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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • It turns out, that for the values we are talking about here, it actually more or less does! A lemon has a pH of around 2.5, while “Flow” has an advertised pH of 8.1. This means roughly that to neutralize 1L of this water you need approximately 0.4mL of lemon juice or about 8 drops/half a gram. It’s hard to tell how much a “spritz” is intended to be, but a single lemon contains about 60mL of juice, so this represents about 0.67% of the total juice inside.

    It’s a surprising consequence of using a logarithmic scale for pH.


  • I am a bit late to this party, but I thought I’d piggy back on your comment to halfway address it using math.

    We want to run data centers cool. This means keeping the center itself as close to 20°C as possible.

    If we lose our convection and conduction then our satellite can only radiate away heat. The formula governing a black body radiator is P = σAT^4. We will neglect radiation received, though this is not actually a negligible amount.

    If we set T = 20°C = 294K. Then we have the relationship of P/A = 423.6 W/m^2

    According to an article I found on the Register from this April:

    According to Google, the larger of the two offered pods will consume roughly 10 megawatts under full load.

    This would imply a surface area of at minimum 23600 m^2 or 5.8 acres of radiator.

    I don’t know how large, physically, such a pod would be. But looking at the satellite view of a google data center in Ohio that I could find, the total footprint area of one of the large building of their data centers is ballpark in that range. I don’t know how many “pods” that building contains.

    So it’s not completely outside of the realm of possibility. It’s probably something that can be engineered with some care, despite my earlier misgivings. But putting things in orbit is very expensive, and latency is also a big factor. I can’t think of any particular practical advantages to putting this stuff into orbit other than getting them out of the jurisdiction of governments. (Not counting the hype and stock song and dance from simply announcing you’re going to set a few billion dollars on fire to put AI into space.)












  • I googled it for you.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome

    In 90 percent of these individuals, the syndrome is caused by the Y chromosome’s SRY gene, which triggers male reproductive development, being atypically included in the crossing over of genetic information that takes place between the pseudoautosomal regions of the X and Y chromosomes during meiosis in the father.[2][7] When the X with the SRY gene combines with a normal X from the mother during fertilization, the result is an XX genetic male. Less common are SRY-negative individuals, those who are genetically females, which can be caused by a mutation in an autosomal or X chromosomal gene.[2] The masculinization of XX males is variable.



  • I’m currently working on a government funded project to develop a robot to locate nuclear contamination in soil (for cleaning up the Hartford and Savannah River sites, where we used to make nuclear weapons). The idea being that we use robots to perform these surveys rather than handheld detectors.

    My recommendation though, is focus only on one thing. Having two degrees has not made me particularly marketable, it is certainly unique, but HR doesn’t actually seem to give much of a shit. Instead, it’s much better to focus on one thing, get a Masters or PhD in it (double degrees also suck for this as well, because you don’t have time for research and publishing when you’re graduating with 195 credit hours taken out of 128 required, so even if you have a good GPA it’s hard to get into grad school).


  • I did a double major in college.

    In my computer engineering courses, I learned digital signal processing, and then took a follow-up course on signals and systems because I enjoyed the material and I had an eye on robots, because robots are dope.

    Imagine my surprise when I got to 4th year and I suddenly found myself using the exact same math to handle thermal and fission product neutron poisoning feedback in my nuclear reactor physics courses.




  • I don’t know much about lay person explanations of nuclear engineering that are accurate and accessible. I can perhaps recommend the textbooks I used in my major? Nuclear engineering is a cousin to mechanical engineering, so if you have a background in differential equations then you have all of the tools necessary to start learning the material. The physics of nuclear interactions are mostly abstracted away into tables and data, (such as the Evaluated Nuclear Data File (ENDF) which you can browse online here) so you don’t need to learn Nuclear Physics beyond the complete basics.

    The introductory course at my old university, which kind of discusses general things rather than specifics, uses “Nuclear Engineering Fundamentals” by Masterson. From here if you’re specifically interested in nuclear reactors, you can study Radiation Physics (Turner’s “Atoms, Radiation, and Radiation Profection”), and then Reactor Physics (Lamarsh’s “Introduction to Nuclear Engineering” and Lewis’s “Fundamental of Nuclear Reactor Physics” and Duderstadt’s “Nuclear Reactor Analysis”). From there, if you have a background in Heat Transfer and Thermodynamics (very important) you can learn how practical (rather than abstract) reactors work using Todreas’s Nuclear Systems I. This covers mostly PWRs and BWRs. Undergrad doesn’t talk much in curriculum about other reactor types (Fluoride, Lead Eutectic, Breeders, etc) that’s mostly Graduate material.

    Please note this isn’t a complete major, there’s a lot of material about radiation protection and shielding and health effects and so on.