Today's Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

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#3212342 30-Mar-2024 15:19

The great push back...well that could well come from the 99%+ who did NOT vote for you.
You do NOT speak for the rest of NZ.

Go back telling your gullible parishioners how Jesus wants you to have another Harley Davidson...

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2024/03/car-impounded-after-doing-burnouts-on-gisborne-s-rainbow-crossing.html

Car impounded after doing burnouts on Gisborne's rainbow crossing

msukiwi

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#3212383 30-Mar-2024 19:49

I wonder if Just Energy have a Feb 29 bug?

Just checked the Online Portal and was presented with this (Part Shown) usage graph!

I've filled in their online form to ask why!

kingdragonfly

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#3213115 2-Apr-2024 08:33

Pop Inquirer: ‘Prank gone wrong?’: Man acts on Philippines store’s April Fools’ post, tattoos logo on forehead for $3,000 NZD

A local Philippines store named Taragis has stirred controversy on Facebook after it posted an April Fools’ Day challenge, sparking debates about responsibility, cultural awareness, and the perils of online pranks.

Taragis, whose social media presence revolves around trendjacking as well as social media stunts and challenges, boldly captioned a post, "Can you do the challenge for ₱100k?!", entailed a hefty reward of NZD $3,000 for anyone daring enough to tattoo the Taragis logo on their body. The allure of quick cash drew attention, but the aftermath revealed more profound consequences.

A participant in the challenge, took it to heart and inked the page’s name on his forehead, becoming a symbol of the blurred lines between humor and harm. He commented on the post with a photo of him having ‘Taragis’ logo tattooed on his forehead, saying, “Sir, I messaged you. It’s already being done. I’ll wait for your chat.”

kingdragonfly

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#3213133 2-Apr-2024 09:24

Nuclear fusion: Kiwi scientists working on cheap, clean energy - but there's a catch

Newshub

"We'll be here at the end OpenStar aims to have commercial fusion power on our grid by the 2030s"

Rikkitic

Awrrr
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#3213143 2-Apr-2024 10:18

Pretty good joke!

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

kingdragonfly

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#3213230 2-Apr-2024 14:09

The running joke:

"Fusion power is always 10 years away."

A research organization company, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, December 2022, did report a historic milestone on the road to practical fusion energy by breaking even.

That machine was three football fields in size. Initial cost was 3.5 billion. LLNL has approximately 8,968 staff members and 321 postdoctoral researcher, though it's unknown how many work on fusion.

Openstar seed budget is 0.2% of that, at $6.2 million.

As of now, OpenStar Fusion is still in the research and development phase. While they haven’t conducted large-scale tests yet, their mission is ambitious: to harness the power of the stars through fusion energy.

Ratu Mataira hails from New Zealand and is of Māori descent. He has a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington. Prior to his fusion endeavors, Ratu ran successful paintball fields.

Caffeinedaily.co, daily for New Zealand’s Startups: Project DarkStar: OpenStar’s journey in stealth

From the founder

"...why OpenStar really stayed in stealth.

...Reason number One in the beginning we did not have a world-class view of the plasma physics, and our pitch was largely a representation of the arguments made by those projects that had come before ours.

...Reason number two (which I stand by even now): we hadn’t done anything!"

ezbee

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#3213247 2-Apr-2024 15:19

The LLNL thing in USA did not really go over unity in total.
Ultra High Power Lasers are horribly inefficient.
You had to use about 200-400 times more 'total' energy in to what you got out!
Oh we also forgot losses of converting that energy output into useable generated energy.
This may be may be 50% or more 'on top'.

More a project that can research what a Fusion reaction is like on a small scale.
Though it may also be useful for research including that for weapons without past testing.
Weapons guys are also interested in more efficient high power lasers so that may also mesh. :-)

Even ITER a massive European project aimed at proving the whole solution at scale including generating power.
Promotional stuff and TED Talks show a target of producing 10x energy, when it may only generate 0.57 of 'total energy' that went in.

2 years old Youtube, but explains difference between TED Talks and reality.
Here Sabine was very generous to LLNL not knowing exact numbers that came later on Laser input.

How close is nuclear fusion power?
Sabine Hossenfelder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY

neb

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#3213290 2-Apr-2024 17:45

kingdragonfly: A research organization company, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, December 2022, did report a historic milestone on the road to practical fusion energy by breaking even.

As with "quantum supremacy" (snort), there are so many ways to measure this that you can get twenty different organisations all announcing they're the first to reach quantum supremacy/breakeven fusion and they'll all different and so far pretty much all of them are more an exercise in fiddling the measurements than achieving the goal. Google "fusion breakeven" or "gain factor"... well OK, don't, there's a lot of stuff and it's pretty dry reading, so only Google if you've got time to kill.

In the case of this announcement, I assume their goal is fusion funding breakeven, which it sounds like they're on their way to achieving. If you want a case study of how this will most likely run assuming they get the funding, look up the Huemul Project, when Argentina tried to create a fusion reactor.

neb

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#3213291 2-Apr-2024 17:52

ezbee:
2 years old Youtube, but explains difference between TED Talks and reality.
Here Sabine was very generous to LLNL not knowing exact numbers that came later on Laser input.

How close is nuclear fusion power?
Sabine Hossenfelder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY

Sabine is great, although you wonder how she has time for anything else given her output volume. In any case don't miss her thoughts on quantum computing (with wonderful snark) while you're there.

Behodar

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#3213300 2-Apr-2024 18:20

A recipe with the word "quick" in the title suggests marinating for 24 hours.

kingdragonfly

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#3213305 2-Apr-2024 18:45

Regarding fusion, it's not impossible for a tiny company to make a technology break through where large companies fail, a "moon-shot" project. See "Blue LED"

Interesting about the hoax/con "Huemul Project"; I never heard of it.

Sabine Hossenfelder is not my favorite physicist, as she can be misleading on subjects that stray away from physics, but the link supplied is good.

An article on Science alert had this is say

"huge amounts of energy are used to power the lasers in these experiments: 500 trillion watts, or a thousand times more power than the US national energy grid produces at any instant. So there's a long way to go before these fusion reactions actually generate more energy than goes into setting them off."

The article I saw that mentioned fusion breakeven was this one. I don't pretend to critique it.

Physics: Nuclear-Fusion Reaction Beats Breakeven

neb

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#3213311 2-Apr-2024 19:25

kingdragonfly: Interesting about the hoax/con "Huemul Project"; I never heard of it.

I tried to find a longer writeup but there doesn't seem to be much around, if you can get it from a library I'd recommend James Mahaffey's "Atomic Adventures", he's a nuclear physicist who both tells a good story and writes very knowledgeably. In particular it wasn't at all clear at the time whether Richter wasn't onto something, it wasn't the "total prank" the brief ITER summary makes it out to be, and goes into much more detail about the theory behind what he was trying to do.

kingdragonfly

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#3213324 2-Apr-2024 20:17

Wow, is this a What-the-heck feature from Telegram (I don't use it, any three letter agency reading this)

If you don't know what popular instant messaging application Telegram is, you lead a better life than I do.

Telegram's DUMB New Feature Costs Your Privacy

Seytonic