Onihikage

@Onihikage@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This is the first silent home wind turbine that destroys solar panels - 1500 kWh of free electricity⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re right, I was thinking in Wh. I don’t think it changes my overall point though, which was that if one’s goal is to generate clean energy, most people don’t live in the ideal conditions for this device and hence have much more cost-efficient means available. I’ve edited my post.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This is the first silent home wind turbine that destroys solar panels - 1500 kWh of free electricity⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  1500 kWh per year is effectively nothing. That runs a high-end gaming PC for three or four hours. The company won’t even tell you the price up front (the product page just has a link to their contact form), but word elsewhere on the web is that little turbine with that piddly output costs somewhere in the neighborhood of a ludicrous $5500. Per the graphs on the product page, their turbines also require a very narrow range of wind speeds to even come close to the claims about the power output: 12 m/s, which in 99.9% of the world is a significant gust, but it shuts off entirely at 14 m/s, and the output drops off very rapidly with wind speed. At half its maximum wind speed, it’s outputting 1/8 of its maximum output.

  Contrast these limitations with traditional large wind turbines, which cut-in at around 4 m/s of wind speed (same as the Liam), but can maintain full capacity along a much wider range of wind speeds, typically from around 10 m/s all the way up to 20 m/s. For these turbines, half their maximum windspeed is still maximum power output. It’s a night and day difference in efficiency.

  This mini-turbine may not be a scam, but it’s a product with a vanishingly small market. It’s for people who live in very particular locations where solar is either so inefficient as to not make financial sense or their property is occluded for most of the day, yet they also have access to continuous high winds that don’t fluctuate much and average right around this turbine’s sweet spot but no higher. There might be 1000 people in the entire world that this product is suited for, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the real number is far fewer. There’s no justification for any article to so enthusiastically say it “destroys” solar panels.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nike’s Air Max 1000 are almost entirely 3D-printed⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  3D-printed shoes could be a great idea given how different everyone’s feet can be. It could save on transportation and logistical costs, and everyone could have shoes perfect for their feet, created much more locally than Vietnam.

  However, the cynic in me says that’s not what Nike is doing, or why - they’re doing this because it lets them cut workers. Traditional shoe manufacturing involves human hands at many process steps, often with machine assistance or other tools. This lets them cut out all of those workers and all of that equipment in favor of one machine that makes an entire generic shoe for them to shove onto shelves next to all the other generic factory-made shoes. This is not the future.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Question: What mineral/compound do modern arthropods use for their eyes (vs. Trilobites with their calcite lenses)?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is an entire category of proteins known as Crystallins. Crystallins of one kind or another seem to be used when pretty much any living species needs to grow a lens. They aren’t exclusive to lenses, either; many crystallins are found elsewhere in an organism’s metabolic pathways, such as the nervous system.

  I found this paper from 1996 titled “Lens Crystallins of Invertebrates” which I’d say is exactly what you’re looking for. There wasn’t much for arthropods, but it mentions Drosocrystallin for the Drosophila fruit fly’s corneal lens, and antigen 3G6 as “present in the ommatidial crystallin cone and central nervous system of numerous arthropods”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists Want to Teleport a Whole Human. A Quantum Breakthrough Could Make It Reality.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I believe current understanding is that quantum shenanigans mean you can’t truly make a perfect quantum duplicate of something without destroying the original at the same time, so what you’re describing (destroying the original after making the copy) would only be possible for imperfect duplication - e.g. manufacturing a clone and syncing its memory with the original.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China connects its first large-scale flywheel storage project to grid - Energy Storage⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The purpose of this plant is in fact not grid-level storage, but secondary functions as you mentioned, and it’s also meant to be a proof-of-concept. Per an article from CNESA’s English site when the plant’s construction began in June 2023:

  This project represents China’s first grid-level flywheel energy storage frequency regulation power station and is a key project in Shanxi Province, serving as one of the initial pilot demonstration projects for “new energy + energy storage.” The station consists of 12 flywheel energy storage arrays composed of 120 flywheel energy storage units, which will be connected to the Shanxi power grid. The project will receive dispatch instructions from the grid and perform high-frequency charge and discharge operations, providing power ancillary services such as grid active power balance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“So tired”: Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ prices increase by up to 25 percent in October⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, not free per se, DVDs and Blurays and the computer in my closet I use to host Jellyfin for the rest of the home do cost money… But they sure as hell can’t jack up the price after the fact. Quite the contrary; the hardware needed for it is getting cheaper over time. I can also use it even when the internet is down.