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jcmarchi · 9 months ago

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New transistor’s superlative properties could have broad electronics applications

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/new-transistors-superlative-properties-could-have-broad-electronics-applications/

New transistor’s superlative properties could have broad electronics applications

In 2021, a team led by MIT physicists reported creating a new ultrathin ferroelectric material, or one where positive and negative charges separate into different layers. At the time they noted the material’s potential for applications in computer memory and much more. Now the same core team and colleagues — including two from the lab next door — have built a transistor with that material and shown that its properties are so useful that it could change the world of electronics.

Although the team’s results are based on a single transistor in the lab, “in several aspects its properties already meet or exceed industry standards” for the ferroelectric transistors produced today, says Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics, who led the work with professor of physics Raymond Ashoori. Both are also affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory.

“In my lab we primarily do fundamental physics. This is one of the first, and perhaps most dramatic, examples of how very basic science has led to something that could have a major impact on applications,” Jarillo-Herrero says.

Says Ashoori, “When I think of my whole career in physics, this is the work that I think 10 to 20 years from now could change the world.”

Among the new transistor’s superlative properties:

It can switch between positive and negative charges — essentially the ones and zeros of digital information — at very high speeds, on nanosecond time scales. (A nanosecond is a billionth of a second.)

It is extremely tough. After 100 billion switches it still worked with no signs of degradation.

The material behind the magic is only billionths of a meter thick, one of the thinnest of its kind in the world. That, in turn, could allow for much denser computer memory storage. It could also lead to much more energy-efficient transistors because the voltage required for switching scales with material thickness. (Ultrathin equals ultralow voltages.)

The work is reported in a recent issue of Science. The co-first authors of the paper are Kenji Yasuda, now an assistant professor at Cornell University, and Evan Zalys-Geller, now at Atom Computing. Additional authors are Xirui Wang, an MIT graduate student in physics; Daniel Bennett and Efthimios Kaxiras of Harvard University; Suraj S. Cheema, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an affiliate of the Research Laboratory of Electronics; and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan.

What they did

In a ferroelectric material, positive and negative charges spontaneously head to different sides, or poles. Upon the application of an external electric field, those charges switch sides, reversing the polarization. Switching the polarization can be used to encode digital information, and that information will be nonvolatile, or stable over time. It won’t change unless an electric field is applied. For a ferroelectric to have broad application to electronics, all of this needs to happen at room temperature.

The new ferroelectric material reported in Science in 2021 is based on atomically thin sheets of boron nitride that are stacked parallel to each other, a configuration that doesn’t exist in nature. In bulk boron nitride, the individual layers of boron nitride are instead rotated by 180 degrees.

It turns out that when an electric field is applied to this parallel stacked configuration, one layer of the new boron nitride material slides over the other, slightly changing the positions of the boron and nitrogen atoms. For example, imagine that each of your hands is composed of only one layer of cells. The new phenomenon is akin to pressing your hands together then slightly shifting one above the other.

“So the miracle is that by sliding the two layers a few angstroms, you end up with radically different electronics,” says Ashoori. The diameter of an atom is about 1 angstrom.

Another miracle: “nothing wears out in the sliding,” Ashoori continues. That’s why the new transistor could be switched 100 billion times without degrading. Compare that to the memory in a flash drive made with conventional materials. “Each time you write and erase a flash memory, you get some degradation,” says Ashoori. “Over time, it wears out, which means that you have to use some very sophisticated methods for distributing where you’re reading and writing on the chip.” The new material could make those steps obsolete.

A collaborative effort

Yasuda, the co-first author of the current Science paper, applauds the collaborations involved in the work. Among them, “we [Jarillo-Herrero’s team] made the material and, together with Ray [Ashoori] and [co-first author] Evan [Zalys-Geller], we measured its characteristics in detail. That was very exciting.” Says Ashoori, “many of the techniques in my lab just naturally applied to work that was going on in the lab next door. It’s been a lot of fun.”

Ashoori notes that “there’s a lot of interesting physics behind this” that could be explored. For example, “if you think about the two layers sliding past each other, where does that sliding start?” In addition, says Yasuda, could the ferroelectricity be triggered with something other than electricity, like an optical pulse? And is there a fundamental limit to the amount of switches the material can make?

