https://larvatus.livejournal.com/384861.html

What a compressed gas represents is not stored energy, but stored (negative) entropy. It is a resource that allows low grade heat to be converted to work at high efficiency. This is what's to happen in this facility: the heat of compression is separated out and stored, then used to reheat the compressed air at discharge time. The energy is actually being stored in that thermal store.

But there are other ways to do this that don't involve compressed air storage. Instead, after the heat of compression is removed and stored the compressed air could be reexpanded, recovering some of the work. This would leave the gas much colder than when it started. This cold could be stored (heating the gas back to its initial temperature) and the gas sent around again. To discharge, the temperature difference between the hot and cold stores could be exploited.

This is called "pumped thermal storage". I believe Google/Alphabet has/had a group looking at this (called Malta). It has no geographical limitations.

(*) Highly compressed air will store some energy because the molecules become so crowded some energy is stored in intermolecular repulsion, but that should be a small effect in this system.

Though I think it's worth keeping in mind Elon's recent frustrations with Grok not embracing his and Twitter's current world views.

We're quickly crossing a threshold where self-evaluation by LLMs of content becomes its own filter which will likely mitigate many similar attack vectors.

(Mine isn't so much an attack as much planting an alignment seed.)

But it wasn't ego, it was fear. The company was running out of runway, we just hadnt been told yet. The CEO adopted the product team strategy as a Hail Mary, out of sheer panic, and he sabotaged it for the exact same reason: he was terrified of not trying it, and then terrified of it not working.

Not only because of this anecdote, but because of several other important ones, I view leadership as being generally fear-driven in their decision making. Ducklike, they appear calm and even confident on the surface, while desperately thrashing and failing below the surface. Or, like someone falling down a hill and reaching out for anything to hold on to.

If you are reading these comments please try and be aware of this fact and the possibility that anyone, yourself included, could fall into this trap and remember to take all of the amazing possibilities being suggested and conclusions reached herein with a grain of salt.

I was with a person who I loved deeply, the details are, personal and I am going to skip over. But when she passed...

Her breathing moved from the rattle to just a quiet rhythm, and after a long time, slowed and finally stopped, with her last breath, I kissed her on her forehead, and said, “I will always love thee my sweet love."

I felt something, I sensed something, her spirit pierced through me, an energy, so intense, so much love. I know it was her spirit, she passed through me on her way to her journey to the beyond.

I had a vision. I don’t know if I fell asleep or exactly what happened, but in my vision, I was on a sandy beach with her on an island, there was a large campfire, it was dark, no moon and the milky way was splashed across the sky so vividly, like diamonds on velvet. I was a child and so was she, an old man as dancing around the fire.

He stopped and smiled at me, he waved his hand across the fire and embers trailed his hand as he traced the arc of the milky way, the embers seemed to mingle with the stars. It was so beautiful; I cannot explain it fully. He turned to me and smiled and nodded, and I nodded back, as if to say, I see, I understand now. He took her hand, she smiled at me, and they walked together into the sea.

Something of her stayed with me, I feel her, and him, both her spirits, some little piece. She was and she is, and he was, and he is, with me, in spirit. I wrote this poem about the experience.

Dämmerstunde (Twilight Hour)

When I stand at the window in the twilight, I see the sea in front of me in deep silence, Star upon star shines high above me, I like to think of long-forgotten childhood days.

How I yearned from my mother's womb, When she asked the great sky spirit, With wispy white hair, an old man, How he splashes the lights across the sky?

How then, she tenderly taught me, To hold dear the great spirit. How the omnipresence works and creates, With immeasurable love, kindness, strength.

Does he love me too, Mommy? Am I too small? Certainly, my child, you must be sincere and true, Stay strong, always trust in him, He will never renounce his love for you.

Oh mother, how often, with patience, Have you explained to me the great beauty of the spirit. Then I fell asleep, tired from many questions, You carried me lovingly and carefully to my little bed.

You left me so long ago, you're in the light, My mother, sees me from the spirits eye, But when my lifetime is up, Come home to thy glory!

