Viewing profile — hobscoop

Do you have the manual? It might be possible to configure a non-beeping mode. (I recently learned this was the case with my Panasonic model, to great delight.)

This cannot work: the power balance doesn't close for a 25 MWe tokamak. Otherwise people would have made plans to build one already. Tokamaks want to be big for physics reasons, wa…

Rubi is great. When I'm stuck on an integral in Mathematica with the builtin Integrate, I load up Rubi and sometimes it can find a solution.

Are they able to adjust the color and brightness simultaneously? Or would brightness be controlled with PWM?

Strong echoes of the Onion's reporting on Dr. Lester Mordock's giant crabs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Uq9pp586AE

This would eliminate the failure mode of my grayscale attempts. I would appreciate knowing the configuration steps.

Plasma physicist here. While this is an idea worthy of study, the answer to the (spaceweatherarchive.com) title question is "no". The researcher's article makes simple errors in wh…

Actually, I think the strength of modern steels is a limiting factor for fusion magnets. Plasma "beta"s are only a few %, so for a few atmospheres of plasma pressure your magnetic …

I thought they were ultimately limited by problems of corrosion at the electrodes? Helion's scheme to turn fusion heat into pushing E&M fields back through their magnet to generate…

Yes. We're currently living through a golden age of stellarator design powered by new algorithms and optimization techniques.

It'll ultimately be dissipated by infrared radiation into space. Earth receives something like 173,000 terawatts of radiation from the sun; this is equal to the amount radiated out…

It sounds like they're trying to build a device with a distribution of ions in velocity space which is very far from the equilibrium Gaussian-type distribution ('Maxwellian'). This…

It's pretty different. This is pulsed; LM's was going to be steady state. LM's design had magnets internal to the plasma which has significant difficulties. The proposed fuels are …

For a long time fusion was funding constrained: there were many more ideas than could be tested and examined under government budgets. In the US nearly all funding went to one conc…

It's not plausible that even fusion power plants would make energy 'basically free'. 1) Fusion plants still require site infrastructure, power conversion technology, waste heat rem…

There are more plausible and less plausible concepts/companies out there. Helion in particular was founded by respectable scientists who have a background in plasma physics, and th…

There's some interesting arguments in favor of the combination of magnetic and interial approaches. This is broadly known as 'magneto-inertial fusion', and there's a continuum of i…

SPARC is very important, but it's a physics demonstration facility, not a reactor. Its not going to generate any electricity. CFS (SPARC's parent company) will use SPARC to demonst…

Helion's scheme would require a specific isotope of helium, of which there's not much of in current stockpiles. Assuming that you had some He-3, remember that since this is a react…

No currently operating device is 'attempting' to achieve Q_total; they are all physics experiments, not simply searching for a magic combination of knobs that will ignite the plasm…

SPARC is aiming for Q_plasma of about 10 in 2025, but not to generate energy at all: it doesn't have any of the required 'blanket' system for breeding tritium. SPARC is a physics t…

If only the US Forest Service knew about this, they could have properly answered Rep Louie Gohmert's questions!

ITER is planning to do its flagship D+T runs in 2035, not 2050. While inertial confinement fusion facilities like NIF are also used for weapons work, the physics of magnetic confin…

I don't understand the promise of lattice confinement fusion. While it is certain believable that they measured fusion events, the explanation they give involves several unlikely s…

Try H3 mining of Uranus or Neptune rather than Jupiter! The gravity well is much smaller.