Arxiv version here https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.00411
Why are the Arxiv and Nature versions so different, even the text?
Readit Newsfoofoo55 commented on Project Aardvark: reimagining AI weather prediction turing.ac.uk/blog/project... · Posted by u/bentobean
foofoo55 commented on Liu Jiakun Receives the 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize pritzkerprize.com/laureat... · Posted by u/pseudolus
Maoist Apartment blocks and hideous concrete monstrosities win you Architecture Prizes? Wtf is wrong with out society. Complete disdain for actual beauty that can add to human flourishing...
They have their beauty as objects of art, but certainly not as a place that I would enjoy occupying or being around. Brutalist architecture with a Chinese flair.
From the page: https://www.c-motive.com/applications/
>"C-Motive has designed a sub-5 kW (7 hp) industrial motor platform designed for direct drive applications where high efficiency and high torque lead to substantial operational savings; a 1.5 kW (2 hp) C-Motive machine could save up to $1,400 a year in energy costs in a typical industrial application."
[...]
"A C-Motive electrostatic generator, however, can be connected directly to the hub of the wind turbine and driven directly without an efficiency-robbing gearbox. This can add 20% or more to the annual energy output of the wind turbine..."
That seems like very promising future technology!
Wishing the C-Motive team a lot of luck with their electrostatic generators and electrostatic motors!
$1400 a year in electricity at a high rate of $0.15/kWhr for all 8,760 hours in a year is about 1 kW in power savings. Reality check:
A typical 3-phase 2hp industrial motor [1] is over 85% efficient and typical 10:1 reduction gearbox [2] is 94% efficient, which results in about 3kW power usage and 20% power lost to heat, or approx 0.6 kW. If their motor is 100% efficient, used in a 100%-duty-cycle application, in an area with high electrical costs, and with similar reliability to the standard AC motor, this gives $800 or so in savings per year.
In a more typical application with a 50% operating duty cycle and $0.10/kWhr, and guessing at 96% efficiency for their motor, we're down to maybe $200 per year in savings. Larger (>=5hp) motors can be 91% or higher efficiency bringing savings down even more. I can't imagine how C-Motive will equal the reliability, so any extra maintenance could quickly wipe out the savings.
I would guess that a variable-frequency drive (VFD) on the above AC motor, used to control speed and improve the power factor, would have the same efficiency as their motor controller. So I only looked at the AC motor + gearbox versus the C-motive motor + fluid pump.
[1] - https://www.baldor.com/catalog/CEM3558T-5#tab=%22performance... [2] - https://www.bostongear.com/ecatalog?page=product&cid=worm_ge...
foofoo55 commented on Generating sudokus for fun and no profit tn1ck.com/blog/how-to-gen... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
This is very much the approach I use as well (I've been publishing Sudoku for a long time at krazydad).
I often ponder what the generator algorithm might be when I am solving "insane" 13x17 Kakuro puzzles [1], because there always seems to be just enough logical paths to solve each puzzle. Well done!
foofoo55 commented on The March of Dimes Syndrome city-journal.org/article/... · Posted by u/thoradam
All the underlying claims by the author really need the sources referenced.
foofoo55 commented on Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life toaster.llc/photon/... · Posted by u/davekeck
It's pretty cool that your MSP handles the SD Card directly!
Personally I think you should keep the focus on a polished mac app. For other platforms you can do just the bare minimum with a web app that uses WebUSB. People will bitch that it's Chromium only but, I mean, chromium has 95% market share outside Apple world (and I say this as a FF user).
A hardware solution could be to add a cheap microcontroller that would handle the usb port. It wouldn't be powered by the battery, only USB and it would act as a proxy between the raw sd card and the computer. Presenting a mass storage to the computer with folders, converting images to PNGs. Such capable MCUs are very cheap (rp2040, esp32-s3) but it certainly adds complexity to your project...
I would suggest the same hardware solution, where the USB powers a device-side presentation of the raw data into a more universal mass storage device. This also allows file transfer to any device without requiring special software. I did something like this in 2008 or so (using a FTDI chip and PIC mcu, and boy was it ever slow).
Meanwhile (apparently) 'removing aerosols induces a global mean surface heating of 0.5–1.1°C.' https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...
So the effect of cleaner air is more warming, but less snow melt? Probably not.
As usual it's complicated, and it depends on which study you pick, and which model and parameters the researchers used. This study suggests that more anthropogenic sulfate aerosols in the air (usually from burning coal and other fossil fuels) could cool Artic summers from low clouds but warm Artic winters due to high clouds:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2021.7665...
foofoo55 commented on Electronics Lab Bench Setup Guide badar.tech/2023/04/30/ele... · Posted by u/stacktrust
I see a fume extractor under the desk. As someone who was in the market for one recently, I'd love some discussion (like loudness, price, performance, etc).
Absolutely essential. Fumes from lead-free solder fluxes are nasty [1]. I find that bench-top "fume extractors", consisting of a fan and thin dust filter, are extremely noisy and essentially useless. I love my Hakko FA430-16. It's relatively quiet such that a regular conversation can be had in its presence, and it really works with the right hose & hood setup.
1: https://www.hse.gov.uk/lung-disease/electronics-soldering.ht...
And unlike the human who spent multiple hours writing that article, an LLM would have linked to the original study: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_envi...
[ETA] Extending on these numbers a bit, a mean human uses 1.25KW of power (Kardashev Level .7 / 8 Gigahumans) and the mean American uses ~8KW of power according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co.... So if we align AIs to be eco-friendly, they will definitely murder all humans for the sake of the planet /s
.24 Watt-hours is 864 Watts for one second, so a 100W human takes ~9 seconds for that output.