Viewing profile — cgdcraig

Humans are the most flexible and reconfigurable system for assembly. They can identify and deal with near infinite variations in position and condition of your inputs. If you look …

Elon has always been one of the main drivers of innovation over there, Gwenn has been the one keeping stuff afloat but Elon has been the one driving the "the hell I'm paying that m…

I'd imagine a lot of places where software is part of a safety critical system also come with physical fail safes. An example being burst plates on pressure vessels, if the softwar…

Fun fact, Canada had the 3rd largest proven reserves of oil in the world, mostly in the oil/tar sands.

Rock isn't necessarily airtight more so in mines. A fractured host material for the ore is very desirable as it means less explosives and higher ore production numbers.

The compressed air systems anger the thermo gods though

That data is the secret sauce for mining and oil and gas companies. Them giving it away would be like Facebook giving away their datasets.

Right but my point is if you're premeditating the theft to the point where you've studied the manuals/practiced in flight simulators then a key isn't going to be the thing stopping…

It's not like the engine start procedure on one of those things is a turnkey solution. The amount of domain knowledge needed serves as a form of soft security.

Atmospheric concentrations are low so you need to harvest a lot of air. To put in context the earth has ~2E9 km^3 air, if you wanted to process every cubic meter of air in the worl…

Not an issue if you have low abandonment of subscribers but an issue if everyone exchanges papers that way. You get a lot of value out of being able to search all the journals in o…

The article says that Australia has 14% of global reserves not that they're only mining 14% of what they have. We've also found all the easy stuff already, the cost of exploration …

You should look into building elements with micro encapsulated phase change materials. They're becoming popular nowadays, and you can find ceiling panels and wall panels from comme…

That's true only of devices that don't convert the energy into work(motors), light(LEDs) or other voltages(transformers). All other electronics convert all the power into heat. Bas…

Dealing with cold energy(coolth) storage whether it's in ice or chilled water is tricky mostly because of the capital cost involved with adding a storage system that can only do on…

Cold energy storage has always had the problem of utilization and capital cost. You need to buy the storage system and then that storage system may only be useful for 3-6 months of…

Ish, solar thermal has its own set of problems and limitations; they don't work during cloudy weather and the storing the thermal energy is tricky because you need a lot of high qu…