Anyone who has spent any amount of time in or near people who are really interested in energy policies will have heard proclamations such as that ‘baseload is dead’ and the sorting of energy sources by parameters like their levelized cost of energy (LCoE) and merit order. Another thing that one may have noticed here […]
It is no secret that we often use and abuse bash to write things that ought to be in a different language. But bash does have its attractions. In the modern world, it is practically everywhere. It can also be very expressive, but perhaps hard to read. We’ve talked about Amber before, a language that […]
If you’ve been even casually following NASA’s return to the Moon, you’re likely aware of the recent Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) for the Artemis II mission. You probably also heard that things didn’t go quite to plan: although the test was ultimately completed and the towering Space Launch System (SLS) rocket was fully loaded with […]
Although at its face the results seem obvious, a recent study by [Sandrah Eckel] et al. on the impact of electric cars in California is interesting from a quantitative perspective. What percentage of ICE-only cars do you need to replace with either full electric or hybrid cars before you start seeing an improvement in air […]
Water wells are simple things, but that doesn’t mean they are maintenance-free. It can be important to monitor water levels in a well, and that gets complicated when the well is remote. Commercial solutions exist, of course, but tend to be expensive and even impractical in some cases. That’s where [Hans Gaensbauer]’s low-cost, buoyancy-based well […]
Top of an RBMK at the Leningrad plant. Control panels of a pre-digitalization nuclear plant look quite daunting, with countless dials, buttons and switches that all make perfect sense to a trained operator, but seem as random as those of the original Enterprise bridge in Star Trek to the average person. This makes the reconstruction […]
Plenty of our childhoods had at least one math teacher who made the (ultimately erroneous) claim that we needed to learn to do math because we wouldn’t always have a calculator in our pockets. While the reasoning isn’t particularly sound anymore, knowing how to do math from first principles is still a good idea in […]
[Teddy Warner]’s GPenT (Generative Pen-trained Transformer) project is a wall-mounted polargraph that makes plotter art, but there’s a whole lot more going on than one might think. This project was partly born from [Teddy]’s ideas about how to use aspects of machine learning in ways that were really never intended. What resulted is a wall-mounted […]
Making sure the heatgun is on ‘low’ and gloves are on while pushing on the mold. (Credit: Zion Brock) Although hobbyists these days most often seem to use thermoplastics as a print-and-done material in FDM printers, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from taking things further with thermoforming. Much like forming acrylic using a hot wire […]
This week Jonathan chats with Bill Shotts about The Linux Command Line! That’s Bill’s book published by No Starch Press, all about how to make your way around the Linux command line! Bill has had quite a career doing Unix administration, and has thoughts on the current state of technology. Watch to find out more! […]