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🇨🇦 tunetardis

@ tunetardis @lemmy.ca

Posts
2
Comments
305
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Why climate change makes wildfires worse

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  • If you wonder why over here is forest while over there is a savannah biome, the deciding factor is fire. When you see an increase in forest fires, it's Mother Nature's way of saying forest, you don't belong here anymore. The climate is drying out too much.

    Interestingly, trees themselves can go without water for longer than you might think. You may even see isolated conifers in a desert biome. They are not threatened by fire because there isn't enough biomass around them, and some of these trees can even grow to be among the oldest in the world.

    Anyway, this is all stuff I remember from biogeography.

  • Incredibly, The Russian Air Force Has Lost Another Rare A-50 Radar Plane

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  • Is anyone keeping score? How many are left? This is the same plane Belarusian saboteurs blew up towards the beginning of the war right? I seem to remember at the time they were saying Russia had maybe 7 in operation? I could have that wrong. It was a low number at any rate. And they were also saying these are effectively irreplaceable given the amount of tech that has to go into them and all the sanctioning on electronics. Articles suggested losing it was comparable to the loss of that Black Sea flagship that was sunk around the same time frame.

  • ‘They lied’: plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals

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  • It would be relatively easy to implement, as retailers already collect this info for inventory management.

    But I fear it wouldn't go far enough? What we really need to do is close the loop so that product packaging winds up back at the manufacturer for reuse. And everyone needs to be at the table to discuss how that's going to work, as it is a significant technological and logistical challenge for both the private and public sectors.

  • ‘They lied’: plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals

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  • Ugh. They need to be part of the solution and not the problem. But you're probably right…

  • ‘They lied’: plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals

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  • Yeah. Every time I try to envision some small change that would bring us closer to a utopian ideal, it invariably smacks of socialism. I just can't help myself! lol

  • ‘They lied’: plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals

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  • I do remember a time before widespread recycling when you'd pay a small deposit on a drink and get it back when you returned the bottle to the store. Where I live, alcohol sales still follow that model to some extent.

    That was the old school approach and I have no problem with it. But it largely disappeared as municipalities started up recycling programs. I guess it was reasoned that when you do it at a city-wide scale, you cast a broader net and divert more material from the landfill. But as this article mentions, recycling has proven to be a sketchy prospect. It loses money for most cities with exception to aluminum cans where the metal still has some resale value.

    One way or another, it would be better if we can get back to more of a reuse approach as opposed to breaking everything down to recycle the raw materials. That just doesn't seem to be working.

  • ‘They lied’: plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals

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  • I think about this sort of thing from time to time, and every time I come to the same conclusion that manufacturers of bulk goods need to take more responsibility for the entire life cycle of their products. They're getting a free ride with municipalities stuck footing the bill for recycling plastics, and have zero incentive to solve the problem.

    Let's say the city sent all the recyclables to some regional warehousing facility where they would get sorted by barcode according to manufacturer. Then the companies would be charged for storage and would have strong incentive to come collect their property before it really starts to pile up.

    Initially, they will no doubt gripe about it, but in the long term, it may be a win-win in that if say Coca-Cola realizes it can get all its bottles back, it could switch to a more reusable design that could reduce bottling costs?

  • Bard becomes Gemini: Google launches their most powerful LLM, Ultra 1.0

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  • At least it appears to be available in Canada now…

  • U.S. plans to raise tariffs against Canadian softwood lumber producers

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  • What an endless saga. I guess they'll need to update the wiki again as this latest chapter unfolds. Thanks for the reply.

  • U.S. plans to raise tariffs against Canadian softwood lumber producers

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  • This seems to come up with some regularity.

    The U.S. says the measures are necessary to protect its lumber industry, because Canadian forests are mostly on public land, where buyers pay “stumpage fees” to provincial governments for the right to log.

    Could someone explain the situation in the States? Was there some big land grab by private interests, or is there still plenty of public land but it's all either logged out or protected at this point? Or some other complication?

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    Ukrainian-born model winning Miss Japan re-ignites identity debate

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  • ainudude has entered the chat.

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    Ukrainian-born model winning Miss Japan re-ignites identity debate

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  • She grew up in Japan. All her friends are Japanese. Her life experience is of Japanese society and culture. She's been through it all. What is she if not Japanese? Get over it.

    I am part Japanese myself and the language is literally my mother tongue, but when I go to Japan to visit family, I always feel alienated because I don't look the part. Don't get me wrong. People are very polite to foreigners, but you will always be a foreigner. Even when I spent a year at a Japanese elementary school, I felt this persistent sense of not belonging.

