elihu

56 ms·

631.
by elihu 4y ago
There are too many good books in the world for having read them all to be any kind of a reasonably attainable barrier to entry for authors.
632.
by elihu 4y ago
Extracting useful power isn't really the point of ITER; the main thing is to operate the machine long enough to produce useful data that everyone else can use to build reactors that aren't based on technology that's several d
633.
by elihu 4y ago
> “This team is finding that the density confinement is actually a bit lower than traditional operating modes, which is not necessarily a bad thing, because it’s compensated for by higher temperatures in the core,” he says. “It’s definit
634.
by elihu 4y ago
Not in the upper atmosphere, where temperatures and atmospheric densities are close to Earth-normal. I think living in zeppelin cities would be logistically difficult for other reasons, but as long as you don't need to go down to the s
635.
by elihu 4y ago
> Any ship capable of bringing people to Mars would be infinitely more habitable than Mars itself. A ship only has the mass it brings with it. On Mars you have an atmosphere and mineral resources, from which you can make building materi
636.
by elihu 4y ago
I think it's great, but it's pretty dense and it's one of those things that you get more out of it by reading it several times. First read through it's just a barrage of names and places, and you don't know who&#x2
637.
by elihu 4y ago
I can sympathize with that, but if the choice is between, say, using 1% of the battery capacity to heat the cell versus losing 25% of the capacity because they just don't work efficiently in the cold, going with the 1st option seems li
638.
by elihu 4y ago
In the early years of aviation, Pan America used a huge fleet of sea planes. They did that because modern airports didn't exist yet, but ships were common and harbors provided the basic infrastructure they needed to operate. We don&#x
639.
by elihu 4y ago
You can do a lot better than that; just electrify the roads so that cars can recharge while travelling at highway speeds. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/12/worlds-f... There's basi
640.
by elihu 4y ago
I think a blanket carbon tax at least creates a situation where everyone is paying , in some way, for the externalities they're causing. If some industries don't want to decarbonize because the tax is rounding error to them, then
641.
by elihu 4y ago
For that to work we'd need both a carbon tax (or something equivalent) and a heavy tariff on goods that are imported from countries without such a tax. As long as both of those things can be enacted at once, I'm in favor.
642.
by elihu 4y ago
I think the solution for batteries in cold weather is to insulate the pack and heat the battery "coolant". Almost all modern EVs use liquid cooling of some kind. (Nissan Leaves are the exception; I don't know if they'v
643.
by elihu 4y ago
Vehicle-to-vehicle charging is starting to be a thing, and there's always the option of using another vehicle to tow you. (You could even use regenerative braking on the towed car to recharge the battery.) Realistically, that's a
644.
by elihu 4y ago
It's not like everyone who drives an EV recharges their full battery capacity every day. And besides, home charges are typically level-2 charging from a 220V outlet, and they charge overnight. DC fast charging in homes basically does
645.
by elihu 4y ago
Electricity is a fungible resource and most of it is generated from fossil fuels. The price of natural gas is way up, so electricity prices generally are up. Not to mention, hydroelectric production is down in some places (Hoover dam for
646.
by elihu 4y ago
You could have something like that supplies heat to a building by nuclear decay, but generating useful amounts of electricity from relatively small temperature differences is hard. You could theoretically have a steam-generating nuclear re
647.
by elihu 4y ago
I wonder what interesting features electric vehicles and farm equipment could have to power other devices? A lot of old jeeps used to have PTO ports on the transfer case, so you could use the jeep engine to power machinery. I suppose you c
648.
by elihu 4y ago
The H-Pi Tonal Plexus is 205-EDO, and reasonably playable as far as I know. I'm not sure what the biggest version is, but it's about 6 or 7 octaves.
649.
by elihu 4y ago
Actually, 41 has a better 4th and 5th, only being off by about half a cent, as opposed to being off by about 2 cents. It also has thirds and sixths that are quite a bit better (though still not great), and it has very good 7-limit interval
650.
by elihu 4y ago
Article only looks at the 4th and 5th, but I think the more interesting observation is that if you pick any small number ratio between 1:1 and 2:1 (i.e. using numbers from 1..10 and lying within a single octave), they almost all have a reas
651.
by elihu 4y ago
There's also this much longer talk he gave that I watched recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBVmnKuBocc The premise is that we don't have enough minerals to transition to a decarbonized economy if we just
652.
by elihu 4y ago
41-EDO is surprisingly playable on guitar, if you omit half the frets. The trick is to tune the strings so that each string only has half the notes, but the notes that aren't there are available on neighboring strings. It seems like
653.
by elihu 4y ago
No, the article is essentially pointing out that the 12th root of two to the seventh power is really close to 1.5, whereas the comment you're replying to is saying that if you raise 1.5 to the 12th power, you get really close to a powe
654.
by elihu 4y ago
For the intervals they look at in the article, the perfect 4th and 5th, 31-EDO is worse -- about 5 cents of error, versus about 2. What 31-EDO has is a major third that's almost dead-on, and a minor third that's a lot closer. ht
655.
by elihu 4y ago
What's weirder is that if you're using just intonation in, say, the key of C major, there's two different D's. One is 9/8, and the other is 10/9. The note we call D in equal temperament is about half-way betw
656.
by elihu 4y ago
I wonder if that's partly due to people (both young people and the older people that would hire them) being uncertain if they can get away with it these days? There were a bunch of scandals about ten years or so ago about politicians
657.
by elihu 4y ago
If they're just going to be using this for sending texts for now, the signal to noise ratio can be really bad and still work. I suppose they could also fall back on buffering until a satellite is in an optimal position if it can'
658.
by elihu 4y ago
Also, water specifically has good propagation characteristics. (Salt water is best, iirc.) At least, I think that's true for the longer wavelengths more typically used with HAM radio. I don't know if it holds for microwave-ish
659.
by elihu 4y ago
In the article they say the problem is with radioactive contaminants in the large volumes of air that are pumped through the molten steel to purify it when it's made. My impression is that steel that's just exposed to the environ
660.
by elihu 4y ago
I don't think you can separate science from politics. The scientific method that relies on repeatable experimental results is just a workaround for the general problem that the search for knowledge is done by highly opinionated, stubb

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