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efaardvark

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Status Updates posted by efaardvark

  1. Here we go with fire season already.  It isn’t even May!   :veryangry:

  2. LUCY

    Going to be a long "day" Friday night.  They've got me down to work from 9:45PM Friday to 11:45AM Saturday (local) for the LUCY launch.  Why are these things always o-dark hundred, or the weekend?

     

  3. Closing in on 1 million points and 200 WUs in Folding@Home.  As I type this my computer is ranked 169,318th (of 2.6M).  If it can get to a rank of 132,000 that would put it in the top 5%.

    This on an 8-core 2700X.   I'd love to see what one of those 32-core 3970X threadripper processors could do.  Or better yet a 64-core 3990X.  Unfortunately I don't have 4kilobucks to drop on a CPU.  🤣

  4. Passed 1000 work units folded in Folding@Home.  Actually passed the milestone a little while back but I didn't notice until now since it just does its thing in the background. 

    Next goal/milestone looks like maybe a score of 10 million points.  No idea what a "point" means in F@H terms but that's a lot of zeros so it's gotta mean something, right?  :)  Currently at 8.6M so only 1.4M to go.  My "old" Ryzen 7 2700X can clear about 150k/day if I let it off the leash (and no GPU support from my RX480 unfortunately) so in theory that's only about 10 days.  If I actually use my computer for anything or if I have to throttle it back due to warmer weather then it'll be less.  Practically speaking it'll probably be more like a month.

  5. ESA's Mars Express orbiter finds large bodies of underground water on Mars.  "Not a unicorn." 🦄

    Quick, someone go find Bruce Willis and his drill team and put them on a SpaceX Starship to Mars so they can start drilling for water.  :D

  6. So Tesla announced they're getting into making 'bots.  I just want to know, does it do laundry and wash dishes?  :D 

    1. Show previous comments  1 more
    2. Ohayotaku

      Ohayotaku

      Then again … 

      image.jpeg.cbdd1c187583fea3a9d3f87050bcfe85.jpeg
      It loses something in translation 😕

    3. efaardvark

      efaardvark

      Or maybe…

      687D5CB6-916C-428B-9F9C-EE4B2CAB2C58.thumb.webp.32d5b2a49017f5ea4177ad26848d8e30.webp

       

      Collect all six!  :D 

       

  7. GOES-R the Gozarian (sorry) aka GOES-18 launches tomorrow!  Actually reasonable hours for a change.. 10am to 8pm.  Somebody isn't following the SOP!  Not that I'm complaining you understand.  And of course it can always slip due to weather, vehicle problems, etc.

    1. Ohayotaku

      Ohayotaku

      Nice Ghostbusters reference  😆

       

  8. Happy Landing Day!  My dad worked on Viking back in the day so I got a day off from middle school (or "junior high" as they called it back then) to stay home and watch the second pictures ever from the surface of Mars come back.  Line. by. line.  The first pictures were from Viking 1 which landed a couple weeks earlier, but as that happened before school started during the summer break and I didn't get the day off from school I don't count it.  :D 
     

  9. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02275-3

    One thing they can work on......

    catgirls.thumb.jpg.6331ca229feb96f122d44075fce4d1c4.jpg

    :D

     

    1. Nono

      Nono

      What if you had a cat that has human ears?😂

    2. efaardvark

      efaardvark

      @Wedgy Actually, now that you mention it I think I did see that movie.  It didn't turn out well for the humans.  :)

      @Nono Not kawaii at all!  :D  

  10. Turnspit dogs used to be a thing.  Who knew?

    spacer.png

    1. Deeath

      Deeath

      I never knew! 
      I looked up what these dogs looked like, and they are FUNNY LOOKING! Yet...quite cute.

      whiskey.thumb.png.747c16ffe168ab46b09658db8decdb5d.png

  11. UAE, US, and China all have spacecraft coming up on Mars in the next couple weeks.  I gotta go to work a 2am local tonight for Al-Amal because the DSN is handling their downlink, then again for M20's "7 minutes of terror" next week.  China's doing their own thing on the 10th.  Lots of activity at Duna, er, Mars this week!  When all the dust settles there will (hopefully) be two more orbiters around and another lander and two more rovers on Mars.  And a helicopter.

