Mustard and kale are also (among) the ultimate year-round crops. They shrug off winter in all but the coldest places like it’s not even happening. The brassica’s arch nemeses, aphids and the cabbage white caterpillar, die off in autumn. Brassicas even get tastier after a frost. Forget California lettuce; local winter greens ftw!
(Also part of the dead-of-winter greens gang: chicory/raddichio, lamb’s lettuce/corn salad/mâche, Claytonia/miner’s lettuce, spinach, cress, and sorrel)
Wait, but fusion is working. They’re seeing net positive output. It’s still quite small at the moment, but moderate gains continue to be made in the field.
This isn’t properly calculated though. They only count the actual laser energy inside the reacttvs output. They don’t account for the huge amount of energy thatch’s needed to run the lasers in the first place or the rest of the facility. It’s nowhere near putting out more energy than it consumes and it’s also a reactor for nuclear weapons testing so they don’t really try to produce energy anyway.
You’re not wrong. It’s still an important step for the field though. Having a net positive within the reaction itself could theoretically mean eventually the energy from the reaction can help sustain the reaction after the initial higher activation energy. But with the poor state of science journalism the result was reported with extreme hyperbole.
Well seeing how you almost need the output of a Dyson swarm to make a Dyson swarm, cool glowy rock power and explodey gas power can and will work just as good. Especially for places that are far away from the ideal conditions to exploit solar energy terrestrially. Where I’m at we have to use literal piles of garbage to be able to get high enough above the trees to achieve sustainable output.
Sadly I believe they found adding more mirrors did not appreciably raise the temperature of the focal point. Diminishing returns and all. So unfortunately more mirrors is not the answer, more Lasers is!
They already do this fyi. Solar plants tend to use mirrors that concentrate light to heat water and turn a turbine instead of actual solar panels. Amazingly, iirc converting light into heat, the heat into steam, and then the steam into kinetic energy, is still more efficient than a normal photovoltaic cells.
I mean yeah, we should absolutely be replacing as much fossil fuel use as we can with existing renewable energy tech. But there’s no reason we shouldn’t also be investing in fusion research, at least as far as I’m aware
Because bad actors like fossil fuel and car companies will say “look, the government is funding fusion. Don’t make us go renewable now, just wait five years until fusion is here.” You have to consider the political impacts pursuing research will have on society’s perceptions. Even if you know your project is just a wild experiment that probably won’t work, journalists won’t.
Exactly. And that’s with the little reactors. If I remember correctly ITER is less than 5 years from first plasma. After that monster gets online, fusion research gets much easier.
Engineering is just the economical application of applied physics, without Physicists Engineers work off faulty knowledge, without Engineers nothing gets designed.
The level of understanding an Engineer needs, however, is purely within the practical and economical, while Physicists understandably have more in-depth knowledge.
I think the joke is you don’t understand enough physics to make that your gig, so you go engineering as the backup plan. Source: am IT, we’re everyone’s backup plan when their initial goals fall through
Just graduated from college in IT, I know a thing or two because I’ve seen a thing or two. I originally wanted to do creative communications but couldn’t get past the entrance exam.
i didn’t get a degree until I was almost thirty, from an online college at that. I’m a complete idiot and somehow earning a bit over $200k a year in the Midwest at forty years old. Sometimes I have to meet with people and I’m like man, just let me back in my hole, wtf am I doing here, I can barely understand what these people are talking about let alone process any of the shit they are saying. I talk, ask questions, sometimes get answers I can understand but always make an idiot out of myself but I keep talking. Everyone says it’s better to keep your mouth shut and be assumed to be an idiot instead of opening your mouth and removing all doubt but I swear I’ve made a career out of being an idiot. If it wasn’t for IT I would be cleaning shit off guys dicks in a brothel somewhere to feed myself.
I have worked with guys who got physics undergrad and mech E masters. They are both awful engineers who don’t really get it. I take this joke too personally because I know it’s bs from experience.
Depends on the specific engineering branch. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Sometimes nothing at all. But all engineering branches share one thing with physics: math.
I used my particle physics and knowledge of quantum topology to hybridise a new species of drought-resistant pineapple just the other day. It’s that easy!
Oh, I do my plumbing based on political science. But that’s not especially modern. The real genius is using music theory to run my email server. I’m setting self-hosted jazz on a saxophone next weekend.
Well, we did have plenty of engineered items before having the proper physics theory to explain what was happening. Physics does a whole lot more than simply enabling engineering to do more. It’s the basis of our understanding of the universe.
Bonus points (BPs) for when you get entire sentences full of abbreviations (SFOA). Even more BPs when you get SFOA with abbreviations containing abbreviations within them (SWACAWT). I really hate SWACAWTs.
science_memes
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.