Notices by Ben Brockert (wikkit@mastodon.social)

The degree to which the US’s export economy is focused on the past and accelerating global warming, and China’s is focused on the future and not, is striking.

@ryanc RF is weird magic. If you have an object in the Fresnel zone between the antennas, like an open doorway, it can destructively interfere with the signal, even if the literal line of sight is clear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_zone

I’d move the base station around, within the reasonable bounds. It’s possible moving it by a foot makes a significant difference.

I had the belief that aluminum is basically solid electricity, and was prompted to check it today.

Primary (smelting, not recycling) aluminum production is 15 MWh/Mg https://international-aluminium.org/statistics/primary-aluminium-smelting-energy-intensity/

Good industrial electricity price is 0.1 USD/kWh: https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/

Bulk aluminum is around 2600 USD/Mg: https://www.intratec.us/solutions/primary-commodity-prices/commodity/aluminum-prices

If you multiply the power by the energy price that's 1500 USD/Mg, so indeed more than half of the price of aluminum is just the electricity to make it. (1500/2600≈60%)

This is the 100 year anniversary of humans having an idea of what the heck the sun and all the stars actually are. If you had asked a leading astronomer in 1925 what the sun was, they would say that it's basically the same as Earth, but very hot.

In Cecilia Payne's doctoral thesis she was the first to say, from spectral data, that the sun was overwhelmingly made of hydrogen and helium.

It was later described as "the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Payne-Gaposchkin

“NYU is deeply sorry that the audience was subjected to these remarks” is an insane thing for a university to say. Just shut down the university if you can only allow speech that is condoned by the government.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/15/nyu-withholds-diploma-israel-gaza-speech

An old failed Venus lander will re-enter from earth orbit next month, and it could land anywhere between 52 degrees north and south. Which covers basically all population in the southern hemisphere and a large majority in the north, leaving out the Baltics, Nordics, and Alaska.

It weighs a thousand pounds and is expected to reach the ground intact. Previous debris from the launch landed in New Zealand.

https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2025/04/kosmos-842-descent-craft-reentry.html

Another "unusual tracks day" as commercial flights get diverted to avoid a huge fall area of space(x) debris.

Eggs in the free market of the US, with an administration that said they’d reduce prices, are over $6/dozen in many states.

In Spain, with their burdensome regulations from the country and the EU that require space to nest, perching, litter to allow pecking, and unrestricted access to food and water, the price of a dozen eggs I saw today is $2.15.

News articles on this: "Dozens of flights diverted, delayed after FAA warned of SpaceX rocket debris"

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/16/dozens-of-flights-diverted-delayed-after-faa-warned-of-spacex-rocket-debris-.html

"Regulators are investigating reports of property damage from SpaceX Starship’s explosion" in Turks and Caicos

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/17/science/spacex-starship-explosion-investigation/index.html

Multiple flights seem to have diverted to avoid the debris, some are coming back to the US. I hope all those unlucky passengers are able to get compensation, but it never really compensates you for messed up plans.

Screencap from just now on adsb.fi

SpaceX launched a Starship which exploded, leaving a long trail of multicolored burning debris visible in the sky from much of the Caribbean.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/63IgbYFcBvI

(video is stolen from unknown source, I just picked one of the dozens of copies on YouTube.)

@RagnarHeidar Neat animation!

Maybe too big of a question, but will there eventually be a continent stretching from Iceland to the Azores as the Mid Atlantic Ridge gets above the surface, or does the ocean just keep getting wider?

@RagnarHeidar Interesting, thanks. I always appreciate a "we don't totally know" technical wikipedia article.

I see that there's an even shorter one for the Azores. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azores_hotspot

Solar was almost 80% of new generating capacity installed in the first 2/3rds of 2024 in the US, and that doesn't count any of the small-scale solar.

1 GW of nuclear came online after 18 years of work, while 16.5 GW of solar came online, with presumably less lead time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant#Units_3_and_4

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission - "Energy Infrastructure Update for August 2024"
https://cms.ferc.gov/media/energy-infrastructure-update-august-2024

Really interesting doc on the state of the photovoltaic industry. The time for a system installed in southern Europe to pay back the amount of energy that was used to create it is now only one year. Most of the US is sunnier than southern Europe.

Also there were advances in higher efficiency monocrystalline panels and their market share massive spiked since 2016, from a quarter to almost all of the market.

>75% of recent installs in Germany also have batteries.

https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/photovoltaics-report.html

I was curious if panels are cheap enough now to mount them facing east and west, to generate more power in the morning and evening when fix sky-facing panels are tapering, but it turns out it is not necessary. You get a solar panel that generates from either side (bifacial) and mount it vertically as a fence running north to south.

I could see these being used as permanent snow fences down the western edges of north-south highways in the Midwest.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bifacial_solar_cells

"in the first quarter of 2023, when researchers used satellite imagery to count all of the solar installations in the country, they estimated that solar was producing a combined 5,700 megawatts of energy—only 55 percent of which had been declared to the government."

Illicit solarpunk is the new illicit swimming pool.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/10/solar-power-energy-revolution-global-south/680351/

(the swimming pool story: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/08/france-reveals-hidden-swimming-pools-with-ai-taxes-them/ )

If you 'sailed' around the world on a solar-powered boat, you could avoid hurricanes by staying at the equator. Because of the Coriolis effect, they rotate opposite directions in northern and southern hemispheres, and as such can't cross the equator.

@helenczerski Do you know if there was a specific funded government policy that drove that result, or is it more that wind and PV are just the cheapest modular power plant to install at this point?

@Gargron How are users of the server supposed to know about rules updates?