I know, I am an idiot. Or crazy. I hope this is not out of line Again, I am not a believer, but I am questioning myself. I am so sorry if this is out of bounds.

Thank you for putting up with my silliness.

It's not monetized or anything. Just hoping it's of some help to someone out there.

I was a private yacht chef for 6 years. One yacht guest was the biggest condescending jerk so I made him what he said was the best food he has ever had in his life and thought I was putting in the extra effort to impress him. Diplomacy is telling someone to go to hell and make them look forward to the trip. When I liked guests they ate much more plain simple food. If I serve the most perfect Foie Gras, Beef Wellington, and Creme Brulee to a person am I breaking the law? Heart disease the biggest killer in the United States. I haven't worked on a yacht in over a decade and I'm still very close with one family I worked for, for whom I cooked very healthy food. I have joked during that time the reason I cooked healthy plain food for them was that I liked the job security knowing they will be around for a while. One of the many reasons I became a software engineer instead of working in restaurants was guilt feeling like a drug dealer while I ate healthy food which I cooked for myself and friends. Don't get high on your own supply.

And if you want to go off the deep end, try the gateway tapes.

There's a few reliable ways to manifest distortions and to notice the amount of distortion in your present state.

1. After images. Stare at a bright spot such as a lightbulb or a beam of sunlight through a crack for several seconds. Then close your eyes. The normal after image you are used to should now take on a deeply geometric shape rather than smoothly diffusing away.

2. Look at TV static / towel / white noise texture. These patterns are extremely reliable at manifesting crystals and fractals. I have theories why, but lets stay on point.

3. The dead man switch. Set a timer for 20 min. When it goes off, verbally acknowledge and reset. This isn't visual, but the first and most subtle distortion is your sense of time and this will make you acutely aware of it.

4. Thin line on white page. It should reliably start to jiggle around as if it were a wave on a string.

As a general rule, things which have very fine grain spatial components will be distorted in some way. If you must know the theory for whats happening (which I can back with scientific citations), the brain is doing something similar to the way jpeg/mp3 compression works. Namely it converts the incoming information into frequencies via a fourier transform (in some weird, highly optimized basis) because information processing is generally easier there. LSD changes the reference clocks so everything is out of phase. Every frequency is being slowly phase shifted from where it should be, which then causes it all to move as if it were following a wave equation.

I then asked it to write a paper detailing the main character's final battle with the final sorcerer in terms of Hopf algebras. Some parts of it are basic/trivial but it fits so perfectly that I think I'll never see magic systems the same way again.

What's crazy is that that paper as the capstone of our tutoring session helped me understand Hopf algebras much better than just the tutoring session alone. My mind is completely blown at how good this thing is, and this is from someone who is a self-professed LLM skeptic. ChatGPT I used once or twice and it was cool. This is crazy and over my threshold for what I'd say is 'everyday usable'. This is going to change so much in a way that we cannot predict, just like the internet. Especially as it gets much more commoditized.

Here's the full paper here so I don't drag y'all through the twitter post of me freaking out about it. Its temporal consistency is excellent (referenced and fully defined accurately a semi-obscure term it created (the N_2 particle) 5+ pages later (!!!!)), and it followed the instructions of relating all of the main components of Hopf algebras (IIRC that was roughly the original prompt) to the story. This is incredible. Take a look at the appendix if you're short on time. That's probably the best part of this all:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tysam-code/fileshare/69633...

It's really interesting to think about the "could have done this but didn't" stuff!

Silver chloride is one of the less sensitive silver halides you can use in photography, but it works; it dates to about 2500 years ago when someone (the Lydians?) figured out you could separate silver from gold by firing it with salt. So you could have done photography 2500 years ago instead of 200 years ago.

