literallymechanical

[literallymechanical]

Nice allegory. Unfortunately, I have written a counter-allegory where that doesn’t happen

[literallymechanical]

God this guy fucking sucks. Every day he shows up and spends like forty minutes flirting with the physicists, he broke the coffee machine twice, and he's constantly smacking people with his electrons and trying to play it off like it's a joke. No, Doc Fuzor, it's not "an electrifying morning," you just beaned me in the eye with a giant fucking electron and it hurt. Stop chortling.

[literallymechanical]

Wiener Werkstätte ‘Castell’ modular sofa, Hans Hopfer, 1972

[literallymechanical]

MOON

Diploma finally showed up, I'm a Magistrix Ingenii heck yeahhhhh

[literallymechanical]

Diploma finally showed up, I'm a Magistrix Ingenii heck yeahhhhh

[literallymechanical]

[literallymechanical]

suddenly bothered by how indefensible/unfortified chicago is

[literallymechanical]

Bacteria do have souls, but binary fission doesn’t produce new souls 99% of the time, so most single celled organisms share these sprawling souls that just get bigger every time they divide. Over time they compact down into these big mats of soul get compacted into geological layers that gradually accrete to the world soul. Sexual reproduction creates new souls but they’re much shorter lived as a result, and rarely make it into the bedrock, so most of the world spirit is from the Proterozoic.

[literallymechanical]

I’m reading that new memoir about working at Facebook,”Careless People,” and it’s just fucking insane.

At one point Facebook wanted to be an international hub for organ donation. The “Lean In” lady asked why she couldn’t go down to Mexico and buy a kidney if her four year old needs one. This is literally on p.57. What the fuck else is going to be in this book if that is on page 57

[literallymechanical]

In the next 18 months I plan on get caught in some sort of psychic web.

[literallymechanical]

One other thing worth noting: lead or lead-lithium eutectic breeding fluid is electrically conductive – it's molten metal, after all – which means that it interacts with the magnetic fields of the reactor. Eddy currents in the breeding fluid generate counteracting magnetic fields, which actually add a ton of resistance to the fluid flow.

That means that when breeding is ongoing, you need to pump your fluid into the breeding zone VERY hard, much harder than you'd expect.

Breeding blankets for fusion reactors

So, barring a few ambitious projects involving helium-3, fusion reactor power plants will use hydrogen isotopes as fuel: a 50/50 mixture of deuterium (hydrogen-2) and tritium (hydrogen-3). Deuterium is very stable and relatively abundant, as far as these things go, and can be extracted from ordinary seawater.  Tritium, however, has a half life of just over 12 years, so it doesn't occur in nature.

Fortunately, you can use your fusion reactor to synthesize its own tritium fuel, via the transmutation of lithium-6. You use the powerful neutron flux from the fusion plasma to “breed” tritium in lithium, extract it, then feed it back into the reactor. The figure of merit for this process is the tritium breeding ratio (TBR), which is simply the ratio of tritium bred to tritium used. The goal is to get a TBR substantially greater than 1.

This figure shows the physics of tritium breeding, where neutrons from the deuterium-tritium fusion plasma are absorbed by lithium, which then splits into helium and tritium. [source]

Generally speaking, most concepts for tritium breeding involve wrapping a lithium “breeding blanket” around the outside of the reactor, with as few gaps as you can manage. A deuterium-tritium reactor is constantly generating fast neutrons. You want to keep as much of that emission as possible inside the breeding blanket, for both tritium and power generation.

There are a few different ideas for breeding blanket designs, several of which are going to be tested on ITER, the massive reactor being built in France. One concept is a thick sheath of lithium ceramic that surrounds the vessel, either as solid slabs or pebbles.  As tritium breeding occurs under the blanket, water or liquid helium is circulated through it, cooling the lithium and potentially extracting heat for electricity generation.

While such a blanket might be relatively “simple” (lol) to build, there are some pretty fundamental challenges. Neutrons will penetrate most materials with ease, and it might be tricky to extract tritium that's been bred deep inside of solid lithium.  Ideally, you could do the extraction without pause, even as breeding is ongoing. For some designs, though, you have to cycle out breeder units for harvesting as they get a full load of tritium.

Another concept is “liquid breeding." This concept uses a molten mixture of metallic lithium and lead, or a lithium salt compound like FLiBe (fluorine-lithium-beryllium). The liquid would be pumped through a “breeding zone” around the vessel, where the neutron flux is thickest. The tritium will then be continuously extracted from the breeding fluid as it flows back out.  As part of the process, you can run the hot liquid through a heat exchanger, heating water to power a steam turbine. 

Liquid breeding does raise some prominent engineering challenges. Hot, molten breeding fluid will be very hard to handle – not just because of the heat, but also because you're trying to pump a massive quantity of viscous fluid into a very tight breeding zone. Moreover, molten lithium-lead might react explosively with air. If your breeding system springs a leak, you’ll have a serious mess on your hands!

It’s still unclear which of these breeding strategies will bear fruit. From conception to implementation, there are still a lot of unknowns!  Both liquid and solid breeding will be conducted in France, and a number of private fusion companies have plans to breed tritium in their machines as well.

[literallymechanical]

Theres nothing you can say that will convince me that you dont transform into a ufo when im not looking

[literallymechanical]

[literallymechanical]

Oh this is unrelated but I'm 4 degrees of separation from Andrew Hussie

I'm listening to the Behind the Bastards podcast series about the Zizian murders and the first two episodes are really catching me up to speed on what the Rationalists have been up to, and I'm just here like, I suddenly understand why that fucked up college situationship is an AI risk researcher now

[literallymechanical]

Extrusion Easychair, Jan Janssen

[literallymechanical]

See I didn't even get to step 0 because my very first exposure to Rationalism wasn't LessWrong, it was getting caught in the splash zone of the constant dorm room college party relationship anxiety/drama that the Rationalists kept talking themselves into.

I'm listening to the Behind the Bastards podcast series about the Zizian murders and the first two episodes are really catching me up to speed on what the Rationalists have been up to, and I'm just here like, I suddenly understand why that fucked up college situationship is an AI risk researcher now

[literallymechanical]

Listen, I understand that as an engineer and scientist in professional and social spaces that are chock full of Rationalists, I should be more in-the-know about the movement. But you have to understand that every time I see a headline about the latest insane thing that an Effective Altruist went to jail for, I get the overwhelming urge to storm out of the dorm kitchen in a dramatic huff and do a bad job dyeing my hair

I'm listening to the Behind the Bastards podcast series about the Zizian murders and the first two episodes are really catching me up to speed on what the Rationalists have been up to, and I'm just here like, I suddenly understand why that fucked up college situationship is an AI risk researcher now