Viewing profile — lambdatronics

Location: Seattle, WA, USA Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Python, Matplotlib, Scipy, Numpy, sk-learn, Keras, Tensorflow, Julia, Fortran, SQL, git, slurm, Linux,…

>already a fairly radically super-human speech center >We're asking a speech center to do an awful lot of tasks that a speech center is just not able to do Exactly! >We need more p…

>a way to generalize the compute graph as a learnable parameter. Agreed. Seems analogous with how human mental processes are used to solve the kind of problems we'd like LLMs to so…

>What would it even mean for a particle to have an "action" (whatever that is) that is not minimized? The particle doesn't have an action. The trajectory of a particle is what the …

Cool! I had been meaning to try my hand at a to-do app ever since I read "Getting Things Done" a few years ago, and I finally spent a couple weekends on it this month. The tree str…

I see what you did there with the Dr. Horrible reference! :D

IIRC sodium ion batteries have traditionally had trouble with rapid degradation due to the large size of the sodium ion, which disrupts the carbon electrode via swelling during int…

Thanks stuart8ol for all the detailed answers in this thread. I learned several new things today (use of compressors for fuel cells to increase power density, logic of airplane siz…

> But the trade off should not be "if there is any risk at all, then no" I'm a kitesurfer and I'm with you 100%. I'm glad kiting is not banned in most places. Kiters die every year…

The paper says that this is only half of a solution: "Our investigation here has focussed [sic] on the fundamental Li-NRR performance at the cathode. Further developments towards a…

First you want to displace natural gas for fertilizer production. But yes, if the energy efficiency is good enough and the electrolyzer costs are very low, it would make more sense…

Probably not just yet. I calculated downthread that the productivity is something like 16x less per unit area than a hydrogen electrolyzer, so that would need to be improved to mak…

Probably refers to "Coulombic efficiency." Ie, it takes 4 electron transfers to turn 2 H2 + N -> NH4, so that gives you a conversion factor between Coulombs of electrons (1 Amp of …

For hydrogen electrolysis they typically quote around 1 A/cm^2 current. One Coulomb is ~6e18 charges, whereas one mole is 6e23 molecules, so that makes about 1e-5 H atoms per cm pe…

Only if there's enough wind shear between the aircraft and kite altitudes... kinda like dynamic soaring [0] but without the need for the aircraft to jump back and forth between the…

No-moving-parts is probably not realistic - the core would be much hotter than the radiating surface due to the thermal resistance of the shielding. More likely, you would have a w…

Yeah, tungsten is far too expensive. Sounds like more realistically you would have molten silicon in graphite plumbing [0]. This article claims the self-discharge rate could be mad…

Just to amplify on your point about lithium: the tritium production function is critical. Every fusion neutron needs to produce more than one tritium atom on average, so that the r…

Not at the moment. IMO the prospects aren't good, due to the low efficiency (high energy cost) and high equipment cost. There are start-ups working on it (ex: Prometheus Fuels [0],…

"Information theory and statistical mechanics" by E.T. Jaynes [0]. Starting from a Bayesian/information-theoretic perspective, he derived statistical mechanics in just a few pages.…

ReBCO still isn't practical for grid transmission AFAIK. It needs to be cooled to something like 20 K to achieve high current. That's ~4x warmer than traditional superconductors (~…

ReBCO is a huge boon for magnetic-confinement fusion. The comment from their CEO that "In fact, from a physicist’s standpoint, our machines look kind of boring [...] we could get e…

I toured a multi-million-dollar electron microscope at ORNL. They had a piece of tissue paper taped to the side. I asked about it, and they said that it was an airflow monitor. It …