pfdietz

13 ms·

301.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
> historically relevant medieval manuscripts, These are increasingly available online, btw. Historical research is accelerated when historians have direct access to scans of relevant source material. Not destructively scanned, of cours
302.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
Modern texts become piles of dust in time, given the acid paper they're printed on.
303.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
> bulk-buying rare books Isn't that oxymoronic? If they can be bulk-bought they aren't rare.
304.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
Solid cow manure is really low in nitrogen, though, and maybe 90% is organic N which is released slowly. Maybe you meant fresher manure.
305.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
Paper doesn't easily survive for thousands of years. You know that pleasant used bookstore smell? It's paper slowly decomposing.
306.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
Where I live there's a large library-associated biannual book sale where books are (effectively) reverse auctioned over a period of a few weeks. At the end, anything (with a few exceptions, like the Collector's Corner) that isn&#
307.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
Yes, actually you can. The fetish of physical book worship is a fossil of an age when information storage and retrieval was much harder.
308.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
Nowadays, academic libraries are moving their books to archival storage. New publications are electronic only. You need to be a formal member of the university community to access it, unlike in times past when any member of the public cou
309.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
You should plant clover. You'll get plenty of bees.
310.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
And by wind. The major staple crops are all wind pollinated.
311.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
Yes, limestone is where the CO2 comes from.
312.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
It's also possible to neutralize acid drainage with non-carbonate minerals, for example olivine. The sulfide tailings of some mining regions, as in Spain, may in the future become exploited as sources of sulfur. Today most sulfur come
313.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
Note that this is for copper, not metals in general. Iron ores are oxide ores, not sulfide ores, so they would not be as subject to this issue. The world produces about 100x more iron than copper each year.
314.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
Yes, it needs more solar power. But solar panels should be much lighter than radiators, potentially vastly lighter. Even if Carnot efficiency is not approached there is plenty of room for improvement in the size of the radiators.
315.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
Looking more closely, it's not true at all. So ignore what I wrote. I was confused by compressors being driven by steam from the SMR plant that made hydrogen from natural gas.
316.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
Haber-Bosch require continuous input of hydrogen, but aside from that it is a net source of power. The reaction is exothermic and can provide more than enough work to drive compressors that pressurize the reactants.
317.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
It's not just space, it's mass. A solar panel can be made very low in mass. The physical limit comes from the absorption of light in a thin layer of semiconductor. For CdTe, this would be about 1 micron. PV in space could be g
318.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
A reflector could let the radiator see dark sky all around, even in low orbit. There are drag concerns.
319.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
Yes, that was your response. It was a terrible and obviously invalid response, as I explained. You never explained why the GPU temperature had to increase. Could you explain that now? The GPU would be on the cold side of the heat pump,
320.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
[flagged]
321.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
> Carnot's theorem and refridgeration cycles rear their head. Your heat pump still needs power to pump heat uphill., negating any savings from a smaller radiator. And what happens when you shrink a radiator? It becomes a high temper
322.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
Ok, there are at least two bad assumptions there. First, it assumes the radiator is at the same temperature as the GPU. But radiators become dramatically more effective as temperature increases, with radiated power increasing as the fourth
323.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
What are the assumptions behind that 1.1 m^2 figure?
324.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
Yes: the planned Thacker Pass Lithium Mine in Nevada.
325.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
(I could be confusing this with a hard rock lithium mine.)
326.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
Neutron stars are held up by neutron degeneracy pressure, btw, not electron degeneracy pressure. White dwarfs stars are held up by that (even though they can be very hot; the temperature needed to "lift" degeneracy increases wit
327.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
See also Wreck2Restored, a channel that documents the ongoing restoration of a 2-foot gauge steam locomotive. Crossheads and sliding valves featured! https://www.youtube.com/@Wreck2Restored
328.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
Is that mine in California the one powered by burning sulfur? If I recall correctly, they need sulfuric acid to extract the minerals, and they need power, and burning sulfur to make sulfuric acid produces steam, and sulfur is easier to shi
329.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
Ugh I got that wrong. Escape energy increases linearly with mass, so the temperature goes up linearly as well.
330.
by pfdietz 3mo ago
One thing this implies is that the escape velocity of such objects increases linearly with mass, so the surface temperature they can sustain without losing mass increases quadratically with their mass. Massive super-jovian planets can orbi

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