That's where the resources are. You wouldn't expect some uber wealthy billion dollar company to have to provide power/water needs way out in the middle of nowhere would you?
Why are we growing crops that depend on monsoon amounts of water in the desert? Because people with money and power have decided that's what they want to do.
Because farming in a desert means you have as much sun as you could want, and can (with the aid of groundwater and water transport infrastructure) add as much water as you need, when you need it, and at no other times (harvest etc).
The explanation has never made intuitive sense to me and the political power of almond and alfalfa farmers continues to elude me. Yes, almond farmers have money but Larry Ellison, Musk, and Sergey Brin have a shitload more. As do non-tech industries like Californian real estate developers. California has ~40 billionaires from real estate alone. That industry, and tech, and manufacturing, and everyone else is also competing for water supply.
What makes almond farmers so good at procuring and maintaining political influence?
I don’t even know if they need to maintain political influence, they own water rights which are worth a ridiculous amount of money which entitles them to a share of water based on when the water usage began. It’s complicated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior-appropriation_water_righ...
You can use fuel cells; I'm sure external steam reforming based hydrogen (in protein exchange membrane fuel cells) works very well, but I'd not be surprised if some hydrocarbon or alcohol fuel cell beats it in TCO; also I'd expect liquid oxygen to be readily suited to be trucked-in with the fuel they feed these turbines and by the power of a simple dry heat exchanger exchanging between ambient air and combustion "air" they could use exhaust gas recirculation with pure (other than the exhaust gas diluting it so the flame doesn't melt the turbine blades) oxygen which would as a side-effect allow them to condense out water to obtain nearly pure CO2 exhaust.
Liquid oxygen is around 100$/ton and you need 3.21 tons of it to burn one ton of methane. If you use kerosene instead you're at about 2.58 tons of oxygen per ton of fuel.
Note that the absence of nitrogen otherwise plentiful in combustion air eliminates NOX formation.
What they do for the oxygen production is they condense air and then distill it; IIRC it's mainly done for steel production where they use it to burn off carbon dissolved in molten iron. It's side product liquid nitrogen and argon are primarily produced from this but are mostly considered side-products of the "oxygen refining".
Thanks for the information. I never knew about those kinds of fuel cells and they look like an excellent alternative.
From what I've just read, the only real downsides other than initial cost are slow startup time (hours) and they are physically larger than gas turbines. In exchange for a higher upfront price, you get a more efficient and reliable power generator. Very cool.
You raise a good point here. Why do we need a CI job? Just tell the AI/LLM: The max number of lines per PR is X. If you need more lines, please create a chain of PRs. That should work OK.
I’ve always bought a fresh perpetual license to office home and student with every new computer since 2005. That is four mac computers total and I assume ~$600 in office licenses over 21 years. Not a ton of money but not zero.
My resume is typeset in LaTeX and I don’t make many slide decks for personal use. I figure I can get a decent Tex template. I don’t use excel much anymore.
For my next mac I’ll probably just skip Office. I do not want a software subscription.
I also usually buy Sublime text + Merge and Cubase audio, USB overdrive, Graphana for svgs, maybe a few other licenses. I will buy and do not pirate software, devs and companies deserve compensation for their work. I also do not rent software. Though I do a small yearly donation ($50) to the Python software foundation because that language got me out of hands-on labor in labs.
I don’t care about agents at home. If Microsoft abandons a staple software package that has been a standard in personal computing since the 90’s then I’m only their customer at work lol.
As an aside, have you seen Typst? It’s got LaTeX-level typesetting quality but the markup syntax is a lot friendlier (close to Markdown) and the scripting language is a Real Language™ with sensible error messages and sub-second compilation times even for big documents.
Agreed, and before the naysayers start chiming in, I wrote my whole dissertation in LibreOffice Writer without any issues. LibreOffice is fine. My one and only gripe is that the resume templates are sorely lacking, but that's a community issue, not a software one.
Same, though technically I started it on OpenOffice before LO was a thing. Sent material back and forth with supervisors who all used Word, etc. just fine too, and LO has only improved in the past few years.
