I wonder if two opposing rings would be connected by some sort of circular maglev track where the mechanism would just preserve overall angular velocity but spin the two halves in opposite directions. The spin could be entirely powered by electric motors, and energy could be conserved if it needs to slow down or speed up. That might be a lot of mass, but it might not cost any fuel to get it spinning.

increased fuel consumption of spinning down and then spinning back up

wastes a tremendous amount of fuel to spin down/up again

I think a flywheel mechanical energy storage system could both serve as a way to store energy and as a way to manipulate the rotation while preserving rotational energy. To slow down the rotation, transfer the rotational energy to a flywheel, and then transfer it back when you need to go back to speed. That adds some mechanical complexity but it creates a more efficient way to control rotation. Plus with electric motors and solar panels, that should be possible to manage without using any propellant fuel.

The children yearn for the Voight-Kampff test.

30 minutes each time

Dull Men’s Club is a fantastic fediverse community where this kind of stuff tends to be discussed.

Weight of human beings, weights at the gym, etc.: pounds

Height of people: feet and inches

Height of buildings: mostly feet, but occasionally meters.

Depth of water in scuba: meters

Kitchen weight: grams

Kitchen volume: fluid ounces only between 0-128 oz, then gallons after that. Decimal places, not fractions. So for example, cocktail recipes should all be in ounces, no tablespoons or teaspoons.

Distances in wilderness: meters/km

Distances on a football field: yards

Distances on a basketball court: feet

Distances on roads or in cities: miles

All temps in Fahrenheit.

Energy in calories for food and heat, watt hours for electricity, joules for everything else.

So it’s not commonly reported, but all cause mortality is lowest in the “overweight” category of between 25-30 BMI. There’s reason to believe that “overweight” but not “obese” is healthier than “normal.”

Is this the opposite end of the political spectrum from “everything I don’t like is woke”?

Is this the opposite end of the political spectrum as “everything I don’t like is woke”?

You’d never get Kessler syndrome at Starlink altitudes.

Starlink satellites orbit at around 550km, and get dragged by the little bit of atmosphere that is at that altitude. Each collision might make more debris, but the conservation of momentum means that any debris that gets kicked to a lower orbit will probably burn up on the atmosphere while any debris that gets kicked to a higher altitude will be smaller mass and therefore cause less damage on the next collision after that.

Collisions can still happen, but the runaway conditions where debris begets debris won’t happen at those orbital velocities and altitude.

The crack of a bullwhip is caused by the tip exceeding the speed of sound, around 750 mph/1250 kph.

Well then you are lost!

Yeah that’s probably true of all Fallout Boy songs generally.

Honestly? I’m not ready to give into some kind of fatalistic view that each 0.1°C difference isn’t worth fighting for.

There are a few areas where we might see huge improvement in a short amount of time. With car electrification, we saw electric cars go from something like 0% of the global market to 20% of new cars in just 10 years. Meanwhile, the decarbonization of electric grids is happening at a rapid pace, too, with solar and wind representing a huge percentage of newly installed capacity.

And some game changing technologies are right around the corner. Grid scale battery storage is turning into a significant part of managing daily demand, and might soon become an important part of managing seasonal demand. Dispatchable advanced geothermal (using the oil and gas’s fracking/horizontal drilling techniques to dig new hydrothermal sources) is right around the corner. And it’s not exactly imminent, but researchers are making advances in fusion power.

If energy becomes cheap enough, carbon capture for net zero fuels becomes economical, too. That opens the floodgates for trucking, maritime, and aviation uses. Excess power generation at certain times of day can be used for the less time sensitive energy consumption: treating water, manufacturing certain chemicals, charging batteries, heating and cooling some kind of thermal storage system, etc.

Plus, cynically, indoor heating is a much larger driver of fossil fuel consumption than indoor cooling, so a warming planet kinda reduces overall emissions from indoor climate control.

And the thing with all of these factors I’m naming is that these don’t rely on governments to enforce sacrifices by industry or commerce. The pricing has already fallen in line so that the cleanest option is the cheapest option. Policy can nudge things, but actually engineering improvement through price signals is going to create much bigger change: you don’t need the government to shut down a coal plant when the power plant simply can’t produce electricity cheap enough to turn a profit.