wolfram74

9 ms·

61.
by wolfram74 3y ago
OPEC is a possibility because ease of access to petrofuels was very sporadic, but the same is not true for battery chemistries, sodium and iron batteries are being used for storage scale and even some transport cases [0][1] and even lithium
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by wolfram74 3y ago
I'd like to know some timelines on that, cursory googling get's me Portugal decriminalized in 2001, Oregon only did that in 2020. Systems don't change on a dime, how long was the transition period for Portugal?
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by wolfram74 3y ago
we know transitioning to pv/wind is going to lead to some months where we've got megawatt-hours coming out of our ears. If the only problem is energy cost, that won't be a problem long.
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by wolfram74 3y ago
one upside is many modern rockets use methane, synthesizing methane with pv/wind power would be much lower impact, depending on how much of the exhaust is actually at escape velocity it could be very slightly carbon negative, like new
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by wolfram74 3y ago
One thing I took from the bread series was how big of an impact energy storage had on social structures. The fact that it was hard to keep your last harvest edible for much longer than it took to grow your next harvest shaped /everythi
66.
by wolfram74 3y ago
As the seasonality of power becomes more and more pronounced, it'll make more and more sense to make seasonal loads. Cheap to build but electrically expensive to operate manufacturing processes that take advantage of borderline free po
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by wolfram74 3y ago
On average, yes. This is also the tendency for most diseases, too evolve into a form less destructive to their habitat so it's easier for them to get to new places to infect. Given that this is biology I will note there are surely coun
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by wolfram74 3y ago
Do you think it makes a difference if the person is bad person but their work contributes meaningfully to their field vs if the person is affable but their work is geared towards reducing the signal to noise ratio of other channels of commu
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by wolfram74 3y ago
When thinking of load balancing over years, you need to weigh seasonal loads that have low capital costs and high energy costs running for 30~50% of the year vs a battery that only discharges ~once a year. The amortization prospects of such
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by wolfram74 3y ago
The fact that musk has publicly called induced demand nonsense[0] despite his launch company relying on it is an irony I find delicious. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2020/12/29/elon-mu
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by wolfram74 3y ago
If you produced all the USA's electricity in a year with fusion and collected all the resulting helium with 100% efficiency, you'd have collected less than 1% of the amount of helium we go through in that year.
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by wolfram74 3y ago
This is a pet peeve of mine when people talk about the advantages of fusion, if you did all of the US power budget with DT fusion that would generate very close to 10 million moles of helium, or 4E7 grams of helium, or 2E8 liters at stp. Th
73.
by wolfram74 3y ago
One thing I was curious about in that post I didn't catch was what kind of reader they would need. I've been a bit curious about the state of microfiche readers in the recent past, and going much denser is going to require even mo
74.
by wolfram74 3y ago
As others have noted, depends on which stars you're using as reference points. We've done some interesting long-distance parallax stuff at the demo scale, new horizons took some pictures last year to that effect. https:/&#x2
75.
by wolfram74 3y ago
the "right number" is strongly dependent on what the consequences of false positives are. If you're comfortable pulling numbers from thin air, 0.5% of these guided patrols lead to prevented crimes, but 10% lead to arrests of
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by wolfram74 3y ago
The problem is first past the post is in the running for the worst way to run a democracy, so basically any reform option would work, and it's hard to get consensus around change.
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by wolfram74 3y ago
I was raised to consider ordering takeout in truly awful weather as pretty rude.
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by wolfram74 3y ago
But if the network is as a whole pushing full capacity, spreading out the load won't help because there's barely any slack to spread it into. You could get 4x resolution, but you'll only get 1/4th the amount of footage.
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by wolfram74 3y ago
And the general thrust of pointing out things like this is to discuss whether or not the law is wrong. As laws are made and enforced by societies, it is entirely possible that they might need to be changed by those same societies as their n
80.
by wolfram74 3y ago
The point being, RTSC just tears the floor out on some of the operating costs for it, so since all the control schemes and even a lot of the design work is already established practice, maglev /ought/ to proliferate a lot more qui
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by wolfram74 3y ago
Of that particular list, I would say levitating trains are currently solved from a technical view point[0], and are awaiting economic viability. I know enough about fusion to say while having stronger magnetic fields make things easier, the
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by wolfram74 3y ago
Small effect sizes make it easy to confuse noise for positive results. Throw into it the very strong desire to see the thing work, and, well, even the best of us are only human.
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by wolfram74 3y ago
and for say, chemistry or astronomy, that's less of problem. It's like if all computer science research had been done exclusively with, say, ruby, which doesn't allow functions to be passed as arguments. For lots of things th
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by wolfram74 3y ago
If we'd put more efforts into settling space, the demand for photovoltaics would have been higher. That might have pushed us down the learning curve faster and PV might have started turning coal power plants into stranded assets in the
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by wolfram74 3y ago
Unfortunately their statement is too vague to be wrong, obviously there are numerous different ways to define global temperature, and different ways to measure it at the time, and different ways to infer it after the fact. amongst all that,
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by wolfram74 3y ago
That there is no complicated life in Sol system besides on earth, or even within 50 light years of Sol system, and that there is complicated life in other parts of the universe are easily mutually compatible facts. Considering our search ex
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by wolfram74 3y ago
I don't think that's quite as damning a problem with Savage as with some people, he is an inveterate tinkerer afterall.
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by wolfram74 3y ago
I think when you're trying to be convincing of a counter intuitive or controversial point, it helps to start with less objectionable parts of the argument first. If an argument involves several steps, A to B to C ending in D, but D is
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by wolfram74 3y ago
I dunno, they were taken at different times too, so none of them were within thousands of miles of each other relative to the galactic core. So that sentence is clearly not true either. "from the same place", place ~ region or as
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by wolfram74 3y ago
Having people do these long commitments to independently reinvent techniques, with the prevailing odds being worse alternatives to what already exist, is financial insanity under the current regime of only rewarding people for value they ca

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