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moloch-hai

1,102 karma · joined October 23, 2019

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moloch-hai··on NASA solved a $100M problem for five bucks (2012)
There is a great series on YouTube:

https://m.youtube.com/@KathyLovesPhysics/videos

Really took Tesla down a peg. (No, Tesla did not invent the 3-phase power system we use today. That was a Russian in Switzerland, Dolivo-Dobrovolsky.)

moloch-hai··on NASA solved a $100M problem for five bucks (2012)
They are generally labeled with "persistence of vision".
moloch-hai··on Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study
All public money. NuScale is a particularly egregious example.
moloch-hai··on NRC Certifies First U.S. Small Modular Reactor Design
Yet, no one has been willing, in decades, to lend any of their own money to building a nuke. What are you missing? That is a rhetorical question; the topic is dead and buried. Good day.
moloch-hai··on NRC Certifies First U.S. Small Modular Reactor Design
Wind power generation does not, in fact, require any rare-earths at all. (And, they are anyway not rare.) You have asserted this falsehood, and been corrected, many times before. Please do not repeat this falsehood again.

Copper is used heavily in all electric power systems, so does not count against any. Likewise, all industrial energy infrastructures depend heavily on mining, less-electric ones most of all. So, please do not throw up this irrelevant canard again.

moloch-hai··on The Dawn of Everything challenges a mainstream telling of prehistory
Graeber cites example after example, from throughout history and prehistory, of complex societies that displayed no evidence of permanent, pervasive hierarchical organization. It is very common for historians to insist none of that is possible, or just silently assume it without thought.
moloch-hai··on Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study
Seeing how you are promoting instead a thoroughly dead alternative that no one will ever again spend another cent of their own money on...

Good day, sir.

moloch-hai··on Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study
... and would be in the position France is in now, with a fleet of obsolete contraptions that will cost further billions to decommission, and with nothing on the horizon to replace them.
moloch-hai··on The Point of the Banach-Tarski Theorem
Agreed, each added dimension adds wacky surprises.

Packing spheres into a cube leaves you a pretty comprehensible space in the middle. Pack hyperspheres into a hypercube, and all hell breaks loose.

moloch-hai··on The Point of the Banach-Tarski Theorem
Even spiders and newborn babies count; it is a natural animal behavior. Axiomatic systems, not so much.
moloch-hai··on The Dawn of Everything challenges a mainstream telling of prehistory
The "past few thousand years" is a tiny fraction of the human timeline. And, the overwhelming majority of even the "past few thousand years" is obscured. What remains is a poster example of selection bias: hierarchical organizations depend more on writing, so the written record is of hierarchical societies.
moloch-hai··on Runestone discovered in Norway may be the world’s oldest
Yet, we know it is more complicated than simple derivation from Etruscan. So the real question is what else happened.
moloch-hai··on Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study
France is better known for high taxes than for low energy prices... Maybe there is a connection. No one, anywhere in the world, has ever fielded a nuke not massively propped up by public money.

Germany would today be in a much worse position if they had spent what they did on renewables on upgrading their ramshackle old nuke contraptions instead. France, notably, imported power through summer.

moloch-hai··on Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study
Texas, artificially cut off from the wider grid, exhibited its domestic governance failings once again. This has no wider implications for energy policy than that grid connectivity covers for multiple sins.

Need for fossil generation backing will decline naturally as storage is built out, but will take a long time to go to zero. Pretending otherwise makes bad policy. Building storage without renewable capacity to charge it from would be stupid because charging storage by fossil fuel burning would be monumentally stupid.

moloch-hai··on Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study
The "stable grid" argument is well past its sell-by date.

In the future we will need to build out storage. Before there is enough renewable generation to charge storage, building it would be foolish. After, we will need storage, and build it.

And, we will always need liquid fuel. As cost for renewables continues exponentially downward, ammonia synthesized at solar farms in the tropics will undercut NG. In the meantime, shortfalls will be filled by burning an ever-decreasing amount of NG.

