Thevenin @ Thevenin @beehaw.org

Posts

4

Comments

167

Joined

2 yr. ago

Makeover day!

I admitted to some of my friends that I'd love the chance to get some makeup tips from them, and they pounced on that with unexpected enthusiasm. They scheduled an appointment at the mall, saying it was a rite of passage. So I got my makeup done by a professional makeup artist who taught me how to do things like foundation matching and mixing color changer, all while a gaggle of absolutely wonderful people took notes and told me I looked beautiful.

I've been running on that high for weeks now.

I did! 👋 Unfortunately, I mostly infodump about engineering in the comments, which is maybe not the kind of engagement we need.

Solid point. A laptop battery is around 60Wh, and charging that in 1 minute would pull 3.6kW from the outlet, or roughly double what a US residential outlet can deliver.

Supercaps stay pretty cool under high current charging/discharging, but your laptop would have to be the size of a mini fridge.

The research paper itself was only talking about using the tech for wearable electronics, which tend to be tiny. The article probably made the cars-and-phones connection for SEO. Good tech, bad journalism.

Yeah, this matches my experience.

A supercapacitor buffer will cost around twice as much and deliver around 1/10th the watt-hours of a similarly-sized lead acid battery. And lead acid isn't exactly great to begin with.

Capacitors are useful, but only in applications where the total amount of energy stored is more-or-less unimportant.

Yeah, no. This is not about chargers or batteries or phones or cars. This study is about improved charge/discharge rates for supercapacitors.

Supercaps have very high flow rate, but extremely low capacity. Put them in a phone or a car and it would run very fast for five minutes. Supercaps are useful, don't get me wrong, but they're not batteries.

Very cool research from UC Boulder, but the journalism leans way too far into clickbait.

I'd argue your SO might not be displaying neurotypical behavior.

Between 50-85% of autistic spectrum people (plus a significant portion of people with PTSD or depression) experience Alexithymia, or significant difficulty in recognizing and analyzing their emotional state.

When I'm feeling bad, my SO frequently assumes I'm withholding the reason from him in some sort of passive-aggressive mindgame, and I have to remind him that I barely know what my mood is, let alone what's causing it.

I'm getting better at it, but it's a lot of work and I still regularly mistake stomachaches for anxiety.

Transportation is a necessity, and I believe every inelastic market deserves a nationalized alternative to prevent price gouging. Like how the USPS keeps UPS and FEDEX in line. With that being said, nationalization doesn't fix this particular problem.

China is run like a giant capitalist cartel (in all but name), and appropriately, their ultimate weapon in their hunt for global monopolies is the provision of slave labor. The number of slaves in Xinjiang alone is estimated in the hundreds of thousands, and their labor has been credibly linked to the production of cotton (face masks), polysilicon (solar panels), and aluminum and lithium (EVs).

It's no coincidence that these are the industries being slapped with tariffs. No amount of subsidization or nationalization can level a playing field that's been tilted by slavery. You don't outcompete slavery, you either penalize goods suspected of involving it, or you go full John Brown.

Even with unlimited funding, you want to scale the size of the train to the population that could potentially ride on it.

A P42 locomotive pulling 7 Amtrak superliner cars is 700 tons of steel getting 0.4 miles per gallon of diesel. That's a crapton of mining and drilling and CO2, and it would be incredibly wasteful if it ended up carrying, like, two people at a time.

Nebula link for those interested.

When a smaller nation aligns itself with a larger empire or coalition, it will gravitate towards that collective's philosophy. Sometime's it's imposed through political or military pressure, or "encouraged" through subversion, but it can just as easily happen through the natural influence of a larger and more prolific culture.

Historically, there have been more socialist and/or communist states associated with the USSR than not. Especially when measured by population.

Sodium batteries are commercially available as of early this year. I've seen Hakadi and Sriko tested independently on Youtube -- they're the real deal (sodium has a unique charging curve), but they have the same/similar organic electrolyte as LFP cells (I believe Natron uses PBA on both anode and cathode plus water-based electrolyte).

https://srikobatteries.com/product-category/sodium-batteries/sodium-cells/

https://hakadibattery.com/collections/sodium-ion-battery-cells-3v

2-3°C is the worst case if we stick to existing policy. If we flinch or back down on those policies, then the sky's the limit.

