It’s the Mythbusters episode where we got the iconic “Am I missing an eyebrow” line from Adam Savage. One of their first episodes in 2003 I think and it was considered an old myth even back then. Modern large capacitive touch screens didn’t gain popularity until around 2006.
I think no cell phones near gas stations is a 90s thing from when cellphones were new.
Wait is that Nicolas Locarno? Why is he in this picture with Janeway?
There are many cake recipes for the microwave, it’s actually easier than one might think. And most of them are pretty damned good, if you get the heating to be even. You can even get a good crust with some tricks.
Once upon a time people got really creative using microwaves to cook food. You’d be amazed at some of the truly delicious stuff you can cook using a microwave.
It’s all fun and games till they keep it because they like it…
I’d recommend the movie Threads (1984), if you don’t feel like sleeping for the next week or so.
The “algorithms” are also dumb as fuck. For example on a large retailer site you spend a couple of hours browsing for a particular kind of item. You are comparing different kinds, looking up reviews and issues, watching YouTube videos about them. And finally you pull the trigger and but the thing. Then for the next 3 months that site (and others that picked up on the research) will go: Hey here are some more of that thing you like, you really liked it right? Would you like to compare some more items? Uhm no, I actually bought said thing, you made the sale. All of that “targeted” advertisement is just wasted, I have zero interest anymore since the need has been filled.
It’s either that or stuff I can’t afford (like memory or graphic cards) or really weird stuff I have no idea why it’s being shown to me. Sometimes very alarmingly so. Just recently I got an ad that said “Popular in your region” and it was for illegal Nazi dogwhistle flags, “self defense knifes”, baseball bats and tracksuits. That’s a bit scary. On the other hand the same site gave me an ad for an “easy to conceal” blowjob machine sex toy. Like holy shit what kind of people are living in my region?
Targeted ads have been terrible for as long as I can remember. I don’t think I ever bought anything through an ad or hardly ever even clicked on them. Only time I click on them is because the site and my adblocker are fighting and when I try to click somewhere on the page, it inserts an ad the last millisecond, shifts the entire page so I accidentally click on it.
I’m not sure the energy to weight ratio of 80,000 pounds of batteries to 80,000 pounds of fuel is.
Fuel is about 25 times more energy dense compared to batteries. Of course depending on the fuel and depending on the batteries. 25 times is most diesel fuels compared to most modern li-ion batteries. Large LiFePO4 would probably be used for transport, which do worse than high performance LiCoO2 batteries, so then you are talking about somewhere around 30 times worse. Transporting batteries simply isn’t worth doing, it’s super inefficient.
Same with stuff like microwave transmission of power, you lose so much in the transfer, it’s a total non starter.
The big enemy is transportation. You can put biofuel in a container and it will keep for a very long time. It’s easy to ship anywhere you’d like in large quantities. It can be pumped around using pipelines, it can be put in ships, boats and fuel trucks and brought to just about anywhere. Even places that don’t have permanent infrastructure can often easily be reached by truck and transport a huge amount of energy in one go. Those fuels are very energy dense, so transport is easy and cheap and it doesn’t lose any energy from being transported.
With electric energy transport is much harder, you need large transformer stations to get it up to high voltages and then you need fixed infrastructure to transport it anywhere. And on the receiving side you’d also need large stations to be able to use the energy and distribute it further. And every step loses energy, the conversion up to high voltage, the transport over the powerlines and then the conversion back down. Reaching places that don’t have fixed infrastructure is much harder, as we don’t have very good storage options for electrical energy. Best we can do is chemical storage in the form of large and heavy batteries that aren’t as energy dense as biofuel.
However solar has a trick up it’s sleeve where it’s super easy to generate the energy where you need it, reducing the need for transport. Different from other power generation options you don’t need a whole lot to generate some energy. For a lot of homes simply putting solar panels on the roof is enough to generate a lot of power for the home itself and an electrical car. Putting solar in places we need energy is the trick to a sustainable future (although we need to fix some issues with solar, but it’s pretty good as it is). Having a bit of biofuel as an alternative can be pretty handy though and is better than fossil fuels for sure.
In the real world you can expect panels to lose on average no more than 10% per decade. Usually it’s less, somewhere around the 7-8% mark. Some manufacturers or installers give warranty for a max of 10% in the first decade. However due to natural variability of the energy produced, it would have to be pretty bad in order for anyone to notice.
