• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • how much you can build without a complete understanding

    We’ve never actually never had one. I’d have to check the timelines but Tesla was almost certainly working on a functional, but inaccurate atomic model (Bohr). Medicine is actually a great example of all this. We are so used to just kind of knowing “there’s a bad bug or bad gene that’s making me sick”. Like you may not know the details, but you’ve got some loose concept a bunch of cells in your body are pissed off. For the vast, vasssssssst history of medicine, it was all empirical, and the thing is, it kind of worked… sometimes.

    My favorite example of “knowing without fully understanding” is Mendel and his peas. If you do a 4x4 punnet square (that gene cross thing), and look at the frequency of co-inheritance, you can track how far genes are from on another (because the further they are, the more likely there will be a swap during the shuffle). Thing is… because DNA is an integer thing (no such thing as ‘half a base pair’) it works DOWN TO THE SINGLE BASE PAIR. Mendel was accurately counting the number of freaking base pairs separating genes without knowing what a base pair, or indeed even really a molecule, was.

    Tesla would have lived to see some absolutely nutty stuff in physics. Boltzman, Einstein with relativity, it must have seemed like pure madness at the time.

    So yeah, we discover new and interesting stuff all the time. I personally think that some of the weird quantum stuff is going seem as rote in the future as germs do to us now. As in, the same way any lay-person shoved into a time machine would at least be able to give the basics to a medieval European, someone from the future would be like “well I don’t remember much about quantum tunneling, but…”.

    And that’s all before getting into some of the bizarre things going on in math itself. Be careful if you look into that stuff though, it’s easy to fall into the “Terrance Howard” style rabbit hole. Suffice to say there is some really interesting and unexpected implications we’re discovering, but if you don’t have a solid grasp of theory, it is easy to be led astray but sources that want to gloss over details to talk about a conclusion that isn’t actually supported. It’s like if you tried to explain time dilation to an ancient Greek, and they excitedly hopped on their fastest chariot thinking they could “fast forward” to the future, because time moves “more slowly” for you when you’re going faster, right?



  • Thrilled you asked! So yes: Treatment is always required, but the final destination of the treated water can vary. For instance, in a lot of places they may have municipal water TO a home or business, but that may be discharged to septic, as opposed to the river. Also in a lot of areas, water may be taken out of an underground aquifer (either by private well or a municipality) but when treated it may be discharged into a river or ocean. That can create problems because if you’re near the coast, the empty space in the aquifer may be filled by salt/brackish water that can lead to salinity rises in the aquifer. To solve that some places turn to “ground water recharge”, which is just a fancy way of saying “we built a big well to put it back in the aquifer”.

    Increasingly, you’re seeing some places essentially sell their treated water. Santa Rosa CA, for instance, built an entire pipeline that goes from their treatment facility to another municipality to be injected into their groundwater.

    So yes, everywhere treats it, but the final destination makes a difference. Las Vegas (or anyone else on the river) only gets credit for what goes back into the river, so any evaporation etc is a problem. It sounds trivial, but there is a reason those other strategies exist. It essentially doubles every pipe, limits where you can park a treatment plant etc. Vegas also does some great grey water re-use. That essentially means it doesn’t go “back” but can get used many many times, limiting the initial draw.

    Wastewater is funny because it’s far from rocket science, but the numbers to implement any of it get staggering very quickly.











  • The browns gas thing (usually “using water as fuel” by splitting it… Using power from the engine) actually has insanely specific be credible use case.

    It turns out that in very specific engine types, you can gain additional engine efficiency that’s worth the energy it took to generate the gas. The us army did a whole proper study. That net gain was, however, only present in vehicles not maintained on the usual schedule. So it did infact help some engine types that were not well maintained.

    I know this because I did a dive years back. Effeciency be damned, building a reserve of browns gas that I could dump in when I wanted for a power boost sounded fun as hell to me. You wouldn’t gain any effeciency (probably loose a ton) but you would have more power when you were mixing in the reserve you’d built up. I wound up not doing it because 1) the vehicle I had in mind was carb not fuel injection so no power gains there. And 2) dealing with generating, pressurizing, storing and delivering a gas isnt a ton of fun in a “for the lolz” project.


  • So I’m trying to find an academic article, but it’s not just the substrate. They blew right past it in the article but there is electric potential applied, and the substrate is slightly conductive which is what allows it. They seem to imply that leads to better root growth but like I said the article barley mentioned the actual e of the e soil lol.

    But bioelectrochemistry is a thing. I work on the other end, where microbes are depositing electrons, but I am aware of different technologies where the bugs use a potential as an energy source for specific reactions, usually around remidiating some nasty stuff in the ground.

    Im less aware of it affecting a plant directly (I’d assume it changed the soil bugs or something) but it’s not hard to picture. Good be something as simple as the potential changing the osmotic pressure and making it easier for the plants to take up nutrients or something.

    But yeah, pretty far from a rod in the ground, although in some cases that is basically all you’d need. The bioelectrochemistry field always had junk science to contend with.


  • batmaniam@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhat DID Apple innovate?
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    9 months ago

    Also standardizing hardware. Part of the iPhones success was that developers had to develop for A phone, singular. There were a lot of cool palm programs and whatnot, but having a single hardware set to bug-smash had to be a big part of making the app-market go into hyper drive.

    I don’t own a single apple product, but credit where credit is due.



  • Responding to like three of your comments at once. But I used RES since like 2010. Until June I, and I imagine many others, had zero idea what “vanilla” reddit even looked like.

    But yes, I only do r/NFL because I haven’t found that in fediverse yet. When I’m there and the muscle. Memory kicks in and I click the logo and go to the home it’s… Bad…

    I’ve popped in once or twice in the niche communities I used to do. There’s activity, but it’s stuff I would have called filler posts two years ago. Not bad just… Not good.


  • Yeah… I don’t know if the person you’re mentioning meant productive stuff or not, but I was in a pretty niche community there. One where parents were dealing with their kids on operating tables, but not often. It was as exactly the kind of thing internet forums were made for: medical advice from doctors, venting and whatnot from strangers who’d been there. I said a lot of practical helpful things and a lot of meaningless nice platitudes at the right time.

    And I was happy to do it the same way I swapped guitar tabs as a kid.

    There’s honest money in making a community space.

    There’s no honest money in monetizing a community.