In Ireland, we’re running at about 75% renewables for the day, with most of that being wind. The absolute numbers are smaller, but that’s a peak of about 500 MW of solar and 3.6GW of wind, against something like 5-6Gw of demand.
When I visited CERN, they mentioned that there were some large number of protons in the ring at a time, and the runs would last a significant amount of wall clock time. (Don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think it was like 10^19 atoms of H, and days of wall clock)
The upshot was, it was likely that less than a mol of hydrogen had been run through the ring.
If humanity doesn't perish in the next hundred year and masters interplanetary spaceflight, antimatter drive is the logical next step in propulsion after fusion.
Interstellar spaceflight will become (barely) feasible once spaceships can reach velocity between 0.02 to 0.1c are possible. Even assuming non-100% conversion efficiency, antimatter has enough energy density to provide this capability.
My memory is that 1g of constant acceleration grants sufficient relativity to make it to the edge of the known universe in a current human lifespan.
Now, it's true, there's some slight issues such as radiation, food storage/production, psychological effects, and any random space rocks obliterating your craft, all of which could reasonably turn out to be enough to make it not work. We also don't have a fuel source that can provide 1g of constant acceleration for 80 years for a reasonably sized space ship, though again my memory is that nothing prohibits it from a physics perspective (this is where my knowledge/understanding get prohibitively poor. I'm not sure how the math works if you stick a thousand ion drives to a spaceship that's already in space or if you just need a huge snifter of compressed hydrogen or if you can just use nuclear propulsion but I'm pretty sure that antimatter would do it, if you could bring yourself to waste the money. But maybe we don't have a plausible way to contain it so what do I know).
Maybe I'm remembering wrong, or maybe I glossed over what's currently considered a physics, rather than engineering/economic/materials science problem, but that's what it looked like last I checked.
Alpha Centauri yes, the edge of the universe no :D
Edge of observable universe is something like 46 billion light-years away, even at 0.9c thats 50 billion years of travel (22 billion years experienced by the traveller)
But yes, you can travel places by constant acceleration but unfortunately it still dwarfs in comparison to those places out of our reach.
Unfortunately also, the universe is expanding at a rate faster than the speed of light so you actually cant ever reach the edge
If the craft could maintain a constant 1G acceleration the entire time or more it is feasible to get near the known edge for the traveler, assuming we could make and utilize enough anti-matter to do it and that what we see as the edge here is actually a recognizable edge once you are out there.
0.9C would be reached in only a year and a half for the traveler under constant 1G acceleration. After 2.5 years you would be at .99c, and at a bit over 3.5 years you would hit .999c with a 6x time dilation compared to earth. After 6 years of acceleration it would be .99999c and Earth would be 200 years in the past. As you approach 12 years you would be going 0.9999999999c and Earth would have experienced almost 70,000 years. As you go past 16 years you would be in the millions of years and as you got past 20 years you would be in the billions of years.
Of course doing that may only be feasible with anti-matter energy storage. The next best energy source is fusion energy but it is 2 orders of magnitude less dense. Perhaps some kind of ram scoop would make that route possible but that is going beyond just speculation because we don't know if you can feasibly capture random particles at that speed even assuming you didn't explode from just hitting them in the first place.
You don't need new physics for interstellar spaceflight - 16 km/s of dV is enough. you don't even need to go that much faster to slowly spread among the stars. There are a lot of smaller bodies all the way from Sun to Alpha Centauri. As long as you hop between them within reasonable time in a few thousand years you can become a true interstellar civilization, while going at much-slower-than-light velocity (similar to Polynesian colonization of Pacific).
Dutch Baby or German Pancake is probably right in that abyss.
Very eggy, with some flour/milk. It's essentially a souffle, puffs up to like 6" high in the oven. Tasty with maple syrup, powdered sugar/lemon, or just butter.
Fantasy is certainly big, but it’s not like there isn’t space sf or space opera out there.