Challenges remain. For example, the current way of producing the new ferroelectrics is difficult and not conducive to mass manufacturing. “We made a single transistor as a demonstration. If people could grow these materials on the wafer scale, we could create many, many more,” says Yasuda. He notes that different groups are already working to that end.

Concludes Ashoori, “There are a few problems. But if you solve them, this material fits in so many ways into potential future electronics. It’s very exciting.”

This work was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office, the MIT/Microsystems Technology Laboratories Samsung Semiconductor Research Fund, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Ramon Areces Foundation, the Basic Energy Sciences program of the U.S. Department of Energy, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) of Japan.

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catenary-chad · 3 months ago

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More reasons why Boxcab Rusty would solve everything: in at least one instance they literally WERE done in by rusting out and falling to bits

"Metal fatigue was breaking the frames," recalls retired Carpenter's Helper, Wade Stevenson. "One time at Othello, a guy coupled onto his train real hard, and the frame of his Freight Motor just broke into pieces and fell to the track. Those frames were welded and re-welded many times." Noel T. Holley, The Milwaukee Electrics

Yeah now I really want to rewrite Call Me Rusty and other OLC sections to be about an ancient electric boxcab instead. Make Momma/Poppa the out of touch high maintenance celebrity who’s not very malicious, Electra of all characters goes in Poppa’s original role of winning their heat and physically failing (probably via catching fire or blowint a transformer). I’m kind of reimagining them as a New Haven EP-5 because they were a popular toy and looked cool but had major issues irl. They can keep AC/DC and turn the main Starlight Express theme into bombastic jazzy piece.

(It’s hard to get much older than boxcabs for electric engines so sure, let’s flip some ages around.)

#still got change the bootstrapping message because it’s fundamentally anti-train lol #he whistled at me is staying in barely modified form because it is HILARIOUS with the context of Rusty being an electric engine with a whis

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kkwaghvideo · 11 months ago

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Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering | Experiential Learning from Day One

Prof. Nayana N. Jangle and Prof. Ganesh N. Jadhav, delves into the fundamentals of this Electrical Engineering. In this video, they shed light on the significance, vast applications, and abundant opportunities within the field. Discover the innovative curriculum at #KKWIEER, designed to provide students with hands-on experience through state-of-the-art laboratories.

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#Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering #Youtube

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reasonsforhope · 3 months ago

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"The man who has called climate change a “hoax” also can be expected to wreak havoc on federal agencies central to understanding, and combating, climate change. But plenty of climate action would be very difficult for a second Trump administration to unravel, and the 47th president won’t be able to stop the inevitable economy-wide shift from fossil fuels to renewables.

“This is bad for the climate, full stop,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at the Columbia Business School. “That said, this will be yet another wall that never gets built. Fundamental market forces are at play.”

A core irony of climate change is that markets incentivized the wide-scale burning of fossil fuels beginning in the Industrial Revolution, creating the mess humanity is mired in, and now those markets are driving a renewables revolution that will help fix it. Coal, oil, and gas are commodities whose prices fluctuate. As natural resources that humans pull from the ground, there’s really no improving on them — engineers can’t engineer new versions of coal.

By contrast, solar panels, wind turbines, and appliances like induction stoves only get better — more efficient and cheaper — with time. Energy experts believe solar power, the price of which fell 90 percent between 2010 and 2020, will continue to proliferate across the landscape. (Last year, the United States added three times as much solar capacity as natural gas.) Heat pumps now outsell gas furnaces in the U.S., due in part to government incentives. Last year, Maine announced it had reached its goal of installing 100,000 heat pumps two years ahead of schedule, in part thanks to state rebates. So if the Trump administration cut off the funding for heat pumps that the IRA provides, states could pick up the slack.

Local utilities are also finding novel ways to use heat pumps. Over in Massachusetts, for example, the utility Eversource Energy is experimenting with “networked geothermal,” in which the homes within a given neighborhood tap into water pumped from underground. Heat pumps use that water to heat or cool a space, which is vastly more efficient than burning natural gas. Eversource and two dozen other utilities, representing about half of the country’s natural gas customers, have formed a coalition to deploy more networked geothermal systems.

Beyond being more efficient, green tech is simply cheaper to adopt. Consider Texas, which long ago divorced its electrical grid from the national grid so it could skirt federal regulation. The Lone Star State is the nation’s biggest oil and gas producer, but it gets 40 percent of its total energy from carbon-free sources. “Texas has the most solar and wind of any state, not because Republicans in Texas love renewables, but because it’s the cheapest form of electricity there,” said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, a climate research nonprofit. The next top three states for producing wind power — Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas — are red, too.

