Daily Shaarli
October 1, 2023
Television has been around for a long time, but what we point to and call a TV these days is a completely different object from what consumers first fell in love with. This video of RCA factory tours from the 1950s drives home how foreign the old designs are to modern eyes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxQS58t39_U //
The next youtube video that came up is a great watch also if you’re interested in the cathode ray tube alone details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp6tNaUvfNI
Making an oscilloscope is relatively easy, while making a very fast oscilloscope is hard. There’s a trick that converts a mundane instrument into a very fast one, it’s been around since the 1950s, and [CuriousMarc] has a video explaining it with an instrument from the 1960s. The diode sampler is the electronic equivalent of a stroboscope, capturing parts of multiple cycle of a waveform to give a much-slowed-down representation of it on the screen. How it works is both extremely simple, and also exceptionally clever as some genius-level high-speed tricks are used to push it to the limit. We’ve put the video below the break.
Michael Girdley @girdley
I considered moving out of the USA.
After some research, I realized leaving is stupid.
There is no chance the USA will stop being the global superpower.
And the best country for opportunity.
The reason surprised me:
The Gayle & Max Dillard Science & Engineering Research Centre (SERC) at the US Abilene Christian University (ACU) in Texas will research and develop molten salt nuclear reactors.
The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is currently reviewing ACU’s August 2022 application to construct a 1 MWt low-power molten salt research reactor – MSRR – at the NEXT Lab. A detailed design engineering contract has been awarded to Zachry Nuclear Engineering, part of Zachry Group. Natura Resources aims to deploy its first molten salt reactor system in the new facility by 2026, followed by larger factory-built modular reactors for commercial operations in the early 2030s.
For those of us who lived through the Cold War, there’s still an air of mystery as to what it was like on the Communist side. As Uncle Sam’s F-111s cruised slowly in to land above our heads in our sleepy Oxfordshire village it was at the same time very real and immediate, yet also distant. Other than being told how fortunate we were to be capitalists while those on the communist side lived lives of mindless drudgery under their authoritarian boot heel, we knew nothing of the people on the other side of the Wall, and God knows what they were told about us. It’s thus interesting on more than one level to find a promotional film from the mid 1970s showcasing VEB Fernsehgerätewerk Stassfurt (German, Anglophones will need to enable subtitle translation), the factory which produced televisions for East Germans. It provides a pretty comprehensive look at how a 1970s TV set was made, gives us a gateway into the East German consumer electronics business as a whole, and a chance to see how the East Germany preferred to see itself.
When Isaacson asked Musk later that day whether he thought he’d been too harsh with Hughes, Musk replied, “I give people hardcore feedback, mostly accurate, and I try not to do it in a way that’s ad hominem … Physics does not care about hurt feelings. It cares about whether you got the rocket right.”
Physics does not care about hurt feelings, and it also does not care about DEI standards. Musk’s hiring policy is as simple as it is effective: “I believe in a strict meritocracy. Whoever is doing great work, they get more responsibility. And that’s that.”
He worries that unchecked, “the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit, and antihuman in general,” could lead to civilizational decay and AI domination of the human race. In his words, which apply to the regulators and the critics, “Every year there are more referees and fewer doers.”
Musk is not perfect, and there are plenty of decisions to criticize, whether his bizarre family life, his Starlink refusal, or his sophomoric tokes and jokes. But perhaps, as Elon deadpanned on “Saturday Night Live,” it might be too much to expect that a man single-handedly transforming society would also be a “chill, normal dude.” If we end up on Mars, we’ll know who to thank.
The Harris Ranch Tesla Supercharger station is an impressive beast. With 98 charging bays, the facility in Coalinga, California, is the largest charging station in the world. But to provide that kind of power takes something solar can’t provide — diesel generators. //
Just as these charging stations find they can’t run without some fossil fuel backup, the retirement of a coal-fired power plant in Kansas is being delayed to accommodate the energy demands of an electric vehicle battery factory that’s under construction.
Blackmon said that these stories illustrate well the lack of thought going into the demands that will be placed on the grid with increasing amounts of electric vehicle adoption.
As those demands pile on, U.S. energy policy pushes to remove coal, nuclear and natural gas from the grid.
Blackmon said he watched all summer as the Texas grid, which operates separately from the rest of the county, nearly collapsed with the incessant heat. //
Musk has also been taken to task for his solar promises. Energy expert Alex Epstein ran a fact check on Musk’s claim that we could power the world with a small area of the Sahara Desert and “some batteries.”
Epstein calculated that enough battery storage to create a reliable grid would cost $590 trillion for the batteries alone. It doesn’t include the cost of all the transmission infrastructure. And the batteries would have to be replaced every decade.
We all know, at least intellectually, that our computers are all built with lots of tiny transistors. But beyond that it’s a little hard to describe. They’re printed on a silicon wafer somehow, and since any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, they miraculously create a large part of modern society. Even most computers from 40 or 50 years ago were built around various inscrutable integrated circuits. On the other hand, this computer goes all the way back to first principles and implements a complete processor out of individual transistors instead.
The transistor computer uses over 2000 individual transistors to implement everything comprising the 11-bit CPU. //
AzagThoth says:
September 30, 2023 at 10:34 am
wow that is most definitely the 10th level of hell.
-Moore’s inferno