Authors in my library who’ve released space sf stuff in the last few years — Anne Leckie, Ada Palmer, Andy Weir, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Arkady Martine, John Scalzi, Martha Wells, James Corey, Lois McMaster Bujold, Max Gladstone, Mary Robinette Kowal.
To be fair, some of them get into philosophy or fantasy, or even romance. But the settings are SF.
Yeah, that's a good one. "Dumb and fun" is a good description.
Craig Alanson also wrote a fantasy trilogy a while back that proved much better than I was expecting. It started off as what appeared to be an uninteresting juvenile fantasy book, but quickly got better and darker. I very much enjoyed reading those.
The Irish NCT results for 2024 show high failure rates for Teslas in:
- Vehicle safety and Equipment
- Steering and Suspension
- Side Slip
- Wheels and Tires
and to a lesser extent
- Lights
- Lighting and Electrical
The (Tesla) overall failure rate is over 50% (697/1301), which is above the (population) overall failure rates of just under 50%.
Note that the oldest Tesla is 2015, and most are 2020+ which is significantly newer than a good chunk of the cars on the road here.
Also note that in my personal experience of ~10 NCTs, I've had 3 nominal failures which were stupid trivial things that aren't actually maintenance issues. (1, extra seat not in car. 2, tent peg fell in and folding seat didn't lock in place. 3, folding seat wasn't up when tested, as well as at least one where my mechanic swears that they screwed it up (steering rack boot not attached))
Suspension and steering is probably loose bushings. Side Slip is alignment/tracking. Wheels and tires is almost always worn tires, especially passenger side front due to roundabouts.
I'm not sure what the vehicle safety and equipment failures would be, nor the distinction between lights and lighting and electrical. The fact that it's a noticable failure point is a little surprising to me because all the lights should be LED and pretty solid.
(Though, I'll say, even though we have mandatory inspections, 5-10% of cars in my area are driving with at least one light that's out.)
That is probably because the ID4s had pre-inspection before their yearly technical inspection. That is what they do in The Netherlands, probably also other countries. That makes their cars stand out in these reports.
Don't all cars in the Netherlands have at least a small checkup before inspection?
I once had a Fiat Panda from 1984, 20 years old by then. It had a small checkup and maintenance, then went for the inspection. It passed, but was highlighted for inspection from the controlling organizing. The mechanic, owner of the shop, started getting really nervous about losing his license, asking, is the car allright, is it really allright? And it passed inspection again.
They had an overall failure rate of 20% so I don't think that's the case.
Anecdotally most people I know here don't bother with preinspection. It's usually cheaper even if it fails the first time. Although looking at the data most people driving EVs could probably save time/money by investing in a tire thread guage!
Also to add, the Irish system is totally different to a lot of Europe. The owner always brings the car for inspection, it's never part of an annual maintenance package.
There are some subtle edge cases in the django migrations where doing all the migrations at once is not the same as doing migrations one by one. This has bitten me on multiple django projects.
There's a pre, do and post phase for the migrations. When you run a single migration, it's: pre, do, post. When you run 2 migrations, it's: pre [1,2], do: [1,2], post: [1,2].
So, if you have a migration that depends on a previous migration's post phase, then it will fail if it is run in a batch with the previous migration.
When I've run into this is with data migrations, or if you're adding/assigining permissions to groups.
Did you mean migration signals (pre_migrate and post_migrate)? They are only meant to run before and after the whole migration operation, regardless of how many steps are executed. They don't trigger for each individual migration operation.
The only catch is they will run multiple times, once for each app, but that can also be prevented by passing a sender (e.g. `pre_migrate.connect(pre_migrate_signal_handler, sender=self)` if you are registering them in your AppConfig.ready method).
Does that affect the autogenerated migrations at all? Teh only time I ran into that issue as if I generated a table, created a data migration and then it failed because the table was created same transaction. Never had a problem with autogenerated migrations.
Hardest choice for me:
Apple Extended Keyboard 2 vs TiBook.
Had both, Used AEK2s for a decade or more, still have the TiBook with Myst on it.
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