Amusing Science

[sparks]

Ah yes. The good ol' Wanker!

[Witness]

Not really science, but a technology I found amusing:



Somewhat repetitive timelapse:

[Anaxagoras]

I guess this goes here.



Exactly how big are these? It's a little hard to tell because there's no people up on top to give a point of reference, but each one of those blades is longer than a football field. 117 yards long to be precise (107 meters). Those fences are probably about as tall as a person.

They are rated to generate 12 MW of electricity.



https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environm ... rgy-blades

There's some interesting talk about capacity factors:

This quote from the Department of Energy’s 2016 Wind Technologies Market Report shows how wind capacity factors have evolved over time: “The average 2016 capacity factor among projects built in 2014 and 2015 was 42.5%, compared to an average of 32.1% among projects built from 2004–2011 and just 25.4% among projects built from 1998 to 2001.”

By way of comparison, in 2016 the US nuclear fleet had an average capacity factor of around 92 percent. (Given current markets, nuclear is only economic when running continuously, as baseload.) Coal and natural gas were 55 and 56 percent respectively. (Natural gas is that low because it frequently ramps up and down to follow swings in demand. Coal used to be up close to 80, but it is less and less economic to run coal plants at all.)

So modern US wind is up to 42.5 percent and natural gas is at 56 percent. The Haliade-X, according to GE, will have a capacity factor of 63 percent. That is wackadoodle, though it wouldn’t be the highest in the world — the floating offshore turbines in the Hywind Scotland project hit 65 percent recently.

Add all that up and, at a “typical German North Sea site,” GE says, each Haliade-X will produce about 67GWh annually, “enough clean power for up to 16,000 households per turbine, and up to 1 million European households in a 750 MW windfarm configuration.” (Suffice to say, the number would be smaller for energy-profligate American households.) That’s “45 percent more energy than any other offshore wind turbine available today,” according to the company.

[Rob Lister]

These comparisons ...

By way of comparison, in 2016 the US nuclear fleet had an average capacity factor of around 92 percent. (Given current markets, nuclear is only economic when running continuously, as baseload.) Coal and natural gas were 55 and 56 percent respectively. (Natural gas is that low because it frequently ramps up and down to follow swings in demand. Coal used to be up close to 80, but it is less and less economic to run coal plants at all.)

Make it appear that wind is on par with coal and natural gas. But in fact the comparison is at best apples and oranges. Coal for example has a lower capacity factor because one decides to turn it down. Wind has a lower capacity factor because the wind stops blowing. A coal plant with any given nameplate capacity can be run at >100% as necessary and any downtime can be scheduled. Same with nuclear, natural gas, hydroelectric, and even geothermal. Decidedly not so with wind unless the wind decides to cooperate; it is unpredictable.

Therefore, for every unpredictable KW of wind that you build, you have to build a KW of something reliable to back it up. As such, you pay for your power twice even if you only need the energy once; every KW/h of energy produced will have two KW of potential behind it. What you save in fuel may pay for that but the energy bills certainly don't reflect any savings.

[Witness]

↑ That's kW.h or kWh, not kW/h.

Wit – pedantic asshole – ness.

[Witness]

Spoiler:

Emergency fire extinguisher at Kennedy Space Center.

And you can try to simulate it in your kitchen:

[Witness]

[Witness]

(I have the same glasses, but without this crawling chaos…)

[Rob Lister]

whatthefuckisthat?

[Witness]

The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?
Gavin A. Schmidt, Adam Frank
(Submitted on 10 Apr 2018)

If an industrial civilization had existed on Earth many millions of years prior to our own era, what traces would it have left and would they be detectable today? We summarize the likely geological fingerprint of the Anthropocene, and demonstrate that while clear, it will not differ greatly in many respects from other known events in the geological record. We then propose tests that could plausibly distinguish an industrial cause from an otherwise naturally occurring climate event.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748

Amusing article on the subject: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arc ... on/557180/

[Witness]

[sparks]

OK, that's fun.

What's the trick?



Oh. Nevermind!

[Anaxagoras]

Weird. It almost looks impossible without some sort of trickery.

You gotta watch to the end of the gif to briefly get a glimpse of the actual shape of whatever that is.

