Posts by midgepad

Massive energy storage system goes online in UK

Insulate Britain. And

Shut your oven door.

Dynamotors, ancient screaming horror

I recall sitting in front of noisy valve radio sets which made EHT from 12V batteries by running a common axle which was a 12V motor at one end and a generator at the otter.

I recall there were big AC ones including ones which ran on 50Hz at one end and 60Hz at the other, separated by a very long DC cable.

But just spinning a big thing up without blowing steam into it would make a good stabiliser, even better if you want a gyroscope.

Re: Decommissioning?

Demand is not fixed in time.

Also, every megawatt of electricity produced from the sun is a megawatt and a half of gas not burnt - it isn't cheap or unlimited and that will steadily bite more under assumptions independent of warming - and CO2 not yet added to the air.

Saving spare solar etc capacity - as it develops - by electrolysis and burning the result in those gas combjned cycle turbines may be worth doing to avoid wasting sunshine or piping gases to homes. Once it is spare, it is cheap.

Re: Decommissioning?

Your assertion is that we have built every wind turbine and every solar panel that will ever be in place, and that there will be no tidal power.

Oh, and that fission will fizzle out and not be replaced either.

Could you show your workings for that, please?

Winter

Perhaps we'll have an occasional week off work. Bad huh.

However, your arithmetic is wrong.

A daytime with no wind and no sun is unlikely.

The demand is elastic to a degree.

And while the wind may, the tide waits for no week.

Re: Decommissioning?

Extinction is the externalised cost of the fossil fuel approach.

Cheap, right?

Watchdog warns UK health data platform could damage patients' trust

Describing as health leaders

People who failed to gain the confidence of either patients - citizens - or the health professions seems unjustified.

They might drive, but are not followed.

Worried about your datacenter carbon footprint? Why not put it in orbit?

Name a satellite deorbited from

Geosynch orbit.

LOX/H2

Tell us how much CO2 that produces.

Cygnus cargo ship makes it to ISS with blanketed solar panel

Down a chute.

Launches I think 6 at a go

Look! Up in the sky! Proof of concept for satellites beaming energy to Earth!

After we ban crypto mining in the Earth's atmosphere ...

... a obvious use for large amounts of power in orbit, which needn't be GEO, arises.

Moves power generation and heat dissipation off Earth, apparently a market exists to fund the lift.

GEO is

a lot higher.

40 000km IIRC

Open source's totally non-secret weapon big tech dares not use: Staying relevant

Nobody can prevent you

Is the argument.

Your abilities and inclinations are no more and no less a factor than in other tasks.

A digression, but

FWIW the bits I use work fine, thank you.

NASA details totally doable, not science fiction plan for sending Mars rocks to Earth

Nasa landed in reverse in 1969

and take off again,

And a few times more.

And with a more delicate and difficult payload.

Batteries with a 3 year shelf life are no trouble, even without panels or Pu.

The article mentions the Mars return vehicle in orbit, awaiting rendezvous with the Mars to orbit launcher.

You should think better, rant less.

No, I will not pay the bill. Why? Because we pay you to fix things, not break them

Oh no ...

It isn't!!!

50% of Limeys*

don't have a religious component to it.

I don't mean Xiand, I mean the whole range of gods and whatnot.

So let's go with the winter solstice, which demonstrably happens.

* lemons were known to be more effective - later explained by their higher content of vitamin C, but at the time Scurvy went out of fashion England/Britain didn't have any friends among the many places that grew lots of lemons.

So, limes.

They do go well with rum though

Juno what? Jovian moon Europa is looking rugged

CHON

With traces of, indeed, sulphur etc, is the basic recipe.

The Martian Way, by

Isaac Asimov.

I'm not sure we've seen the icebergs yet, but they might be there.

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

Re: Customer pushback

Even if you don't rely on aerobraking for any of the slowing down, you are climbing up the solar gravity well, so you won't need half the fuel at the far end.

You also have a much lighter ship to slow down than you started boosting from the vicinity of Earth.

One reason why Venus is so hard.

Post-Brexit 'science superpower' UK still hasn't appointed a science minister

Conspicuously didnt

work.

Surprising no detached observer.

Re: IMF

You vote for an MP.

In practice all of them stand on a Party prospectus.

Public speaking

Is a core role in the job she has sought and obtained.

It is an important job.

There are other jobs, in fact all other jobs are not it.

We are not unreasonable in criticising her if she lacks a required ability, facility, skill, capability, or inclination ... and takes that job.

Update your Tesla now before the windows put your fingers in a pinch

I've had Br Leyland cars with

lighting by Lucas.