We will need a hell of a lot of electric ammonia synthesis in coming decades.

moloch-hai··on Runestone discovered in Norway may be the world’s oldest
https://theconversation.com/shillings-gods-and-runes-clues-i...

might be a good place to start.

moloch-hai··on Runestone discovered in Norway may be the world’s oldest
It doesn't offer anything else. So, yes. "Not widely accepted" means, exactly, "usefully checked against new evidence".

If you can point to anything beyond "woohoo, new older runes" and "maybe this helps distinguish between Greek and italic origin", do.

moloch-hai··on Runestone discovered in Norway may be the world’s oldest
Assuming you already have all the possible evidence already leads to falsehoods. Science is about not embracing falsehoods, if it is anything.

What you promote is what cemented "Clovis first" for decades beyond its sell-by date, and opposition to the K-T bolide model and plate tectonics. Pretending to know interferes with coming to know.

For a more recent example:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00128...

Opposition was sloppy to the point of dishonesty.

moloch-hai··on Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study
Point. We are in a race against global civilization collapse.

But the race is, at base, to displace atmospheric carbon release. So displacing more, faster is the measure of merit.

moloch-hai··on Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study
99%+. So, no.
moloch-hai··on Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study
Gravity storage in weights held far above the sea floor is probably more viable than in mineshafts, because you cannot share the motor/generator and winch between multiple mineshafts, and most mineshafts do not go not very deep.

There is a lot of seabed.

moloch-hai··on Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study
False. As has been explained in detail too many times to count.

Please do not try to resurrect old falsehoods.

moloch-hai··on Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study
Summer storage for winter will not be a thing.

Tropical solar farms synthesizing ammonia for export to high latitudes will be.

moloch-hai··on Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study
No lithium or "rare earths" (which are not anyway at all rare) are needed for a transition to solar and wind for power.

Electric cars use lithium, just now, and a bit of rare-earths. (They are used in wiper and window motors.) Cars are their own thing, which we would be better off with less of.

Obviously before you have built out wind and solar, you don't have much yet. It is a vacuous observation. Instead, look at the rate of deployment, which follows a classic exponential curve.

moloch-hai··on Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study
It is not "tone policing". That is an accusation guaranteed to derail any discussion.

Nukes and geothermal simply cost more than solar and wind: nukes, many, many times more. Spending a billion dollars gets you N GW of solar or wind, and N/M, M>>1, of others. Generally, if you need a steam turbine to keep working, you will trail behind anything with zero opex.

Hydrogen has a plausible place in long-term (i.e. strategic) underground storage, in steel refining and other manufacturing processes, and (as LH2) in the future direction of aviation. It might have other roles, such as an intermediate form when using ammonia. Trying to force it where it is a bad fit adds noise.

moloch-hai··on Runestone discovered in Norway may be the world’s oldest
Any discussion that doesn't even mention the possibility of origin in semitic forms (which, of course, Greek and ultimately Roman also trace to) seems unlikely to enlighten.

Carthaginians certainly got around. You would seem to need a plausible reason for them to have been unable or unwilling to visit Denmark.

moloch-hai··on Runestone discovered in Norway may be the world’s oldest
It would be interesting to explore whether this has any effect on the hypothesis, based purely on letterform comparisons, that runes may be traced to semitic symbols, presumably introduced by Carthaginian refugees or, anyway, travellers.

(This idea has been dismissed as impossible based on the timeline, as the oldest runes postdate Carthage's demolition by centuries, but that argument depends on assuming we have a complete archaeological record, which we of course do not.)

If the older letterforms more closely resemble a semitic form, it would be powerful evidence in favor. If not, things get more complicated.

moloch-hai··on The Point of the Banach-Tarski Theorem
> Despite it being a non-starter from a pragmatic standpoint

That was my point, thanks.

moloch-hai··on NRC Certifies First U.S. Small Modular Reactor Design
Maybe read what you just wrote.
moloch-hai··on The Dawn of Everything challenges a mainstream telling of prehistory
It is thus very, very convenient for the few that people are conditioned from childhood to believe it is the only way to organize, and announce it freely in print.
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