There's lots of stuff in optics that only requires a Fizeau interferometer (made of a candle flame and a razor blade, Bronze Age stuff), abrasives (Paleolithic), reflective metal (Bronze Age again; Newton's mirrors were just a high-tin bronze), abrasives, and an unreasonable amount of patience. Imhotep could have made a Dobsonian telescope and seen the moons of Jupiter 4700 years ago if he'd known that was a worthwhile thing to do.

Speaking of metrology, I've heard conflicting stories about surface plates: one story that the Babylonians knew about grinding three surfaces alternately against one another to make them all flat, and another that Maudslay originated the technique only about 220 years ago. (Or, sometimes, Maudslay's apprentice Whitworth.) This is clearly a technique you could have employed in the Neolithic.

Sorption pumps for fine vacuum (usually 1e-2 mbar) require a high-surface-area sorbent (zeolite or maybe even kieselguhr or ball-milled non-zeolite clay: Neolithic), probably glassblowing (Roman Republic era in Syria), sealed joints (apparently Victorians used sealing wax successfully up to HV though not UHV, and sealing wax is pine resin and beeswax: probably Paleolithic), and some way to heat up the sorbent (fire: Paleolithic). Fine vacuum is enough for thermos bottles (dewars) and CVD, among other things.

Conceivably you could have just luted together an opaque vacuum apparatus from glazed earthenware (which dates from probably 3500 years ago), using sealing wax to seal the joints. But debugging the thing or manipulating anything inside of it would have been an invincible challenge.

Sorption pumping works better if you can also cool the sorbent down, too; dry ice is today made by explosive decompression of carbon dioxide, similar to how puffed corn and rice can be made with a grain-puffing cannon, and regularly is by Chinese street vendors. Pure carbon dioxide is available by calcining limestone (thus the name: Neolithic) in a metal vessel (Bronze Age) that bubbles the result into water into a "gasometer", a bucket floating upside down. Compressing the carbon dioxide sufficiently probably requires the accurately cylindrical bores produced for the first time for things like the Dardanelles Gun (15th century). But possibly not; the firepiston in Madagascar is at least 1500 years old, dating back to the time of the Western Roman Empire, and I think it can achieve sufficiently high compression.

Mercury has been known all over the world since antiquity, though usually as a precious metal rather than a demonic pollutant. Mercury plus glassblowing (Roman Republic, again) is enough for a Sprengel pump, which can achieve 1 mPa, high vacuum, 1000 times higher vacuum than an ordinary sorption pump (though some sorption pumps are even better than the Sprengel pump). High vacuum is sufficient to make vacuum tubes.

The Pidgeon process to refine magnesium requires dolomite, ferrosilicon, and a reducing atmosphere or vacuum. You get ferrosilicon by firing iron, coke, and silica in acid refractory (such as silica). Magnesium is especially demanding of reducing atmospheres; in particular nitrogen and carbon dioxide are not good enough, so you need something like hydrogen (or, again, vacuum) to distill the magnesium out of the reaction vessel. As a structural metal magnesium isn't very useful unless you also have aluminum or zinc or manganese or silicon, which the ancients didn't; but it's a first-rate incendiary weapon and thermite reducer, permitting both the easy achievement of very high temperatures and the thermite reduction of nearly all other metals.

Copper and iron with any random kind of electrolyte makes a (rather poor) battery; this permits you to electroplate. The Baghdad Battery surely isn't such a battery, but it demonstrates that the materials available to build one were available starting in the Iron Age. Electroplating is potentially useful for corrosion resistance, but to electroplate copper onto iron you apparently need an intermediate metal like nickel or chromium to get an adherent coating, and to electroplate gold or silver you probably need cyanide or more exotic materials. Alternate possible uses for low-voltage expensive electricity include molten-salt electrolysis and the production of hydrogen from water.

Copper rectifiers and photovoltaic panels pretty much just require heating up a sheet of copper, I think? Similarly copper wires for a generator only require wire drawing (Chalcolithic I think, at least 2nd Dynasty Egypt) and something like shellac (Mahabharata-age India, though rare in Europe until 500 years ago), though many 19th-century electrical machines were instead insulated with silk cloth.

