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Comment by hangonhn | Hacker News Reader

The MIT Club of Northern California posted a video a few years ago on this exact topic and reactor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4

This thing came out of MIT, at least according to the video, and was really the collective efforts of a bunch of MIT grad students who made the breakthrough partially by taking a very Silicon Valley startup approach of using off-the-shelf parts, experimenting with new ideas, and starting small. I don't know if Professor Whyte framed it that way to appeal to the crowd or not.

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Here's a more recent (1 year old) talk that gives a bit of a progress update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY6U4wB-oYM

Here is an even more recent (last month) update https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8uYNhevRtk

tl;dw: SPARC is on track to Q=9, and there will be a magnet demonstrator in June, this year

How in January 2021 after a full year of pandemic lockdowns and video conferences, has someone hosting something like this not invested in a microphone?

They are a post-doc? They probably don’t see it is a priority in their budget.

Most laptops and phones already have a microphone or two.

You missed "rather terrible". The other day someone on our sales team did a presentation to the company, and they used the microphone on a $3 headset - I practically couldn't hear half the things they said because the audio was so muffled. This is someone who has calls with people all day!

If you record any audio or make calls with people outside your organisation, for the love of God, please invest in some sort of microphone upgrade. Even the $20 no-name Chinese microphones you get on Amazon are miles better than what is built into laptops.

While I agree with you get a better microphone. Buying Chinese crap is a lottery I bought my self a Chinese condenser microphone 60usd that thing is worse than my iPhone headset. My lesson when it comes to buying quality is to only buy name brand things.

> If you record any audio or make calls with people outside your organisation,

... please ask your employer to invest in some sort of microphone upgrade. Unless you're self-employed, paying for work equipment is not your responsibility.

Sound dampening as well. Fabric lined partitions, just sitting angled to walls, etc. $3 headset isn’t the end of the world by itself but capping at $3 total invested in setup is surely going to ruin the sound.

And if you're on desktop make sure to plug it in the right jack port. I spent 3 years wondering why all the mics I bought were garbage until I realized it was my front panel that was garbage and was messing up the signal.

Because it sounds perfectly fine for them. Nerds tend to obsess over a narrow field of interest and their field is not audio quality and gear, unlike say, yours.

It's not just about geeky interests. I am not a native English speaker, and I was in the artillery (so I have mild hearing loss). I can follow presentations with good audio quality without effort, but at times this video is damn near incomprehensible to me. At least the subtitles are good.

Maybe researchers and professionals is more appropriate than nerds.

Take a look at streamers and Bill Gates collaborating, then compare that to Gates appearing in remote news interviews. Quality difference is significant with TV being always worse.

I haven't seen that one, but here's another talk on the same topic in the context of fusion energy broadly, by some people involved https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk

As far as I can tell that framing is probably for crowd appeal. The real breakthrough here is the availability of high-magnetic-field superconductors, which push the size requirements for break-even down a lot and so put construction costs in reach of private investment.

(This is why MIT is at the center of the work - they have a really good materials science program that's good at working with these finicky ReBCO tapes.)

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