wildncrazyguy138 @ wildncrazyguy138 @fedia.io

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398

Joined

1 yr. ago

So I’ve had this thought for 20+ years but can’t seem to get it to work. Maybe someone smarter than me can make it work.

The Curie point of Gadolinium is around room temperature. If you put a high powered magnet on one end and then generate some external heat and an include a spring (or crank arm) on the magnetic end, you could produce a piston, similar to a sterling engine.

Now, if you add this cooling material as a heat sink, you could likely rapidly cool the gadolinium material back below the Curie point, making a more efficient engine, perhaps even producing something that could do a bit of work.

I made some prototypes back in the day, but the ferromagnetic material would always eventually get locked with the magnets. My rudimentary engineering skills could never get the external heat source quite right. Perhaps someone with a bit more ingenuity will take this and run with it.

Also, old broken microwaves are a great way to salvage some pretty strong magnets.

And be careful when handling gadolinium, it’s known to cause kidney and nerve damage.

I don’t trust DOOFUS with the cognition to spell his own name, why the hell would I want to give him power to declare war?

No thank you, I am not privy to a war with Canada nor Denmark.

Pork BBQ and Collards. Finish it down with some Cheerwine.

This ain’t Oz. On what the snake hath proclaimed is not mushy.

You must be one of those big big city mice.

Are you asking this genuinely? Yes, we do. We are a net exporter of refined petroleum products, we export low sulfur coke for steel production. We export agricultural products, particularly soy beans. We export advanced robotics and pharmaceuticals. I think, granted this is from 15 years ago, but we also export a significant amount of vehicles.

15 miles by the crow flies is a lot different than 15 miles driving on the ground.

I’m more worried about what happens when one of these contraptions wraps itself around a power line.

• hey, my name is _____, what’s yours?
• are you looking for new friends?
• great I do _____ on ______ days, would you like to join?

Peace in our time.

How do you square cleaning up Europe’s mess in one thread with Yemen and knocking them down for actively defending Ukraine in another?

You know guys, I’m starting to think these morons just hate Europe.

This week on The Americans, they discover that they elected the old man who yells at the TV! Hilarity ensues when he chucks the remote and breaks the screen then goes on a wacky adventure to buy another TV under the new tariffs!

You made this? No.

I made this.

Now do it for Ireland and measure it in pints.

You can keep it about Americans though.

I don’t know every impeachable offense, but I’m pretty sure not following a decision of the Supreme Court is one of them.

You see a baby on the second floor in a burning building. It’s crying. Its screams trigger your fight or flight response. Though you know going into that burning building will harm you, your will to act compels you to go save that baby and end its suffering.

You go in, the flames all around you, but you can barely feel them because you are so concentrated on reaching that baby.

You get to the baby. Your flight response now kicks in. You jump out the window. You break your ankle, but you can’t feel it, because your sense of duty and accomplishment of saving that child and the cheers from the community overwhelm your own internal nervous system.

That’s empathy. When your feelings for others override your feelings for yourself. When the extrinsic reward from the community can override your intrinsic experience.

Granted, an extreme example.

I just listened to this podcast. This guy sounds smart. He’s not on the same side of the fence as I am, but I wanted to give him a listen.

I do understand where he is coming from about certain policy decisions functioning well within the university incubator, but then not being able to scale. There certainly are policies that don’t live up to their hype and we absolutely should be performing studies and assessments on why these sometimes don’t scale. I don’t like wasting my tax dollars on ineffective policy as much as anyone else.

However, I think attacking these with a broad brush does more harm than good. There are policies that do work, given the right environment and right people. I think it was what, Portland? That recently did a UBI study and it showed positive results there. I don’t see UBI results being reproduced for say, the entire state of South Dakota. It’s completely different culture and resources.

We should continue studying for effectiveness and scale where it make sense to do so.

He also wants to undermine certain liberal policies so that conservative ideals can flourish on campuses. I think this is disingenuous. There are already universities with conservative ideology. Why must we force other universities to bend to something that is not their culture? And if they say “because you take government tax dollars and we say so” well, that’s not how the contracts were written for one and two, I think universities would have put a lot more thought into what funds they were willing to accept if those conditions had been written.

It’s a bit like the reverse of “regulatory capture.” You work with Princeton to build a billion dollar atom smasher to do some amazing physics work, then you come in 10 years later and add strings attached to their D.E.I. policy to keep their funding. Well, it’s not like Princeton is then going to go and demolish the building and say “take your funds and shove it!” I mean they could, but I could imagine the public blowback wouldn’t be worth it.

So now the govt is dictating policy that is better off being left at the professional and cultural level of the university. And that is quite a dangerous place to be in, both for liberals and conservatives. Where have the “keep the government’s hands out of my business” types gone?

Gregorian chant can be very relaxing in the right moment.

They say that a beam of light doesn’t understand time. That if you were to travel at the speed of light, a ray of light would just be one long line with a start and end point.

They also say that a beam of light has infinite possibilities to get to a destination, and the destinations it can get to are infinite as well. As in life, it’s all in the journey. The journey can be as short or as winding as you choose to make it.

But that makes me wonder about things like pi. It’s a journey that is never ending. If a ray of light followed the path of pi, though it gets ever closer, it never reaches its final destination. It is truly immortal.

And if that’s the case, then that must mean universes, in some way, until the numbers stop numbering, are too.

Bros over at the guardian knew exactly what they were doing when they chose that picture.

Hey transistor!