[sparks]

It's a matter of perspective. Any other angle save the one it was photographed at would give it away immediately.

[robinson]

It's still fucking awesome

[Witness]

[Bruce]

Viscous liquid syphoning itself.

[Witness]

Some aerodynamics:

[Witness]

[sparks]

Fun with tuned circuits! One of my personal favs.

[Witness]

Schlieren optics.

[robinson]

Science is fun

[sparks]

No argument here.

Just a damn shame I'm too stupid to have done something great, be set for life as a result, and retire early to my personal island. (One of the larger islands in the Scotch Archipelago)

[Witness]

retire early to my personal island. (One of the larger islands in the Scotch Archipelago)

I hate to break it to you, but a close friend went to Islay and told me the locals don't drink the local whisky.

On the bright side that's more booze for you…

---

Hydrodynamics, surface tension/capillarity, minimal surface, reflection on a sphere (the droplets) and surface waves. The whole bunch.

[Witness]

Seeing light move, sorta (annoying music):

We have built an imaging solution that allows us to visualize propagation of light at an effective rate of one trillion frames per second. Direct recording of light at such a frame rate with sufficient brightness is nearly impossible. We use an indirect 'stroboscopic' method that combines millions of repeated measurements by careful scanning in time and viewpoints.

Details & other vids: http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/

[Witness]

[Witness]

Spoiler:

water + sound

[Witness]

Classical iron filings experiment, in oil:

[Bruce]

Did NOT know you could capture plasma in a syringe

[Witness]

Spoiler:

Using the visual metaphor of a coral reef, artist Rogan Brown (previously) introduces his audience to the diverse bacteria, archaea, fungi found in the human body through paper-based sculptures. The detailed works are created after months of research and hunting for aesthetic parallels that might link the two surprisingly similar worlds.

His series Magical Circle Variations merge these sources of inspiration with a pastel color scheme that can also be found in a coral habitat. “What the reef and the microbiome have in common is that they both consist of biodiverse colonies of organisms that coexist more or less harmoniously,” Brown explains. “There are further parallels between coral and human beings in that we are both symbiont organisms, that is we depend on a mutually beneficial relationship with another species: coral only receive their beautiful colors from varieties of algae that live on them and human beings can only exist thanks to the unimaginably huge and diverse number of bacteria that live in and on them.”

Brown hopes that his intricate paper sculptures will allow his audience to more greatly conceptualize the bacteria-based landscape of the human body. Works like these will be exhibited with C Fine Art at the upcoming Art Market Hamptons July 5-8, 2018.

Source: http://alphi.xyz/the-human-microbiome-r ... gan-brown/
Artist's site: http://roganbrown.com/home.html

[Witness]

[sparks]

Pretty good shit. What's the trick?

[Don Logan]

Pretty good shit. What's the trick?

This is a man you know

[Anaxagoras]

What are those, colored marbles? I see them being sorted into colors, but I can't think of how they would do that. It looks kind of like a pachinko game. Are the weights and sizes all the same? Maybe they aren't really being sorted by color but by something else that isn't apparent from the gif.

[Anaxagoras]

Spoiler:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44368813

[Rob Lister]

What are those, colored marbles? I see them being sorted into colors, but I can't think of how they would do that. It looks kind of like a pachinko game. Are the weights and sizes all the same? Maybe they aren't really being sorted by color but by something else that isn't apparent from the gif.

Spoiler:

Record the run of clear marbles. Use editing software to color the marbles after-the-fact.

[Witness]

What are those, colored marbles? I see them being sorted into colors, but I can't think of how they would do that. It looks kind of like a pachinko game. Are the weights and sizes all the same? Maybe they aren't really being sorted by color but by something else that isn't apparent from the gif.

Spoiler:

Record the run of clear marbles. Use editing software to color the marbles after-the-fact.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/machi ... red-balls/

[sparks]

Spoiler:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44368813

Waste heat into the sea will cause teh dreaded sea level rises and shit!

[Doctor X]

Worse, it will infect the sea.

--J.D.

[sparks]

Indeed. The World Oh-See-Un will become self aware and in a hissy fit temper tantrum over all that plastic we dumped in there, will destroy us all!!

We are doomed.