The reason lifetimes of solar panels is given somewhere around 20-30 years isn’t because they stop functioning after that time. It’s because they simply won’t perform very well after that time. It’s a double edged sword, where the existing panels degrade and new panels get better. Especially if the mounting can be re-used, it becomes more and more favorable to just replace the panels. Chances are within 30 years at least one panel would have failed, in a string configuration that often means the entire string goes down. Depending on the setup that one defunct panel can be bypassed, but simply replacing all the panels makes more sense.
One of the parts I would like to see improvements in longevity is the inverters. Those are pretty expensive a lot of the time (depending on where you live they have to meet very strict specs and certification, driving up cost) and don’t live as long. Typically an inverter will work for at least 10 years, but they hardly ever make it to 20 years. So an installation that runs for 25 years will probably have its inverter(s) replaced at least once.
This article doesn’t state anything new, this has been the case for a very long time now.
Uhm the Moonmen built the pyramids, why would we need to teach them? Man it’s sure going to be embarrassing if we get up there and proclaim: “Hello Moonmen! We are here to teach you about pyramids” and they are like “Dude, we know all about the pyramids, what else you got?”. Can you imagine how red the astronauts faces would be?
I think it’s a mistake to look for niche communities on Lemmy. There simply aren’t enough people to fill those communities and they wither and die. Many people have made that mistake, which is why it’s harder to grow Lemmy as a whole. My advice would be to just ask in a larger active community which is somewhat in the right direction. Then you have the best shot of reaching people that might have answers for you.
Someone send this to Randall Monroe, how fucked would we be if we actually created this piece of land?
Yeah wall plug efficiency is much harder since you need to do the power conversion as well, in a small and cheap way for mass production. I’d assume they have a specialized power supply for the big LED in the sky?
There are super efficient LEDs used in flashlights, the lumen per watt figures these days are absolutely crazy.
This can vary a lot depending on the LED. The average LED is indeed somewhere around the 50% and 60% mark. But there are LEDs out there that can get up to 90+%
Oooh that’s what you meant. I was referring to the time horses became obsolete almost over night and their population got reduced to only 10% of what it was before within a very short time.
Just don’t mention the part where 90% of them got killed off because they weren’t useful anymore.
Management loves that they are using AI, they will probably get promoted if anything.
One night Musk and Trump were sitting in the Oval Office not doing much, as they like to do. Musk was out of his gourd on ketamine and Trump just shit himself for the third time since his last diaper change. Out of nowhere Musk says: “We should start saying “Sieg Heil” to each other”. Trump looks up, or at least as much as his failing body would allow, and says: “Why Elon? What does that mean?” Musk responds, irritation showing in his voice: “Well that’s what our brothers in Germany said, so I think we should bring back the tradition”. Trump, also getting angry, picks up the phone and shouts he needs a MickeyD hamberder right away. As he fumbles the handle back on the red phone, he shouts to Musk: “Yes, I know that’s what the Germans said, but what does it mean?!”. “I’m not sure, wait I’ll ask Grok” Musk responds. After a couple of failed tries with the speech to text on his phone, Grok responds using a voice suspiciously like Scarlett Johanssons. Grok explains the word Sieg means victory and Heil is a greeting (hail), Germans used to say this to mean they believed they would be victorious. “Why would we say it then? I’m already President for life, I already have my victory!” Trump exclaimed. “We’re going to need a war then” Musk responded.
“And that, children, is how WW3 started all the way back in 2026” the Teacherbot says to the class over Microsoft Copilot New 365 Teams with Copilot ™. Elroy shouts: “Teacher! That can’t be true, that sounds dumb as shit!”. “Language! We’ll have a talk about your behavior after class young man. I’ve already sent a meeting invite to your father, so he’ll be joining that call as well” Teacherbot responds. Elroy sighs and says “Ah shucks”
Ugh I hate those new suburbs with themed street names. They are always a maze and I get turned around in them. My mate Martin used to live in one of those where all of the streets were some variation of grass. We would be in the car and ask amongst ourselves: “Where does Martin live again? What was the street? Wasn’t it grass something or other?”. Only to get to that suburb and get really confused as all of those streets were named grass something and then we really couldn’t remember.
But back then before GPS was a common thing and before we had cellphones, we had a sort of vibe navigation system. Getting to the correct city was easy, even if you didn’t know where it was, there would always be signs. But then when we got near our destination, you’d sorta drive in a direction that felt right. You’d be amazed how often we just found the right place like that. Only rarely did we have to check our navigation book tucked under the seat or fold out a big map on the dash. Never did we need to ask for directions, that simply wasn’t done.