Don't tell me that story.

Joe Lucas: Prince of Darkness.

Datacenter migration plan missed one vital detail: The leaky roof

100 years ago

I think the bulk of construction would be done with subunits one or two people could keep lifting all day.

Tesla Megapack battery ignites at substation after less than 6 months

Re: Look to Dinorwig

Bombastic rubbish.

Constant speed propellors

Are old tech.

Re: Look to Dinorwig

Balls.

There is z lot of inertia in one turbine, and massive something like inertia in the Grid.

(Why was it built)

Generators on the Grid are synced, the people doing it have had some practice.

Re: Look to Dinorwig

You were planning to hide it?

Rather than deal with it?

Like BP in 1974

The energy

To spin up comes from the wind.

Which, you know, free.

'I Don't Care About Cookies' extension sold to Avast

Annoyingly Reach sites "countyonline" continue to ask.

Ah well, next version or extension.

'Last man standing in the floppy disk business' reckons his company has 4 years left

Re: "Extinct media still in demand"

In the wild?

Document Foundation starts charging €8.99 for 'free' LibreOffice

You know better than the scare quotes.

French has libre and gratuit, English conflates them as free.

Libre Office is, perhaps surprisingly, libre. Free as in speech.

The FSF and other FLOSS licence writers make it perfectly clear that charging for media, convenience, configuration, support is fine.

That many do all or some of those things gratuit is just an indication of the size of actual costs involved. Too cheap to meter.

Appeals court already under fire for upholding Texas no-content-moderation law

Place called Britain

2000 years ago there was, and the Romans were there, no?

Re: Consitutaional right to block content and legal precedent?

Are they publishers?

How this Mars rover used its MOXIE to convert CO2 into precious oxygen

Very, if you have

CO2, and don't have water.

CO2

Ww2 submarines had episodes of up to 4%CO2.

Gradual rise in prolonged hiding.

People didn't feel well, but they didn't die of that.

Pure...

It is partial pressures, not percentage.

Some inert gas is good, to stop absorption atelectasis - small portions of lung losing gas and sticking shut.

But given the 3psi of O2 you'll be fine.

Given 30 psi of O2 you'll convulse.

US warns cryptominers must cut power use to avoid busting US carbon goals

Ban it from the planet

The difficult question about solar power satellites was always how thd power that paid for them, and an orbital infrastructure around them, was to get to the planet.

Use it up there. Ship the data.

Make use of power within Earth's atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere illegal, watch as had panels dread.

If they'd like to drop inward a little - more sunlight, less eclipses - then thry could cluster around L1 and marginally decrease Earth's insolation helping to counter existing trouble from prior burning.

A few implementation details, but the market I'm told will work such things out.

NASA picks a tailor for Artemis moonwalking suits

Re: " ... land a woman and person of color ... "

in no way excluded.

Why the end of Optane is bad news for all IT

MUMPS/M and globals

I know little of this stuff, but I gather MUMPS, and then M, regard the whole collection of data - a medical record system for instance - as a global.

And it is mapped onto an area of hard drive.

MUMPS has been around for a long time, but perhaps would prefer Optane to rust already?

Re: Amazing... But also a bit stupid

1. For Petabytes of data, according to the article.

NASA scrubs Artemis mission yet again because SLS just can't handle the pressure

Leaving the Moon

Catapult at a slightly complicated level I think, straightening out toward ejection end.

Nontrivial to build, the Moon being a harsh mistress and all that.

Legate

perhaps?

Methane makes no soot

In the rocket, hence good for turnround on Earth, and is one of the easier fuels to make on Mars.

But it does make CO2, which we have too much of, albeit less than RP1 would.

Hydrogen makes water, which drops out.

Convicted felon busted for 3D printing gun parts

Re: Can any American gun enthusiasts please explain

A racist thing.

They've not got over slaving yet.

Tesla Full Self-Driving 'fails' to notice child-sized objects in testing

Re: But ....

Nobody does.

Quite often human drivers

manage to miss pedestrians.

Quite often these automated systems manage to miss pedestrians.

It is nice the smaller the gap gets where neither manages it.

The large overlap is in retrospect.

Doctor gave patients the wrong test results due to 'printer problems'

I'm a pessimist

And after several decades my interest is in failure modes.

I teach people how to stop the car.

Then I tell them how to start it.

You might remember Buncefield

The Trusts involved had sensibly demanded that their backup systems were in a separate data centre from the primary.

And their provider did that.

East Wing, West Wing.

Next to the boundary of the oil depot which went very boom.