Youtube videos often gloss over the details for the sake of uninhibited futurism.

Large-scale hydrogen electrolysis has a cost of around 55kWh/kg, and when you combust the H2 directly you get about 39kWh/kg back. Without compression/transport, using H2 as a heating fuel is 71% efficient.

H2 is usually compressed for transport. Compression of 1 kg of H2 to 700 bar costs about 5kWh of additional electricity. I'll spare you the calcs, but truck transport is under 1kWh/kg H2. This reduces our efficiency to 39kWh/61kWh or 64%.

Converting H2 to ammonia takes the place of the compressor and truck. 2 mols of ammonia burn for 162kcal, less than the 204kcal you'd get from 3 mols of H2. The Haber-Bosch process reduces output to 31kWh per kg of H2 put in. This reduces out efficiency to 31kWh/55kWh or 56%.

With currently-proven cracking technology, it costs around 23kcal/mol of ammonia, reducing overall efficiency to about 55%. It is more effective to burn ammonia directly than to convert it into H2 and burn the H2.

Using ammonia as a transport medium removes a bunch of technical problems, but it introduces new ones. It's corrosive, it's toxic, it burns eyes/lungs/skin, and it wastes more energy than you'd think.

There are quite a few comanies now that follow some version of "name-blind hiring," where the system scrubs the name from the resume before the interviewer sees it, for the sake of avoiding biases. These companies would be a good place to start.

Outside of name-blind hiring, a lot of people use nicknames or given names on resumes, particularly if they have non-english names that could tempt biases or be hard to pronounce. It is widespread and completely kosher as long as HR has your current legal name for your background check and W-2.

No matter what, HR will need your legal name. But in my experience, HR departments tend to be accepting and accustomed to maintaining confidentiality. And they don't make the hiring decisions, anyway.

Tangential: ranked choice voting seems to be gaining momentum in progressive states. Definitely keep pushing for that, too.

$1.9m/MW is dirt cheap for nuclear, about one fifth the cost of a new site. Easily competitive with the initial cost of wind+storage.

I've only just recently begun exploring my gender identity. This is all very new for me, and very raw.

Gender is subjective. Defining it is like trying to nail jello to a wall. I cannot think of a single description that is exclusively feminine. When I imagine myself as a woman, I see myself in a new light, through a new lens. It feels like home. Gender is a construct, but that's not to say it's meaningless -- marriage is a construct, too. If it truly is possible to redefine gender as anything you want, then why do I want so very badly to be a woman and not a man?

I never realized how much I despised my body hair until the first time I removed it. The first time my spouse called me "beautiful," I cried, because until that moment I did not realize how many decades I'd been waiting to hear it. Gender is expressive. It's how I see myself, but also how others see me. The desire to express is the desire to be known; I want people to know that I am gentle and nurturing, fragile yet strong, irrational yet relatable in my strangeness.

But I could be wrong about this, every single word of it, and it wouldn't make any difference. Because I started down this path by deciding to want what I wanted, to feel what I felt, to act without trying to justify my actions to some invisible judge. And when I wear a cute outfit and see myself in the mirror, I smile. When my spouse calls me "wife," I blush. When I think of femininity, I think of reinventing myself. To me, femininity is daring to live a life I have dreamed for myself. It is not troubling my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood.

Gender is nothing. But it's also everything.

Despite the fediverse's reputation for leaning leftist, I feel like such a stranger with how often I find myself arguing that the collective action and solidarity of the working class can and has improved the material outcomes of nations, with or without the capital of the owner class, and with or without the approval of the government.

Fight in whatever way makes sense to you. Some people will carpool or use less hot water. Some will put peer pressure on wealthy acquaintances. Some will alter design requirements or RFQs. Some will [redacted] a pipeline. It all works towards the same end.

Yes, this is the fault of the owner class, but who do you think is going to force them to change if we all sit on our hands and say, "I dunno, man, that sounds like someone else's responsibility."

My husband (transmasc) found this an immediately responded, "Someone needs to tell Kristen about HRT right now."