive phase change. Water's the obvious choice, but it tends to drain away rather than stick around
619.
by elihu 4y ago
Wow, that's a lot. I wonder if the other 360,000 pounds or so were lead acid?
620.
by elihu 4y ago
I was wondering the same. From the article it sounds like it was just a random assortment of lithium-ion batteries that someone was storing with the intention of turning into a large solar-connected battery, so probably a mix of cell chemi
621.
by elihu 4y ago
I think the standard procedure in EV car fires is to just dump water on it to conduct the heat away as fast as possible, and to keep dumping water on it until the batteries can no longer self-ignite -- which can take awhile.
622.
by elihu 4y ago
It's not poisonous to chickens, plenty of people grow it for chicken feed. I think at this point it's unclear whether it's safe for human consumption. Azolla has a symbiotic relationship with a kind of cyanobacteria that mig
623.
by elihu 4y ago
It's not really an electricity source, but recently I was curious about pumped hydro storage, and how to develop any kind of intuition about the relationship between volume of water, height difference, and how much energy you can actua
624.
by elihu 4y ago
Interesting. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/singapore-unveils-on... Article describes a 111.2 acre installation. That's not huge, but it's not trivially small either.
625.
by elihu 4y ago
There's also a lot of land that is suitable for solar that is too dry or the soil too poor to be suitable for agriculture.
626.
by elihu 4y ago
Huh, interesting.
627.
by elihu 4y ago
No, I mean that the conditions can't happen anymore the way they did then, because in the intervening time microbes have evolved that can eat lignin. The dead plants would be almost entirely decomposed before they have a chance to get
628.
by elihu 4y ago
I think all these approaches should be looked at. It's not obvious to me that farming algae to sequester carbon would be cheaper/easier per ton of CO2 removed than farming duckweed or azolla.
629.
by elihu 4y ago
If I understand right, most of our current fossil fuels are from an era when there weren't bacteria capable of breaking down lignin. So, plants would die and dry out, but wouldn't fully decompose. You'd have huge mounds of
630.
by elihu 4y ago
According to wikipedia, during the azolla event, the azolla would grow in a fresh water layer at the top of the arctic ocean and then sink when it died. There was a layer of oxygen-free water at the bottom, preventing it from decomposing.

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