State regulators are also pressuring utilities to slash emissions, further driving the adoption of wind and solar power. As part of California’s goal of decarbonizing its power by 2045, the state increased battery storage by 757 percent between 2019 and 2023. Even electric cars and electric school buses can provide backup power for the grid. That allows utilities to load up on bountiful solar energy during the day, then drain those batteries at night — essential for weaning off fossil fuel power plants. Trump could slap tariffs on imported solar panels and thereby increase their price, but that would likely boost domestic manufacturing of those panels, helping the fledgling photovoltaic manufacturing industry in red states like Georgia and Texas.

The irony of Biden’s signature climate bill is states that overwhelmingly support Trump are some of the largest recipients of its funding. That means tampering with the IRA could land a Trump administration in political peril even with Republican control of the Senate, if not Congress. In addition to providing incentives to households (last year alone, 3.4 million American families claimed more than $8 billion in tax credits for home energy improvements), the legislation has so far resulted in $150 billion of new investment in the green economy since it was passed in 2022, boosting the manufacturing of technologies like batteries and solar panels. According to Atlas Public Policy, a research group, that could eventually create 160,000 jobs. “Something like 66 percent of all of the spending in the IRA has gone to red states,” Hausfather said. “There certainly is a contingency in the Republican party now that’s going to support keeping some of those subsidies around.”

Before Biden’s climate legislation passed, much more progress was happening at a state and local level. New York, for instance, set a goal to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 40 percent by 2030, and 85 percent by 2050. Colorado, too, is aiming to slash emissions by at least 90 percent by 2050. The automaker Stellantis has signed an agreement with the state of California promising to meet the state’s zero-emissions vehicle mandate even if a judicial or federal action overturns it. It then sells those same cars in other states.

“State governments are going to be the clearest counterbalance to the direction that Donald Trump will take the country on environmental policy,” said Thad Kousser, co-director of the Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research at the University of California, San Diego. “California and the states that ally with it are going to try to adhere to tighter standards if the Trump administration lowers national standards.”

[Note: One of the obscure but great things about how emissions regulations/markets work in the US is that automakers generally all follow California's emissions standards, and those standards are substantially higher than federal standards. Source]

Last week, 62 percent of Washington state voters soundly rejected a ballot initiative seeking to repeal a landmark law that raised funds to fight climate change. “Donald Trump’s going to learn something that our opponents in our initiative battle learned: Once people have a benefit, you can’t take it away,” Washington Governor Jay Inslee said in a press call Friday. “He is going to lose in his efforts to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, because governors, mayors of both parties, are going to say, ‘This belongs to me, and you’re not going to get your grubby hands on it.’”

Even without federal funding, states regularly embark on their own large-scale projects to adapt to climate change. California voters, for instance, just overwhelmingly approved a $10 billion bond to fund water, climate, and wildfire prevention projects. “That will be an example,” said Saharnaz Mirzazad, executive director of the U.S. branch of ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability. “You can use that on a state level or local level to have [more of] these types of bonds. You can help build some infrastructure that is more resilient.”

Urban areas, too, have been major drivers of climate action: In 2021, 130 U.S. cities signed a U.N.-backed pledge to accelerate their decarbonization. “Having an unsupportive federal government, to say the least, will be not helpful,” said David Miller, managing director at the Centre for Urban Climate Policy and Economy at C40, a global network of mayors fighting climate change. “It doesn’t mean at all that climate action will stop. It won’t, and we’ve already seen that twice in recent U.S. history, when Republican administrations pulled out of international agreements. Cities step to the fore.”

And not in isolation, because mayors talk: Cities share information about how to write legislation, such as laws that reduce carbon emissions in buildings and ensure that new developments are connected to public transportation. They transform their food systems to grow more crops locally, providing jobs and reducing emissions associated with shipping produce from afar. “If anything,” Miller said, “having to push against an administration, like that we imagine is coming, will redouble the efforts to push at the local level.”

Federal funding — like how the U.S. Forest Service has been handing out $1.5 billion for planting trees in urban areas, made possible by the IRA — might dry up for many local projects, but city governments, community groups, and philanthropies will still be there. “You picture a web, and we’re taking scissors or a machete or something, and chopping one part of that web out,” said Elizabeth Sawin, the director of the Multisolving Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that promotes climate solutions. “There’s this resilience of having all these layers of partners.”