    But maybe things are starting to change? I admittedly have not been back in a couple of decades. I hope so.

  • Climate change isn't producing expected increase in atmospheric moisture over dry regions: Study

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  • Oh hmm… I thought they were having some sort of problem with a blight that was wiping out all the commercial crops one-by-one until only corn was left. And then the NASA researchers realized even corn was on in trouble. But there was a lot going on in that movie that was hard to follow, so I'm not sure. Maybe there was a climate angle?

    Going back to the lethargy idea, one could also surmise that when the rain does work its way inland, you could get more than you bargained for because the system will stall again and dump on one spot rather than moving on. At least that sort of tracks with what we've been seeing.

  • Climate change isn't producing expected increase in atmospheric moisture over dry regions: Study

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  • When I was studying climatology, I wondered if an increased evening out of global temperatures (with higher latitudes warming disproportionately more than lower) would lead to a kind of lethargy in weather systems, since it is ultimately temperature differentials that are the driving force to their movement. So systems that bring rain to the coast might be less likely to wander inland, for example. That would then intensify the continental effect and make interiors more prone to drought.

  • 'It hasn't delivered': The spectacular failure of self-checkout technology

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  • I treat self-checkout as a game with 2 goals:

    1. Make it through the process without getting any help.
    2. Do it as fast as a trained cashier.

    In a good season, my batting average for #1 might be .300, which would not be bad were the game baseball. As far as #2 is concerned, I have never come close. It's like I throw 30 mph pitches. Things get real when I'm trying to look up bananas or something and the helper comes up behind me. "It's 4198. Here, let me do it." Thanks, I already lost #2 and you just made me lose #1…again.

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    First Flight of the Vulcan Rocket Sends an American Lander Toward the Moon

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  • Oh you're right, the Zhuque-2 apparently launched successfully in July, 2023. (There had been an earlier launch in '22 but it ran into trouble.)

  • China set to lose crown as top U.S. exporter after 17 years

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  • Was reading an article about the CPTPP that left me wondering if/when the US might have another crack at it? It's sort of an Everyone-But-China economic club as it stands, and the US was heavily involved in it early on until Trump came along.

  • Where, and when, did you start using Linux? Where are you now?

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  • I am also fairly new to the game. I had an iMac from around 2010 that was starting to show its age. Newer macOS versions were glacial on it. I eventually realized they were meant to boot off SSDs, but my options in that regard weren't great. I would either have to take the whole thing apart to replace the internal drive or live with USB2 speeds on an external SSD. Then it dawned on me I could just put Ubuntu on there and call it a day. This worked great and bought me a few more years out of that machine.

    More recently, we started buying threadripper workstations at the office for scientific modelling. These have since migrated into a server room where they are currently acting as a small compute cluster.

    And most recently, I've been tinkering around a bit on my Steam Deck. It's a little walled-garden-ish but it let me put VSCode and a few tools on there so I'm playing around.

  • Solid state battery design charges in minutes, lasts for thousands of cycles

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  • Ok, so we're onto capacitors and fuel cells now. Here we go with my mental image of those.

    On the pros side, capacitors can charge/discharge in an instant, have nearly perfect energy recovery (almost everything you put in comes back out), and have almost limitless charging cycles with no memory effects or any of that nonsense. On the cons side, even a supercapacitor can't match battery tech for energy storage density and they tend to be not so great for long-term electrical storage.

    Fuel cells are sort of the opposite. Once you've sorted out the challenges in producing/storing/transporting hydrogen (these are all non-trivial but not necessarily deal-breakers either?), you're looking at essentially limitless storage duration since it's, well, a fuel. Like you can stockpile it for next year. The energy density is enviably high, though with pure hydrogen, you're doing better by weight than by volume. In any case though, it's looking pretty good compared to batteries.

    But pulling the energy out of them in a timely manner is a major pain. You need either a chemical or thermal catalyst to speed it along for most applications. And the chemical of choice is platinum, which is not exactly abundant. If you wanted a fuel cell in every car, is there even enough on Earth for that? I'm not so sure.

    Also, I have read impurities in the fuel can really mess up this type of fuel cell. The thermal type is purportedly more forgiving in this respect, though I picture thermal fuel cells as these hulking things that would work best as stationary power plants? Well, maybe they would be a good fit for large ships? It's hard to picture some giant container vessel plying the oceans on battery power, at any rate.