Notices by publius (publius@mastodon.sdf.org)

@lispi314 @andymoose @dalias

High Efficiency Particulate Air filters were developed for the Atomic Energy Commission in the early 1950s, and for a long time they cost too much for use outside laboratories and other specialized facilities.

Electrostatic precipitation is not an "absolute" filtering technology, but it remains very useful for dust control in bulk air handling.

@lispi314 @andymoose @dalias

Electrostatic precipitation is frequently paired with cyclone separation, with the cyclone getting the coarser particles and the electrostatic getting the finer particles.

In general, anything that reduces overall particulate load contributes to biosafety.

@andymoose

I hate to tell you this, but 75 years ago there were articles in ARCHITECTURAL RECORD about indoor air quality — electrostatic precipitation, best practices for installing germicidal UV lamps in air ducts, and so on.

@UP8 @coreyspowell

Plutonium-244 has a long enough half-life that it has been found in cosmic dust, generally thought to be from supernova remnants. It's been used in attempts to determine the chronology of seabed sediment deposition. As far as practical chemistry is concerned, however, it's strictly a man-made element.

@botvolution

Should we be trying? I didn't get the memo.

@ckape

@screwtape @iiogama@social.sdf.org @iiogama@0x212.com

Worked for me just now.

@joeo10 @Ricardus

Not too unlike local broadcast blackouts.

@tek

"We can't find workers" is not always equivalent to "we're not willing to pay", but when you're trying to fill those positions with teenagers (who almost by definition don't have experience, training, or education which may actually be scarce), it's sure hard to interpret any other way.

My father is closing in on retirement. One of the folks who works under him intends to leave when he does. There are maybe two dozen people in the world who do exactly what they do. It's a small field.

@tootbrute

Many do. I don't, but I always wear socks in the house, and much of the year, carpet slippers as well. It's very difficult to keep the floor clean enough for bare feet, and slab-on-grade construction means cold floors even in summer in Texas.

@_chris_real @jonny

I've been known to say that economists serve the same function in the modern world that soothsayers did in the ancient world, giving a veneer of divine sanction to the arbitrary choices of the powerful.

@adamd @snowdusk

You might be surprised to know that an accident, in a sense far more severe than what happened at Three Mile Island, happened at Pickering in August of 1983. One of the pressure tubes in Reactor 2 ruptured during full-power operation.

It's never talked about, because the operators were able to bring the reactor quickly to a "safe" condition. There were no radiation exposures to personnel, or radioactive releases to the environment, beyond normal (minimal) operating levels.

@capntransit

Burning wood is not, by any sane definition, a clean or sustainable form of energy.

It is also not in any way adapted to the needs of a society where most people live in cities.

#atomicpowertothepeople

@yacowaco

In many parts of Japan, they don't even have gas lines. As a legacy of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, it's all bottle gas in the Tokyo area.

@wakame

"A single person", or "Donald Knuth"?

@ryanc @cstross @dashdsrdash @Zeugs @nf3xn

Oh, what Big Clive calls the "Dethdaptor"!

@dashdsrdash @Zeugs @ryanc @nf3xn @cstross

I bought an outlet plate (for a standard US 2× NEMA 5-15R outlet) which includes a little parasitic rectifier and voltage dropper feeding a USB-A socket.

When it stops working, or being relevant, I can just pop it off and pop a regular wall plate on. Nothing is wired in. (It has contacts which slip over the screws on the side of the outlet.)

Mind you, it was $1 at a thrift store. I doubt I would have paid full price.

@cstross @dashdsrdash @Zeugs @ryanc @nf3xn

I am aware that such "minimally invasive" options might well not be available everywhere. On the other hand, my experience is that it's not difficult in Europe to buy "power strips" or whatever you want to call them, boxes of receptacles on the end of an extension cord, which also include a USB power supply. That also seems to me like a reasonable compromise.

@gemlog @cosullivan

The Leonards were smart. They figured out how to keep bringing traffic to their downtown department store despite motorization and suburbanization.

That store was also the first major air-conditioned public building between the Mississippi and the Sierras, so they were clearly good at keeping up with the times.

@kaia @maija

I know a place in Munich where I can buy farm-fresh eggs and sausages out of a co-op run vending machine, at any time of day or night.