All told, climate progress has been unfolding on so many fronts for so many years — often without enough support from the federal government — that it will persist regardless of who occupies the White House. “This too shall pass, and hopefully we will be in a more favorable policy environment in four years,” Hausfather said. “In the meantime, we’ll have to keep trying to make clean energy cheap and hope that it wins on its merits.”"

-via Grist, November 11, 2024. A timely reminder.

#climate change #climate action #climate anxiety #climate hope #united states #us politics #donald trump #fuck trump #inflation reduction act #clean energy #solar power #wind power #renewables #good news #hope

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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Tesla's Dieselgate

Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla

He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:

https://elonmusk.today/

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.

This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

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literallymechanical · 7 months ago

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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.

#fusion #engineering #science

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inbabylontheywept · 2 years ago

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Kevin vs. Quantum Mechanics

This is an autobiographical piece. Names have been changed for anonymity, but it's otherwise left be. ---

The class's first suspicion of Kevin was that he had, somehow, cheated his way up to this course. He just seemed perpetually confused, and strangely antagonistic of the professor. The weirdest example of this was when he asked what an ion was (in a third year EE class?), and was informed that it referred to any positively or negatively charged particle. It would have been strange enough to ask, but his reply of "Either? That doesn't sound right" sealed him in as a well known character in the class of 19 people.

The real tipping point in our perception of him during a lecture where the professor mentioned practical uses for a neutron beam, and Kevin asked if a beam could be made out of some other neutral material. When asked "Like what?", he replied "An atom with all of its electrons removed." When we pointed out that the protons would make that abomination extremely positively charged, he just replied with "So what if we removed those too?" and then was baffled when we informed him that would just be neutrons.

That's high school level chemistry. Not knowing it was so incredibly strange that I felt like something was off, so I asked him if he'd like to grab lunch. He accepted, we chatted, and I finally began to get a sense of his origin story.

See, Kevin wasn't a junior/senior electrical engineer like the rest of us. Kevin was, in fact, three notable things: A business major, a sophomore, and a hardcore Catholic. All three of those are essential to understanding his scenario.

What had begun all of this was actually a conflict with Kevin and his roommate. Kevin frequently had his fundamental belief in Absolute Good, Absolute Bad, and Absolute Anything pushed back on by his roommate, who was in STEM. Said roommate kept invoking quantum mechanics as his proof against Absolute Knowledge. Kevin was tired of having something that he didn't understand thrown at his convictions, so he decided to take a quantum course to settle things once and for all.

Despite not having any of the pre-reqs.

He'd actually tried to take quantum for physicists first, but the school's physics department wouldn't let him. It's actually pretty strictly regulated, because it is a mandatory class for physics majors. However, because quantum is not mandatory for electrical engineers, there aren't really any built in requirements for the class. It's just assumed that nobody would actually try to take it until their third year because doing so would the be the mental equivalent to slamming your nuts in the car door. Just, pure suffering for no good reason.

Apparently, the counselors had tried to talk him out of it, but if Kevin was one thing, it was stubborn. He'd actually had to sign some papers basically saying "I was warned that this is incredibly stupid, but I refused to listen" in order to take the class.

He was actually pretty nice, if currently unaware of how bad he'd just fucked up. I paid for the lunch, wished him the best, and reported back to the class discord. We'd all been curious about this guy's story, but now that I had the truth, I could share it with the world.

Feelings were mixed. Some people thought he was going to drop out any minute now. Others thought that he wouldn't, be also that convincing him to drop now, while he still could, was the only ethical thing. Others figured that a policy of non-interference was best: The counselors couldn't dissuade him, and if we tried to do the same, he'd probably just think it was STEM elitism trying to guard its little clubhouse. He'd figure out how hard things were, or he'd fail. Either way, it would help him learn more about the world.

We wound up taking the approach of non-interference. If nothing else, understanding his origins gave us more patience when he asked bizarre questions. He wasn't trying to waste our time, he was just trying to cram three years of pre-reqs into a one semester course. He did get a little bit combative sometimes, and we could tell that he was really wracking his brain to try and find some sort of contradiction or error that he could use to bring the whole thing down, but he never could.