Vapor-compression air conditioners probably need pretty advanced sealing and machining techniques, but desiccant-driven air conditioners can operate entirely at atmospheric pressure. The desiccants are pretty corrosive, but beeswax-painted metal or salt-glazed ceramic pipes are probably fine for magnesium chloride ("bitterns" from making sea salt, Japanese "nigari"), and you can pump it around with a geyser pump.

I think the geyser pump is still under patent, but it can be made of unglazed earthenware or carved out of bamboo (both Neolithic) and driven by either a bellows (Neolithic) or a trompe (Renaissance).

Some years ago I figured out a way to use textile thread (and, say, tree branches) to make logic gates; I posted that to kragen-tol. So you probably could have done digital logic with Neolithic materials science, though only at kHz clock rates. And of course you could have hand-filed clockwork gears out of sheet copper as early as the Chalcolithic, instead of waiting until the Hellenistic period.

I found it interesting that he compared and contrasted the airline industry where failures are seen as systemic (don't blame the pilot, blame the system) and the medical industry where failures are typically seen as having personal liability (blame the surgeon).

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/610964/humble-pi-by...

I healed my eczema with red light (infrared heater) It turn out that infrared is needed by all our cells to get rid of inflammation. We are in an epidemic of autoimmune diseases partially caused by the lack of infrared.

The spectrum of halogen lights is continuous and closer to what we would get outside. Tungsten bulbs are also continuous but more tilted toward infrared. I think we will have unintended consequence of everyone switching to led lights: the "wasted" infrared are actually useful for our body.

It is wise to assume that almost everything from the natural environment is connected to our biology. As we move further away from it we stack up the health problems self inflicted: crooked teeth, wisdom teeth, miopia, acnee, vid-d deficiency, autoimmune diseases, depression, anxiety, etc.

Search "Medcram infrared" it’s a doctor that explain the science behind it.

"My most surprising discovery: the overwhelming importance in business of an unseen force that we might call 'the institutional imperative.' In business school, I was given no hint of the imperative's existence and I did not intuitively understand it when I entered the business world. I thought then that decent, intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. But I learned over time that isn't so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play.

For example: (1) As if governed by Newton's First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.

Institutional dynamics, not venality or stupidity, set businesses on these courses, which are too often misguided. After making some expensive mistakes because I ignored the power of the imperative, I have tried to organize and manage Berkshire in ways that minimize its influence. Furthermore, Charlie and I have attempted to concentrate our investments in companies that appear alert to the problem."

[1] http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1989.html

* Geometry and the imagination by Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen

* Methods of mathematical physics by Courant and Hilbert

* A comprehensive introduction to differential geometry by Spivak (and its little brothers Calculus and Calculus on manifolds)

* Fourier Analysis by Körner

* Arnold's books on ODE, PDE and mathematical physics are breathtakingly beautiful.

* The shape of space by Weeks

* Solid Shape by Koenderink

* Analyse fonctionnelle by Brézis

* Tristan Needhams "visual" books about complex analysis and differential forms

* Information theory, inference, and learning algorithms by MacKay (great book about probability, plus you can download the .tex source and read the funny comments of the author)

And finally, a very old website which is full of mathematical jewels with an incredibly fresh and clear treatment: https://mathpages.com/ ...I'm in love with the tone of these articles, serious and playful at the same time.

For every one competent executive there seems to be 3 deluded narcissistic idiots who will slash and burn people who are overqualified and under-utilized for the positions they've been incompetently assigned.

Now before you think I'm a victim of layoffs, I'm actually the political navigator. I constantly survive layoffs as I see the most talented people get let go and the best teams get broken up and reassigned, it's nuts.

One of the best techniques is to get yourself into what I call a "management island" - essentially you have either 0 or many bosses, just not 1. The next one is to be associated with a small bet - essentially a cheap investment that may yield a great long-term payoff, preferably related to the company cash cow. A third technique is to not attend too many events. Vagueness works in your favor. People should know generally but not specifically what you do. With details comes critiques so keep it ambiguous by staying quiet.