  12. 806F41BD-B077-4BF8-A564-7EEC0858D22E.jpeg.e71d7667d4fe42ad8c0272c06f236846.jpeg

    1. Ohayotaku

      Ohayotaku

      For those who don’t get the joke image.gif.a3782cc83506977507e5abffa58b727c.gifnot a single day goes by when I’m not reminded of a Simpsons reference 🤣 

      … or Loony Tunes (don’t remember how old I was when I learned Ride of the Valkyries wan’t subtitled “Kill the Wabbit” :P )

       

  13. 🎵 It's Friday!  🎵 It's Friday!  🎶 Even though it's Wednesday!  :D

     

    1. Show previous comments  2 more
    2. Ohayotaku

      Ohayotaku

      Always feel out of sync returning to a regular work week after a holiday :P 

      Made even worse because I was off Thursday, half day Friday & then 2 days off.

    3. efaardvark

      efaardvark

      I (finally) got a couple additional days off this week so I'm already on my weekend.  Had to spend it getting estimates for and scheduling some semi-emergency plumbing work but I'll take what I can get.

      55E0C7AD-A65B-432E-8DD3-5EFC1470E275.thumb.jpeg.c394414c3750aea829baa8be775742e6.jpeg

    4. Ohayotaku

      Ohayotaku

      There’s the work you get paid to do & then there’s the work you don’t get paid for but still have to do 😂 Spent a good part of my weekend on car maintenance which will hopefully save me some trouble once winter begins in earnest.

  14. UTC 2020-01-01 00:00:01 .. year rollover bug caused all our interfaces that connect our NOC to external users to core dump and refuse to restart. So far I'm not a fan of the new decade.

    1. Ohayotaku

      Ohayotaku

      Thought that all ended with Y2k. And the house I’m in now doesn’t even have a basement, let alone a doomsday bunker.

    2. efaardvark

      efaardvark

      Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the data center.....   :D

       

  15. I got 100%.  💩 💩

    8AEB0A2A-4E25-468F-AB5A-EDBD963892CA.thumb.jpeg.ab9f46b047f5ef700762ea00248e2622.jpeg

    1. Ohayotaku

      Ohayotaku

      I have to concede defeat to you on this one, senpai. Had to google Butch Wax & didn’t have a Party Line (did grow up with a hard wired rotary phone that couldn’t be unplugged though)

  16. I have to wonder if Putin would still have invaded Ukraine if he hadn't been enabled by all the oil money paid to Russia by Europe and others. This worldwide practice of funneling money to despots just because they have oil needs to stop. We should not even be burning it anyway. There are alternatives. Why do we keep enabling these assholes?

    1. Show previous comments  4 more
    2. efaardvark

      efaardvark

      Sorry for the dup.  I switched from my phone to the desktop and somehow sent essentially the same thing twice.

    3. efaardvark

      efaardvark

      @Wodahs I just know physics myself so I might be wrong as well but leaving things like politics aside and just going with the physics I think there’s already a very good economic case for things like big-rig diesel to switch to electricity, either directly on batteries or using ultra clean “synthetic” hydrocarbon fuel via fuel cell technology.  To produce such fuel with nuclear power we could run the chemistry “backward” to make carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuel from water and CO2 from the air.  That way nobody needs to switch right away, yet we still take the geopolitical risk issue(s) off the table.  (Though there would still be the distribution problem and point-of-use pollution issue putting pressure on the phase-out of internal combustion, especially within high-population areas.)

      I'll point out that electrification of the delivery industry is already happening at the short-range end for delivery by entities like fedex or Amazon but give the battery technology a couple years and an infrastructure / environmental demand for it and I think we’ll be seeing even the long-haul stuff switch a lot sooner than most people think.  This is where Tesla is going with their big-rig designs.

