literallymechanical

[literallymechanical]

A bit of good news on the regulatory front from this summer. Fission in America is still hobbled, unfortunately, but fusion power is now officially in the same category as particle accelerators. That is a MASSIVE regulatory hurdle cleared, thanks in large part to the lobbying efforts of the Fusion Industry Association.

it would be kind of based if our renewable energy woes were just immediately solved by building a functioning fusion reactor. like all this philosophical hand-wringing about the consequences of our overconsumption, about the need to eschew our worldly possessions and live smaller, simpler lives more in tune with our food and our material goods and where they come from. how climate change is a wake up call to shun the vulgar decadence of modernity and embrace a more humble, soulful way of living. and then it's just like no lmao we solved it with a machine. sorry you spend all that time contemplating the human condition but what we actually needed was a new machine. sorry lmao. there's pretty much free energy forever now don't even worry about.

[literallymechanical]

Amanda Palmer: It feels so fucking good to finally move back to Boston.

Crowd: WOOOO

Amanda Palmer: Yesterday I was stuck in traffic on Storrow-

Crowd: [EXPLODES INTO ANGUISHED SCREAMING]

Saw the Dresden Dolls in their natural habitat last night, they were excellent and the crowd was having a blast. I have never seen anybody as royally pissed off at a man as Amanda Palmer is mad at Neil Gaiman. Taylor Swift could never.

[literallymechanical]

Saw the Dresden Dolls in their natural habitat last night, they were excellent and the crowd was having a blast. I have never seen anybody as royally pissed off at a man as Amanda Palmer is mad at Neil Gaiman. Taylor Swift could never.

[literallymechanical]

Source: Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics

Yeah! It's easier to see if you separate out the periods . Here is a W7-X module of 14 coils, all of which are different – 10 modular (the squiggly ones) and 4 planar (the flat ones that are slightly wider (not shown in the original post)). Chain this together five times and you get the full set of encircling coils.

These 14 magnets are repeated in the same order in each of the modules, meaning that while there are 70 total magnets, there are only 14* unique shapes, each of which is repeated 5 times.

*Actually 7, the module is divided into two mirrored half-modules, but it could be debated whether a magnet and its mirrored twin are actually the "same" shape, so I'm just going to say 14.

I noticed that the stelerator coils are really particularly shaped based on their location on the ring, compared to tokomak coils. The stelerator plasma at least looks like it's in a ring of similar repeating segments, so surely there must be repeating coil shapes. Does every single coil in a segment have to be unique, or do you have shapes for the twist-over regions and then a shape you can rotate as you go through the softer twisting regions?

I'm the wrong kind of engineer for this and I'm judging entirely by looking at pictures so correct me at literally any step in this question.

Yep! Stellarators have periodicity, meaning that you have some integer number of repeating coil sets. This is easiest to see from the top view:

Source: Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics

Wendelstein 7-X (above) has five-fold symmetry, with five repeating coil sets rotated through a full 360 degrees.

Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison

Whereas HSX has four-fold symmetry...

Source: Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

And Lyman Spitzer's earliest stellarators from the 1950's had two periods, though this was before we started doing optimized coils with those funky shapes.

Fun fact, the Lyman Spitzer who invented the stellarator was the same Lyman Spitzer who came up the Hubble Space Telescope. Back in the day you could just do whatever, I guess!

[literallymechanical]

I noticed that the stelerator coils are really particularly shaped based on their location on the ring, compared to tokomak coils. The stelerator plasma at least looks like it's in a ring of similar repeating segments, so surely there must be repeating coil shapes. Does every single coil in a segment have to be unique, or do you have shapes for the twist-over regions and then a shape you can rotate as you go through the softer twisting regions?

I'm the wrong kind of engineer for this and I'm judging entirely by looking at pictures so correct me at literally any step in this question.

Yep! Stellarators have periodicity, meaning that you have some integer number of repeating coil sets. This is easiest to see from the top view:

Source: Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics

Wendelstein 7-X (above) has five-fold symmetry, with five repeating coil sets rotated through a full 360 degrees.

Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison

Whereas HSX has four-fold symmetry...

Source: Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

And Lyman Spitzer's earliest stellarators from the 1950's had two periods, though this was before we started doing optimized coils with those funky shapes.

Fun fact, the Lyman Spitzer who invented the stellarator was the same Lyman Spitzer who came up the Hubble Space Telescope. Back in the day you could just do whatever, I guess!

[literallymechanical]

@saltkettling I've actually thought about 3D printing stellarator plasmas as bracelets, I have some soft TPU filament that I think would work pretty well. Not the sort of thing I could distribute, but it would be funny to give them to coworkers.

Also! You have identified one of the challenges with stellarators as power plants, especially QI (quasi-isodynamic) designs. They're like thin bracelets with a large empty space in the center, rather than fat donuts with a smaller hole. This means that to get a similar volume of plasma as a tokamak, you need a device with a much bigger radius.