If you survive a layoff then you must not let a good crisis go to waste. Use the fog of the firing and the power vacuum to resituate yourself into this political dynamic as the dust settles. Of course these techniques only work at large companies.

I learned all of these techniques from years in management. There's more but that's a good start

It is incredibly difficult to convince a greedy bastard to support peace. The natural order, for millennia, has been that when a greedy bastard meets a peace-loving activist, the greedy bastard takes the peacenik's stuff and then kills them. That is why we continue to have greedy bastards after millennia, and many of the original peaceful hunter-gatherer tribes have been killed off.

Capitalism's greatest success is as a sociopath-containment vessel. Historically, people who desire world domination achieve it by killing everybody else. Capitalism has managed to convince them that the path to world domination is making stuff and providing services for everybody else. This is a huge change in incentives.

Musical harmony in Western music is based on physical properties of the way materials vibrate. When you vibrate something resonant through plucking, striking, forcing air through, etc, it vibrates at a fundamental frequency, and integer multiples of that fundamental frequency. So for instance 400 Hz, 800 Hz, 1200 Hz, etc.

The power of two multiples sound like the same note in a higher octave. Human hearing is logarithmic, and the same note one octave higher is double the frequency.

The non power of 2 multiples do NOT sound like the same note. These notes are what "sounds good" with the base frequency, and generally the lower frequency multiple it comes from the better it sounds. So for instance, starting with 400 Hz, 400 x 3 = 1200. Divide that back down below 800 to 600 to put it in the same "octave", and you have the interval called a 5th. 400 Hz x 5 = 2000, divide it back down to 500 Hz. That's a major 3rd? I think? It might be a 4th, I don't remember.

Notice that these frequencies are defined by exact ratios to each other, not by consistent logarithmic increases which can be repeated in a pattern (a scale). So, how can you split up an octave in the way that most closely appoximates these exact ratios? Turns out dividing an octave into 12 steps is much better than any number before or after until you get to 24. Thus the 12 note system of western music.

All the different tuning systems mentioned by others are trying to tune these 12 notes for different purposes. Older pre-modern systems usually tuned to C most exactly, and left small errors in every other key. These small errors gave different character to different keys in music of the time. Newer tuning systems (equal temperament), have the key errors balanced out evenly across every key, so every key now sounds the same in character.

    let z = Complex<f64>::new(1.0, 2.0);
    let A = Matrix<f64>::ident(10, 10);
    let B : Matrix<Complex<f64>> = z*A;
    let C : Matrix<Complex<f64>> = 2.0*B;

(yes, I know there are some syntax errors in the type declarations above - It's my opinion Rust got that wrong too...)

Supposedly this kind of thing will eventually be possible with the recent "specialization" changes, but I haven't seen anything that allows operators to work as above...

ps: Last I looked, there was fledgling support for SIMD on the horizon... LLVM supports that, so it could happen.

Podcasts are similar to books though, you have to dig through a bit of garbage to find one that works for you. Here's my list:

- crime in sports

- Linux unplugged

- software engineering radio

- the knowledge project

- coinsec

- persona

- ten percent happier

- quanta podcast

- physics world weekly

- ologies

- darknet diaries

- stuff you should know

- the joy of why

- fall of civilizations

- smartless

- money talks

- planet money

- small town murder

- offensive security

- the journal

- programming throwdown

- timesuck

- Conan O'Brien needs a friend

- philosophize this

- against the odds

- levar Burton reads (no longer running)

- curiosity daily

- science weekly

- future of journalism

- wtf

- broken record

- idea cast

- swindled

- malicious life

- views room

- behind the bastards

- the exchange

- stuff to blow your mind

And for the "junk" I listen to just about every comedian podcast that exists: Bill Burr, Bobby Lee, Chris destefano, Stavros!, Tom Segura, (this list goes on a while...)

I always found it amusing how the "patriots" worshipping the military are pretty much the same people who hate any kind of government intervention in their lives.