Yes, just to keep a current version in the decade. My first repurchase was either because moving from powerPC to Intel compatibility or wanting docx files with a big Office shift.
The last time I bought Office was 2020 before returning to school (despite getting a student license). I do not see a good reason to now until someone in my household needs it for school.
Methane >> carbon dioxide as a polyethylene/linear polymers feed stock. Double bonded oxygens are hella higher affinity than four loose hydrogens. Also as pointed out, even in a concentrated combustion effluent stack CO2 is low concentration at atmospheric pressure.
I don’t know about methane as an aromatic/hybridized ring building block. Anything is possible with chemical synthesis but is it energy feasible.
There’s always plant hydrocarbon feed stocks but I think using arable land to make plastics is dumb and also carbon intensive. (I do wear cotton clothing tho because you need to make trade offs).
Siemens has a collaboration with Porsche are piloting already eFuel production. Cost is super high (think like $10/liter). But thermodynamically feasible.
The carbon isn’t valuable elementally as much as it is structurally and molecularly. I mean that as aromatic rings and other ready made building blocks that conveniently can be fractionally separated with pressure and temperature conditions in a column as a gross generalization. All of this is energy intensive but much less so than building up from three atom molecules with strong bonds. And much much less energy intensive than separating a trace % molecule from the atmosphere at low atmospheric pressure and translating that to complex molecules.
There needs to be more appreciation for the laws of thermodynamics when discussing technology. Everything is not a 1-dimensional reduced abstraction.
Don’t use hsv color wheel to intuit color space. CIE x,y $year_standard is superior to view color space and understand the tricolor values Z = f(X,Y) in every way.
Nah, I like organizing and packing my own bags to unpack into my refrigerator and pantry. And I appreciate the reprieve from small talk to the cashier or feeling the person behind me being inconvenienced by my slowness putting bags in the cart. Plus it helps me get a secondary feedback on relative costs of items in my cart. I’m all for self checkout as an awkward dude that appreciates some quiet time when shopping.
I go to wholefoods (self checkout) and trader joes (cashier) and other local branded stores with cashiers. I feel the least amount of rushed at wholefoods and the most at trader joes.
Edit - I hate the self checkout at home depot in my area where they show the facial recognition bounding boxes on the screen. Like I know that’s happening behind the scenes but home depot makes the whole experience so blatantly loss-prevention and customer profiling motivated vs a good transparent customer experience that I’ve made a point to go to smaller branded hardware stores.
Latitude may affect the eddy currents and resulting convective shear on the film surface imparted by angular momentum from the earth’s spin.
This is what humors me about analytical minded computation focused people vs dumb simple engineer and physics (practical) people. That is imagining all the infinities of what may change a physical result vs knowing by experience or education.
ANOVA: analysis of variance from linear fit parameters will show you in experimental data or simulation the contributing factors. Or you can read a chapter in an undergraduate heat transfer book.
Decay rate of (T(t) - T_inf)/(T(0) - T_inf) is probably dominated by the wind speed in your room. For an 8-12oz cup a sphere or cylinder will get you pretty close.
> all javascript on this website is optional (light/dark theme, particles background, and image lightboxing) and resides outside of the document body. localstorage is used to persist light/dark theme and mono/sans font state while surfing, as well as handle an over-18 check.
Hitting the reader mode of your favorite browser will help.
Usually it sounds like a weird advice and we'd want site owners to aim for readability...but TBH, blaming a site on a .pink domain on a page explaining the codepoints of an emoji flag to not be universally accessible seems beside the point.
Non-scientific anecdote here but I feel like the lawlessness is due to lack of enforcement for traffic violations vs an uptick in weed usage. Possibly covid scrambled our brains and promotes aggressive impulsive behavior. Maybe cops are afraid to pull people over because they might inadvertently shoot them and become a national news story. Maybe the adoption of big trucks makes people feel invincible (two distinct trucks on my drive have cut in line at a left turn lane with a red arrow and crossed 2 lanes opposing traffic at different lights, what would possess someone to do that(?))
Whatever the cause I feel in my gut that if our police did basic standards enforcement people would think twice about lawlessness. I’m in Pennsylvania.
