dgoodell

The argument that if you can suspend your disbelief for dragons and magic you can suspect your disbelief for a diverse cast is a dumb argument because you could use it for basically anything.

Most fantasy shows that are in English use British accents. It’s what we expect. But why not use a heavy southern U.S. accent? If you van accept this world with dragons and magic why can’t you accept a southern accent?

If it deviates too far from our expectations then it just seems like a bit.

The world is going to be a much better place once FAANG is no longer the path to big money and programmers will have to be content with solving real problems for normal amounts of money like the rest of us.

When you compare the energy density of nuclear to chemical materials, it sorta makes sense. It’s almost mind-boggling in its potential. In the early days of atomic energy it’s easy to see why people (or at least sci-fi)l authors) imagined so much promise. We really thought we were entering a new era in humanity. Sadly, it didn’t really work out that way, and the most significant application of this new energy source ended up being weapons. Interestingly, those opposed to nuclear technology only managed to stop its peaceful application.

I’m involved in the development of the free piston Stirling engines for space power production. Ideally, we would like to replace the current solid-state thermoelectric energy conversion system used on the MMRTG and its precursors with a piston engine energy conversion device. This has the potential to increase the conversion efficiency from 6% to 25-40%. This would allow us to use less plutonium 238 so we could either produce more electricity or use less plutonium and do more deep space missions, since the plutonium is in limited supply.

I’m also involved with the much more preliminary work into a fission power for nuclear electric propulsion, which is a much more difficult problem.

I could speak a lot about this stuff. If anyone really wants to talk, email is in my profile.

I’m an engineer at NASA working with nuclear space power systems. I ignore most of the more trite software / internet / money making bullshit. Some of that stuff is legit but most of it feels like “advances in advertising technology” or media delivery. I’m old enough to remember the earlier days of the internet and it’s sort difficult to admire the people that worked hard and made a lot of money turning it into what it is today.

Luckily, there are a lot of smart people here who are interested in many other things and that’s what I’m here to get exposure to.

I cut my index finger pretty bad, it must have been all the way through the skin as there was a big flap. It definitely needed stitches. I used superglue to hold it together until it stayed stuck on its own. I couldn’t use the finger for like a week because it was all bandaged up. Probably not as a good job as if I went to the doctor, but my finger didn’t fall off. HDHP turns you into a do-it-yourselfer. My mother had a much more serious gash when she dropped a piece of glass on her foot. This was on Croatia. We went to the ER in the city, and she got stitches fairly quickly for like $20 cash. If I would have cut my finger in Croatia, I would have gone to ER to get stitches.

A government shutdown is a basically surprise paid vacation, as long as you have enough cash to skip a couple paychecks.

I am traveling in Eastern Europe right now and I have definitely seen instances in airports where both the airport personnel and the the traveler were obviously not native English speakers however English was the only way they could communicate. It seems that English is the international language of air travel. At least for now.

I don’t think the first one is true because the US government doesn’t have to pay a license to use US patents. It can even allow a private company to use another company’s patents for work being done on behalf of the US government.

The dangerous part, and the part that is discussed in the article, is CS-137, which has a half-life of about 30 years. The longer the half-life of something the less radioactive it is.

The linked pdf copy has kinda mediocre quality. Google’s scanned copy looks a lot better. I wonder if it would be possible to get google’s pdf to share instead since there is legal permission?

The free piston stirling engines required also operate via magic and few people understand them well enough to make one suitable for this purpose. The engines required for a reactor like this haven’t been designed yet and it would take years of effort before They would be designed and approved for flight use.

For this test they used a couple of undersized (<100W) stirling engines and the rest were just thermal simulators.

One of the primary uses are deep space probes. The stirling engine has exactly two moving parts and uses non contact seals. In theory the lifetime should be limited by the deformation of the piston at elevated temperatures. Still, you’re right. They certainly have to do a lot of reliability testing to be able to show that these stirling engines will last 10+ years before they use them in a mission. They have several stirling engines that have been running for multiple years in simulated conditions for just this purpose at NASA GRC.

I saw a full scale prototype/model in the Stirling lab. I think a strong person could have lifted it up. It’s just several lbs of uranium with several heat pipes coming out of it connected to Stirling engines. I don’t think they have enough actual Stirling engines because the ASRG project to make them was cancelled so I think they use simulators for the heat load.

Do you perhaps have some examples of some more modern resources or examples we can consult? I would appreciate it.