      Of course vehicles the size of ships could use nuclear directly.  There are designs for SMRs (small modular reactors) that could even be used without much in the way of training on the part of operators.  They’re designed to be simple, passive heat sources that do their thing for 20 years then get swapped out for another unit.

      Couple that / those to one of Stanford’s supercritical CO2 gas turbines and electric motors and you get a very simple, cheap design.  Simpler even than current diesel/bunker fuel designs.  Economically that’s a no-brainer for the merchant fleet.

      We don’t need to be digging up “fossil” fuels.

      (I do have concerns about nuclear waste because some of these designs are solid-fuel but if we also have larger molten-salt designs for grid power then the “waste” could be destroyed using them.  We just need to be reasonably intelligent about the overall system design.)

       

      As for the lithium supply issue, there are battery technologies out there that are even better than lithium.  Tesla is already moving away from traditional lithium batteries even for EV applications.  We're where we are now because the production was already there due to the consumer electronics industry.  For instance, Toyota's first Prius models actually used batteries that were taken out of laptop battery assemblies and remanufactured into the automotive assemblies for use in the cars.  Needless to say that was a highly uneconomic way to do it but even so it still made a profit for Toyota.  It also showed Panasonic and others that the demand was there to build dedicated factories for the automotive applications, which of course lead more or less directly to full EVs and Tesla's Gigafactories.

      Lithium will probably continue to be used in mobile applications because it makes for lightweight and energy-dense batteries.  Obviously that has advantages for things like laptops, cellphones, cars, and planes but I think everywhere else will find other battery technologies that are more optimal for those other uses.  For instance, I think that grid power storage and frequency control will probably switch to sodium-ion and/or iron-based batteries eventually simply for economic/profit reasons, especially if EVs become dominant and cheap electricity becomes common.

      Also, even now lithium is not exactly in short supply.  Worldwide there is plenty of the element.  "Reserves" (discovered deposits) are limited because historically there has not been the demand to justify searching for more sources.  Laptops and cellphones only require so much of it after all.  Ultimately there will be more prospecting now because the demand is now higher, which will no doubt lead to more discovered sources, just as it has for oil.

      We will never get into the same situation with lithium as oil in terms of geopolitics however.  Or at least doing so should not be necessary if our "leaders" do their job right.  There's a huge source of lithium readily available worldwide.  With nuclear power we will have enough power to separate things like lithium and sodium from seawater.  There's a lot of other stuff in seawater that we could also pull out at the same time that would help with the economics and make it happen sooner than later.  This would include fresh water, which is also in short supply worldwide.

      Already the Saudis, Israelis, and others are getting a significant amount of their fresh water from desalinization.  I'm in California in the middle of a severe multi-decade drought that's threatening everything from farming and food supply to hydro power generation.  Cheaper power would have an immediate economic benefit for us, and again help with the geopolitical risk issues.  I mean, I've already got solar on the roof (no-brainer here in the southwest US with SoCalEdison's $0.42/kWh electricity) but distributed solar is really only useful for residential power and personal transport.  It does not help much with water or industrial manufacturing/transport power needs.

    4. Wodahs

      Wodahs

      i do agree with the there is alternatives that can take the function of oil

      my post was more in the aspect of if ye hadnt given putin money for oil up untill now (as it was the point of how he got the capital for his war) we would have been giving it to Xi Jinping of china , who people would probably claim he would be using it for his expansion of territory's in the south china see and so on

      we (companies in australia and one next door to my company) seem heavy in to producing hydrocarbon fuels for big equipment and have started exporting it (tho its still made by dirty methods) and have a couple of export ships running on gas for fuel which we also export , along with oil and coal and rear earth minerals including lithium (australia is as big as the us size wise we just dont have the population) we do seem to have a fair amount of resources here too most going to china or the asia pacific

  17. Photoshop yourself to Mars with NASA's Mars Photobooth.

     

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