Not an insurmountable challenge, but not an insignificant one. If you were using old-fashioned low-temperature superconducting magnets like in ITER, a QI stellarator with an ITER-scale volume of plasma would be gargantuan. Like, football field soccer pitch sized.

Thankfully, modern high-field, high-temperature superconductors let you get away with a much smaller plasma volume by cranking up the magnetic field (that's one reason that SPARC-like tokamaks can be itty-bitty, but reach ITER levels of power). That being said, even a compact QA stellarator is going to be larger than a comparable tokamak.

Another comparison of the two most promising varieties of fusion reactor, tokamaks and stellarators. I used to work on tokamaks and now I'm doing stellarators and let me tell you. It's been an adjustment.

[literallymechanical]

today i took diced green peppers, seasoned them with salt and fresh black pepper and baked it at 8000 degrees for 22 hours. i make this whenever i want pile of smoldering ash.

[literallymechanical]

For my long-time followers, this was the nanotech job with the big hydrogen explosion and the semi-regular toxic borane spills, back before I did fusion.

Trick or treat!!

A map of Masonic and paramasonic organization, as created by a reddit user.

[literallymechanical]

lol perfect. That brings back extremely specific memories of driving past the Supreme Council Headquarters' Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library every morning on the way to work at my first real job, which really set the tone for the day

Trick or treat!!

A map of Masonic and paramasonic organization, as created by a reddit user.

[literallymechanical]

Me and @armoreddragon did self portraits

I haven't carved a pumpkin since I was a kid but I'm pretty damn proud of how this turned out

[literallymechanical]

I haven't carved a pumpkin since I was a kid but I'm pretty damn proud of how this turned out

[literallymechanical]

Apparently a lot of people criticize the book for being overly derivative of Dune, which like, yes, obviously it is, I figured was kind of the point? Empire of Silence is a self-aware Dune in the same was that Scream is a response to Halloween, or Mission Impossible is an American James Bond. That's the idea.

Just finished Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio, book 1 of the Sun Eater series. Written as the autobiography of Hadrian "Half-Mortal" "Sun Eater" Marlowe, translated in-universe from Galactic Standard, an Anglo-Hindi patois.

Old-school space opera in a Dune-like distant future, but with a storytelling sensibility that owes more to Patrick Rothfuss than anybody else. Reads like epic fantasy rather than science fiction, which I think is fun.

The Sollan Empire venerates Mother Earth, slain in nuclear fire twenty thousand years ago, as the messianic god of their state religion. Ruocchio leans into the implications of that premise with a lot of fun linguistics stuff:

lol. Lmao.

The narration is florid and purple and delightful. Hadrian was an ass in his youth in the way that only the vat-born scion of a noble house can be, and his future self writes with wincing honesty while apologizing to the reader for the bad choices he keeps making.

I appreciate how the book opens by basically turning directly to the reader and saying "this is a Dune, we're doing a Dune. Here are three rapid-fire direct references to Dune. Got it? Okay, now we can move on." Highly recommend if you like door-stopper epic fantasy.

[literallymechanical]

In retrospect it actually was pretty funny that the Antichrist just straight up called himself "Mister Beast" right from the get-go. Like okay yeah we should probably have realized what was happening when he did the "I Spent One Thousand Years Burning In The Lake Of Fire" video. I just assumed it was clickbait and didn't watch.

idk it just felt like maybe somebody could have said something when he uploaded "I Am The True God Above God, Worship Me And Win $80,000" but tbf I heard the prize was legit.

[literallymechanical]

Just finished Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio, book 1 of the Sun Eater series. Written as the autobiography of Hadrian "Half-Mortal" "Sun Eater" Marlowe, translated in-universe from Galactic Standard, an Anglo-Hindi patois.

Old-school space opera in a Dune-like distant future, but with a storytelling sensibility that owes more to Patrick Rothfuss than anybody else. Reads like epic fantasy rather than science fiction, which I think is fun.

The Sollan Empire venerates Mother Earth, slain in nuclear fire twenty thousand years ago, as the messianic god of their state religion. Ruocchio leans into the implications of that premise with a lot of fun linguistics stuff:

lol. Lmao.

The narration is florid and purple and delightful. Hadrian was an ass in his youth in the way that only the vat-born scion of a noble house can be, and his future self writes with wincing honesty while apologizing to the reader for the bad choices he keeps making.

I appreciate how the book opens by basically turning directly to the reader and saying "this is a Dune, we're doing a Dune. Here are three rapid-fire direct references to Dune. Got it? Okay, now we can move on." Highly recommend if you like door-stopper epic fantasy.

[literallymechanical]

[literallymechanical]

can we all agree that it's pathetic when so-called "friends" try to sabotage your opportunities? you're clearly jealous that the amulet of eternal darkness chose me and no amount of "please fight it, i know you're still in there somewhere" is going to change that. crab bucket mentality. grow up.

[literallymechanical]

pictures from an old SA thread. someone's basement zone tour...