Nuke

heat pumps are awesome. totally capable of heating an alaskan home.

i kind of feel like this is loaded language and that such is not specific enough for scientific purposes. part of science is using precise language. they had a similar problem with "global warming" as well, while it was a good description of the trends observed in climate data, it was a bit too generalized and was quickly appropriated by political actors to argue whether it was real or not. the same thing is happening with the term "climate change", who's definition changes depending on which side of the argument its used by. i prefer using specific terms like "natural climate change" and "anthropogenic climate change" and usually give more credibility to those sources. this is probibly not caused by scientists themselves but by the science media being lazy with language for the sake of the scientifically illiterate. its just a general nitpick i have with the whole issue.

surge suppressors lol. i actually had something like that in 2008ish. avalanche took out some high tension lines somewhere about juneau ak, the resulting surge went through my german made power supply and fried my high end gaming rig that i pumped $4k into. this has made me severely doubt the supposedly superior "german engineering". anyway i put in new guts and got it to work for only another $1k and moved up to a core 2 quad. turns out my old board, memory and processor still worked with a power supply i got at a government surplus warehouse. the governor at the time got us a huge energy bonus tacked on to the pfd that year which more than made up for the damages. still it was enough to make me question the viability of the high end gaming rig. upper middle tier is fine and you can afford to upgrade on a shorter timetable.

i think the problem is people want to tout their own preferred solution at the expense of all the others. there are enough resources to explore all avenues. its a better strategy than putting all the eggs in one basket. im definitely pro fusion, pro fission and pro renewables. we need all the technology. we might have beamed solar before we have fusion, but that's no reason to defund iter. and we could have had nuclear today if not for the fear mongering of the past.

its almost always a vanity feature with no way to use for practical applications.

the performance of german v2 rockets may have been enough to send bombs to the united states directly. it would have been a much different war. however i doubt that these rockets would be very accurate, they barely managed to hit targets in britain. there were plans for suborbital rocket bombers, which may have been more practical. i don't think it would allow them to win the war, given how spread out industry was in the united states, but we would have had some rubble to deal with. they probibly would have managed to cripple the manhattan project though, assuming their intelligence knew of its existence. that would have probibly added several years to us involvement in the war.

why are backlit keyboards so useless. except for perhaps night use, keyboards with fully addressable leds are being grossly underutilized. it seems there is a lot you can do with application context. like color coding keys to onscreen functions and illuminating shortcuts when the appropriate modifiers are pressed. seems like its a grossly underutilized capability.

seeing as the climate was never fixed to begin with, nope. fusion, for all its benefits, will be initially very disruptive. its going to collapse all the economies that have been built on oil. a lot of rich countries will become poor countries practically overnight. it will however enable an increased quality of life around the globe in the mid term. then we will start worrymongering all the heat pollution reactors generate as the waste heat from first and second gen fusion plants starts going through the roof. later generations bring aneutronic fuels and direct conversion which stand to bring improved safety and efficiency. a lot of people trumpet he3 fusion as some kind of breakthrough that makes fusion viable, that is in error. he3 fuel cycles are a lot harder to fuse than the deuterium-tritium cycles. and if you can hit that cross section, you might as well shoot for proton-boron11, which is going to be perfect for direct conversion outputting only alpha particles and no side products (you need a star to fuse protons). i guess it really depends on what kind of space propulsion were using. it might also turn into a money pit. solar tech is experiencing rapid evolutions and it may turn out to be a lot cheaper per kw/h, especially if you can solve the storage problem or use orbital beamed power. this is especially true if we absolutely have to use a tokamak. as those things are going to be big, heavy and expensive to build. there are hard physical limits on how small you can make them. it will help if we can make more compact reactor designs work, as that drives down costs and lets you build them on an assembly line.

so its like an amon amarth album cover?

i once got a 4 year old niece very interested in doom.

more like the shuttle lost interest in not exploding. nvm, go the dates mixed up.

this will be my next game looks like somone beat me to it. i bet it will be the best cat simulator since alley cat.

android is probibly the closest we get to getting normies to use linux. that said i hate all phone style interfaces.

well with the direction guis are going, a command line looks a lot more like home.

i think its silly to depend on private servers but to keep the censorship centralized. a lot of people are calling this the 1.19.84 patch, which is just damn clever. that said anarchy servers just wont be the same without the hate speech.

i don't know but i used to have this "reversed polish notation" calculator i got from an old engineer i knew. it used to confuse the living hell out of me because it worked completely different from what a normal calculator does. iirc you had to enter your values first before your operator. i don't know if this has any real advantages or is just a regional thing.

computer science doesnt seem to believe in implied operators. for example x(y), the parentheses imply a multiplication operation. you almost never see that in code. it would always be x * (y). as a result ive always had a problem converting formalized mathematics into code and vise versa. then when you got it figured you learn about pointers and get even more confused. interestingly you can use a decimal point in the address left of the @ symbol. that always confuses the hell out of people. ive even encountered a couple websites that don't believe its a real email address.

with or without brackets it evaluates as 1 since division is the lowest priority operation. if you really want to confuse people, put an exponent in there.

in programming i think the mantra is "when in doubt, use brackets". math expects you to know order of operations, but for programmers they can be arbitrarily different from language to language. mathematics could learn a thing or two from computer science, in that readability is often more important than elegance.

im all for martian libertarianism, and the lack of air certainly keeps the riff raff off my lawn loose martian soil.

i saw a video the other day about something called accelerated basalt weathering. its a carbon sequestration technique where by mining waste is pulverized and used as a soil additive in farms. supposedly it restores soil nutrients while also causing a runoff that makes it to the ocean and feeds crustaceans. when they die their shells sequester carbon. the extra krill will likely also help the ocean's food chains and it will also reduce ocean acidity. its a slow natural process cranked to 11 by industrial means. long term consequences? probibly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_weathering

it was probibly insured. their adjuster just got a raise.

splashed my coke on my $250 keyboard. i cleaned it up best i could, removed keycaps, cleaned it with isopropyl, washed the keys, etc. seems like i killed an entire matrix row. i unplugged it last night for further repair. but this morning it seems to have returned to normal. for now. think a $250 keyboard could handle beverage spills better. like put a conformal coating on the pcb or put gaskets around the key switches or something.

if were being honest, vpns are just a piracy tax. using it to gain access to paid content outside your region doesn't work so well. a lot of websites detect that you are using an ip owned by a vpn provider and lock you out. games in particular as vpns are often used to dodge bans. i couldn't even log on to gmail with my vpn running without some convoluted login scheme. in fact the modern paradigm for using the internet is to announce all your information if you want in. anonymity indicates that you cannot be trusted. going down the list of legit uses, its really hard to find one. using it for securing public wifi is a legit use case, but you could also roll your own tunnel between you and your home network for free, and you control the encryption keys. if you want to browse anonymously, just use tor. it also doesn't help that my virus scanner fear mongers that my ip address is showing and that cookies exist, both are just how the internet works. seems they love to blatantly play on the ignorance of the typical tech user to sell them services they don't really need.

i live in a part of the world where if you dont like the weather, wait 15 minutes. you never know what its going to do. one minute the sun is out and im hot, then the wind picks up, the couds roll in and it starts raining and a few moments later its sunny again. like today i needed to run to the store, a 15 minute walk tops, both ways. it was cold so i took a coat, by the time i got down there i was sweating like a pig. but when i got out of the store it was pouring rain for two minutes, when i came in the house my coat was stuffed into one of the bags and i was overheating. alaska is weird.