And yet it did work, with positive results shown over a year, right? It seems that the reasons why this "could never work" like cracks, dust, and vibrations might have perfectly reasonable solutions. Solar panels have gotten so cheap that it might not be as important to install them in perfect conditions, and other factors like real estate, ease of maintenance, access to the grid come into play in interesting ways. I suppose long term results are yet to be seen, but it doesn't seem ridiculous to me.
"Molecular biologists tend to focus on characteristics like metabolism, growth and development, response to stimuli, reproduction, and the ability to process information or evolve."
Even if you stretch the others real hard, I don't see how you'd argue that the Earth "reproduces." Especially not the more rigorous definition of reproduces fertile copies of itself which can evolve.
I see quite a lot of technical data. Check their whole site including the documents page and youtube videos. (Also, I know them, they're very legit.) https://www.c-motive.com/about/documents/
Thinking about this more... and just thinking out loud here. So this pattern essentially happens when: In whatever base you're in a number x^n gives an end of "0" plus a remainder of the number x.
So a number would be automorphic if ((x^n - 1) * n) always ends in "0" (to whatever length that matches the number).
It just occurred to me that it was weird how 6^n always ends in 6. And that it never occured to me before that that was weird. 5s of course do that too. And I wondered what numbers do it in other bases and why. And I found this nice blog post talking about it. And was surprised to find that very large numbers also have this property.
Terrament is working on a modular gravity storage solution that uses deep mine shafts to gain 20x more height than stacking blocks above ground. So you don’t need water or mountains. And since gravity storage uses ballast that is really just dumb weight, it could even be economical to make that ballast a secondary storage like thermal storage.
With climate weirding accelerating, I'm getting concerned that it's only a matter of time before this road continues to collapse in new sections and it will no longer be feasible to keep repairing it as we are now. I'm also worried that sections on both sides of big sur could collapse leaving thousands stranded.
Anyone have knowledge about any studies on these scenarios?
Or, the media is gaslighting people to think violent crime is up even if it’s not. Which is a rational possibility since reporting crime has political motivations.
From stories I’ve read, I think people generally, and including Feynman, concluded that the sprinkler would not rotate. Because conservation of angular momentum. Which is almost true. So what’s fun is that this experiment shows it’s not entirely true, if you have a sensitive enough experiment that takes into account more nuance of the fluid dynamics.
Yes that is the experiment. I think when you do that it doesn’t move at all because the effect is tiny so will normally be nullified by friction? And I think the research used very low friction so they could observe the small effect.
I'll add that this could become particularly important in the 4d case once the sprinkler starts moving. Cause when it's still, the pressure gradient will create a partial-torus like shape around opening, but once it starts rotating, the outer side (rotating around the sprinkler's axis) of the 4D version of this shape has a larger diameter than the inside. So the inner side will be more affected by the environmental water's momentum state than the outside which has more water mass in it's scope rotating around the sprinkler axis.
Hmm, is it possible that this could be partly caused because the water gets sucked not just directly down the pipe, but around the lip of the pipe opening... and one edge of the pipe opening is further away from the center axis of rotation (of the whole sprinkler) than the other end of the pipe opening. I'd think that whether or not this would have an effect could be easily tested by varying sizes of the pipe opening or how far away the opening was from the center to see if it made a difference -- even if the bends in the pipe were the same (the authors seem to attribute the whole effect to the bends in the arms).
This book played an important role in pushing me into a career in software. During the recession in 2009, I lost my industrial design job. And GEB started me down a rabbit hole learning more and more about software and learning to code. That turned into a great software career. I've also read hacker news just about every day since.
Hydrogen is associated with Earthquakes and can maybe even predict them!
In areas with recent tectonic activity: “Higher hydrogen concentrations were observed,” and “hydrogen gas was observed in ground water.” [pg 20]
“[Correlated with earthquakes,] hydrogen concentrations measured at continuous monitoring sites show abrupt changes in concentration over several orders of magnitude, up to 10 times, in a short period of time.” [pg 40]
“Indeed, at epicenters of large earthquakes a reduction in the ozone layer above them has been observed.” [pg 40]
“A systematic study of hydrogen in aquifers shows that H2 concentrations are in- versely correlated with the age of the area's last tectonic activity.” [pg 41]
“Another study shows that hydrogen concentrations in earthquake-associated faults are usually much higher than concentrations in non-earthquake faults.” [pg 41]
‘During earthquakes hydrogen concentrations in fault zones have been shown to increase by several orders of magnitude.” [pg 41]
“Numerous articles discuss hydrogen as a good earthquake indicator and the possibility of monitoring hydrogen for the prediction of seismic events.” [pg 41]
More detail below
I've read that there is a strong correlation between the timing of earthquakes and the volume of gasses like hydrogen and methane leaking out of the earth. The volume of gas can change very significantly before and after an earthquake. There is newfound attention on this topic because there is a race to discover and harvest natural geologic hydrogen (look up latest news about "natural hydrogen").
I found this research pretty mind blowing and took these notes to highlight this topic.
I posted another comment above about recent discoveries that the Earth has enormous quantities of hydrogen deep underground which is constantly bubbling to the surface - and in fact, flowing all the way up to the upper atmosphere and even escaping into space (!). So this would indeed seem to provide a flux even deep underground. Understanding this geologic hydrogen cycle is a fascinating new field.
Very cool research.
On the topic of hydrogen deep underground: I'm not an expert, just a fascinated amateur, but I've been fascinated by the recent discovery that there is enormous amounts of hydrogen below the earth. In fact, this article mentions hydrogen forming by serpentinization, and says that the researchers were shocked to find so much hydrogen. Recent research indicates that hydrogen may exist deep in the earth from processes other than serpentinization as well. There are now a handful of companies working to extract this natural hydrogen to use as a source of green energy. Exciting stuff.
I've also compiled some of my own notes on that paper here which provide some summaries on the multiple fascinating sub-topics. (E.G. hydrogen may be a driver of earthquakes! And we may be able to use hydrogen samples to predict earthquakes! Some predict that there may be even more biomass under the earth driven by sources like hydrogen and methane than there is above ground!) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pnW4HRq6E2up0DhIoxjCyGS6...
There's lots of exciting progress happening with underground mechanical storage like this. It's so interesting that the U.S. DOE has been studying underground pumped hydro since at least the 1980.(https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/6517343)
Today:
- Hydrostor just signed a near $1 Billion contract to build their first underground facility in California using advanced compressed air with water to help efficiency.
See also: Green Gravity, Gravitricity, Terrament, Renewell, RheEnergise, and more.
RIP Snacky. Oh how I loved my weekly pilgrimage to you. The spice in the air, the steam rising off the Bibim Bop, and the warm glow of anime playing on the television behind the bar. You're fondly missed.