tingilinde

idaho's navy base

A special installation for underwater acoustic research.

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The lake, according to ARD Site Director Seth Lambrecht, is ideal for testing because of its geographical location and quiet waters.

“The rivers and inlets are all on the North side of the lake, so the entire South end of the lake is an almost laboratory static environment that is 1,100 feet deep,” he said. “The flat bottom of the lake and its isothermal condition – 100 feet below the surface – make it ideal for mathematical analysis.”

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curtains!

A novel and expensive idea to deal with Antarctica's "doomesday" glacier.  Assuming it or similar project could be built, serious questions remain.

 

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Are such ideas feasible, how much would they cost, and what are the ethics of all this? Moore puts the likely bill for erecting a curtain across the Amundsen Sea at up to $80 billion. That is a lot of money. But much less, he says, than the trillions of dollars that might be needed to protect coastlines from rising tides caused by the loss of the two glaciers.

Others question this analysis. “I don’t doubt we could spend a decade building the curtain,” says Twila Moon, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado. “It is a naturally attractive idea that one big project can make the difference. But curtains may just displace the heat elsewhere, melting other ice.” In any event, she says, sea-level rise would continue as a result of factors such as thermal warming of the oceans, land subsidence, and changes in ocean circulation, as well as the melting of other land ice, such as on Greenland. “So the question is whether this is the right place to put our resources, including limited research funding.”

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nissan's cooling paint

Greg points out a new automotive paint development. There have been a number of cooling paints but making one that works on a car is interesting and useful.I wonder how close it is to being practical?

 

 

passive solar cooling

There's some work in the area - Greg notes two nice YouTube projects.  Both would have application.  The first strikes me as a nice undergrad engineering project - how do you refine the design (or come up with something better) for low cost manufacturability..

 

an old shape for outposts in space

Greg points to some interesting work with the isotensoid

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The startup is led by Aaron Kemmer, formerly of Made in Space, and Maxim de Jong, an engineer who has studiously avoided the limelight despite being the co-creator of expandable habitats like the one currently attached to the International Space Station.

They believe that the breakout moment for this type of in-space structure is due to arrive any year now. By positioning themselves as a successor to — and fundamental improvement on — the decades-old designs being pursued by others, they can capture what may eventually be a multi-billion-dollar market.

Max Space’s expandable habitats promise to be larger, stronger, and more versatile than anything like them ever launched, not to mention cheaper and lighter by far than a solid, machined structure. And despite their balloon-like looks, they are, like their predecessors, quite resilient to the many and various perils of space.

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rapid collapse

AI models on a diet of artificial data.

you are what you eat

 

 

homemade motion simulator for rc flying

fusion is always 20 years in the future

Another chapter to the story.

Even if it did work, the reactors would probably be so expensive it wouldn't make sense.  If the goal is getting away from carbon, there are many shovel ready approaches.  There's this great fusion reactor about 500 light seconds away.  

 

 

 

john gruber's take on apple's recent announcements

A reasonable summary underscoring their different approach. Also the important grain of salt caveat.

 

 

how's that potlatch going?

Steve Sinofsky on AI-LLM hype.  There are good use cases and some that make little sense.  

I'm in the "there's some there there, but much of it is hype" camp