You’re not desalinating aerosilized water. All the salt comes with.

I’d like to take this opportunity to highlight a recent discovery that I think should be shouted from every major news outlet. The implications are big, but they’re rather technical and non obvious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1PbNTYU0GQ

In short, it turns out water evaporates much faster from to light than heat. Green light with a certain polarization hitting the water surface at a 45 degree angle seems to do best. From the research slides, the effects of polarization and angle might be small. That means green LEDs (which are cheap and very efficient, but wouldn’t be polarized on their own) can evaporate lots of water. Something like 4 times the amount we would get from using the same amount of energy to heat it up. This is being called the photomolecular effect.

This fills in a big gap in our climate models. There have been measurements done on clouds that show water was evaporating much faster than theory would predict. I’m not clear on if it would make the results more pessimistic or not. My guess is that more clouds in the model increase the albedo of the Earth, thus reflecting more light back into space, and the resulting temperature should be lower. But I’ll hold off on strong opinions until the models get updated.

The other big thing is desalination. Most desalination plants don’t use thermal evaporation because it’s too energy intensive. They use reverse osmosis. The photomolecular effect brings up the possibility of an even more efficient solution to drinking water problems.

I haven’t seen academic research into this yet, but I also wonder about the implications for lithium extraction from sea water (and pretty much any other sources, really). Lithium is basically one of the salts you remove during the desalination process, so the photomolecular effect potentially makes sea water extraction cheaper. Lithium from sea water is an indefinite resource–there’s more there than we would know what to do with.

Edit: actually, scratch the desalination aspects.

• Multi-stage flash distillation takes 23-27 kWh to get 1 m3 of water
• RO desalination can get you 1 m3 of water with only 3 kWh

So thermal distillation is almost an order of magnitude behind, and the 4 fold improvement doesn’t fully close that gap. In fact, it’s worse than that. The multi-stage plant works by recovering heat when the distilled water is recondensed. Merely heating water to do this would take 626 kWh per m3. That’s more than two orders of magnitude, and since we can’t benefit from a multistage setup to recover heat when using the photomolecular effect, it’s going to be a 4 fold improvement over that very high number.

Still, very big news for improving our climate models.

Right.

As an example, Klipper (for running 3d printers) can update its configuration file directly when doing certain automatic calibration processes. The z-offset for between a BLtouch bed sensor and the head, for example. If you were to save it, you might end up with something like this:

[bltouch]
z_offset: 3.020
...
#*# <---------------------- SAVE_CONFIG ---------------------->
#*# DO NOT EDIT THIS BLOCK OR BELOW. The contents are auto-generated.
#*#
[bltouch]
z_offset: 2.950

Thus overriding the value that had been set before, but now you have two entries for the same thing. (IIRC, Klipper does comment out the original value, as well.)

What I’d want is an interface where you can modify in place without these silly save blocks. For example:

let conf = get_config()
conf.set( 'bltouch.z_offset', 2.950 )
conf.add_comment_after( 'bltouch.z_offset', 'Automatically generated' )
conf.save_config()

Since we’re declaratively telling the library what to modify, it can maintain the AST of the original with whitespace and comments. Only the new value changes when it’s written out again, with a comment for that specific line.

Binary config formats, like the Windows Registry, almost have to use an interface like this. It’s their one advantage over text file configs, but it doesn’t have to be. We’re just too lazy to bother.

Is a very good idea providing much needed fixes to the JSON spec, but isn’t really what I’m getting at. Handling automatic updates in place is a software issue, and could be done on the older spec.

When you log in to an ssh terminal for a shell, it has to launch the shell process as the desired user. Needs to be root to do that.

SSH has been around a long time. It’s not perfect, but it’s mostly validated. Anything new won’t have that history.

Benefit society, or go to support a pharmaceutical company that will in some way benefit society in exchange for making a few people rich?

No ethical consumption working conditions under capitalism.

What I’d like for a configuration language is a parser that can handle in-place editing while maintaining whitespace, comments, etc. That way, automatic updates don’t clobber stuff the user put there, or (alternatively) have sections of ### AUTOMATIC GENERATION DO NOT CHANGE###.

You need a parser that handles changes on its own while maintaining an internal representation. Something like XML DOM (though not necessarily that exact API). There’s a handful out there, but they’re not widespread, and not on every language.

JSON numeric encoding is perfectly capable of precise encoding to arbitrary decimal precision. Strings are easier if you don’t want to fuck around with the parser, though.

The paper actually argues otherwise, though it’s not fully settled on that conclusion, either.

China built a few Ap1000 designs. The Sanmen station started in 2009 with completion expected in 2014 (2015 for the second unit). It went into 2019. The second, Haiyang, went about the same.

This is pretty similar to what happened in the US with Volgte.

And 5 years is what nuclear projects have promised at the start over the years. Everyone involved knows this is a gross lie.

Nuclear is nothing bog standard. If it was, it wouldn’t take 10 years. Almost every plant is a boutique job that requires lots of specialists. The Westinghouse AP1000 reactor design was meant to get around this. It didn’t.

The experts can stay where they are: maintaining existing nuclear power.

Renewables don’t take much skilled labor at all. It’s putting solar panels on racks in a field, or hoisting wind blades up a tower (crane operation is a specialty, but not on the level of nuclear engineering).

Then we just move the problem. Why should we do something that’s going to take longer and use more labor? Especially skilled labor.

Money is an imperfect proxy for the underlying resources in many ways, but it about lines up in this case. To force the issue, there would have to be a compelling reason beyond straight money.

That reason ain’t getting to 100% clean energy in a short time. There is another: building plants to use up existing waste rather than burying it.

… it’s currently not possible to store the renewables anywhere

Every time someone argues this, it’s immediately obvious they haven’t actually paid attention how the storage market has been progressing.

Next, you’ll probably talk about problems with lithium, as if it’s the only storage technology.

If you’re going to do that, then also consider the co2 output of all the concrete needed for nuclear power plants.

No, you just pay out the nose up front.

If I had money to invest in the energy sector, I don’t know why I should pick nuclear. It’s going to double its budget and take 10 years before I see a dime of return. Possibly none if it can’t secure funding for the budget overrun, as all my initial investment will be spent.

A solar or wind farm will take 6-12 months and likely come in at or close to its budget. Why the hell would I choose nuclear?

But the technology to rely entirely on renewables isn’t really there either.

Yes, it is.

https://books.google.com/books/about/No_Miracles_Needed.html?id=aVKmEAAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description

This is a book by a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering that goes into the details. We don’t need nuclear. All the tech is there.

Except we have better options than we did 10 years ago.

I’d be all for nuclear if we rolled back the clock to 2010 or so. As it stands, solar/wind/storage/hvdc lines can do the job. The situation moved and my opinion moved.

Not sure about GP, but that’s basically what we did under “SAFe” (Scaled Agile Framework). PI planning means taking most of a sprint to plan everything for the next quarter or so. It’s like a whole week of ticket refinement meetings. Or perhaps 3 days, but when you’ve had 3 days of ticket refinement meetings, it might as well be the whole work week for as much a stuff as you’re going to get done otherwise.

It’s as horrible as you’re thinking, and after a lot of agitating, we stopped doing that shit.