First test came by, and he bombed it. Completely unprepared. He'd taken Calc I, but he didn't know how to do integrals yet (that was Calc II). Worse, he was far past the drop date. I imagine most people in his shoes would've stopped struggling. They'd realize they were fucked and just let themselves fail, at least salvaging their other classes grades in the process. Why waste resources on an unwinnable battle?

Kevin never asked questions like that. If he was stupid enough to try it, he was stupid enough to finish it. God bless him.

He invited me to lunch after the test and said that the class was more fascinating than he'd ever imagined, but he didn't know if he'd be able to pass it. He asked if I could help, and I said...maybe. I brought the request to the discord, and from the eight people there I got three volunteers who admired this dork's tenacity. He was in over his head, miles beneath the surface, but his fighting spirit was fucking glorious. If he was willing to go down swinging, we were willing to bust our asses trying to get him caught up.

Some of the stuff was just extra homework we gave to the guy. We told him he needed to learn integrals, stat. We sent him some copies of basic software that can be used to teach the basics of linear circuit equations, and he practiced that game like it was HALO. Just, hours sunk into it. Absolutely godlike.

He was still scrabbling for air at just the surface level of the class, but he'd gone from abysmal failure to lingering on the boundary between life and death. Other people in the class started to learn about Kevin's origin story, and our little circle of four volunteer tutors grew to six. Every day, he had someone trying to help him either catch up in some way, or finish that week's homework. He'd gone from being seen as a nuisance that wasted class time to the underdog mascot.

He was getting twelve hours of personal tutoring a week, on top of three hours of classes, on top of six hours of office hours, on top of the coursework. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this kid was doing 40 hours a week just trying to pass this one single class.

Second test comes around and he gets a 60. He's ecstatic. We're ecstatic. Kid's too young to take out drinking so we just order a pizza and cheer like he just won gold at the Olympics.

After that second test, things hit another tipping point. With so much catch-up under his belt, he was able to focus a lot more on the actual material for the class. A borderline cinematic moment happened when I was trying to get ahead on the homework so that I could put more hours in on my senior project. Nobody else had finished it yet because it wasn't due for another week, so the specifics of the problem I was working on were still a mystery. I went to the professor's office hours and get some pointers, but he wasn't willing to give good hints when the HW wasn't due for another week or so. He said I still had time to think about it, which was true, but I wanted to be able to think about other things. Kevin had watched the whole conversation, waiting for his turn to ask the professor more simple questions, but when I left I got a text from him telling me to hop on zoom.

Kevin had finished it earlier, because Kevin started all of his homework the moment it was assigned. He needed to, in order to make sure that he could get it done on time. He'd finished it the day before, and was able to walk me through it.

From student, to teacher. I'm not exaggerating when I say that he probably saved me eight hours on that assignment. I could've kissed him.

A month or two later, we took the final. As soon as we were done, we six asked Kevin how he did. He was nervous, there was so much new material for him in this class that his retention hadn't been great. Us six were also a little stressed: We were going to pass the class, but the final was hard.

We waited for the results.

And waited. And waited.

Finally, the scores were posted as a table, curve included. From our class of 19 people, 4 withdrew within the deadline, 4 failed, 1 got a C, 8 got B's, and 2 got A's. We could see that the curve for a C was set at 59.2% overall.

We called Kevin. He was crying. End score, 59.2%. Teacher curved the C exactly to his score.

It was a week into winter break so we couldn't gather the forces around for a party like last time, but we were all losing our shit. Kevin was losing his shit. He couldn't believe how stupid he was to try this course, he couldn't believe that six people busted their ass just to make sure he didn't die, and he couldn't believe that the professor basically just passed him out of sheer effort alone.

He said it was the stupidest thing he'd ever done, and while I doubt that, it was outrageously stupid. And yet, I've never been so invested in a fellow student before. I'm prouder of Kevin's C than I am of my own B. I was walking on sunshine for weeks after that. In theory, my senior project was building a functioning washing machine, but in practice, in my heart, it was helping Kevin pass Intro to Quantum for Electrical Engineers.

(And as an epilogue: No, he did not renounce Catholicism and become an atheist like his roommate had hoped. He did walk out changed. I think that being that wrong about something, and realizing it, was a pivotal moment for him. It's hard to be dogmatic once you realize that a lifetime of being wrong feels exactly like a lifetime of being right, right up until the last two seconds of it.)

#writing #Kevin #electrical engineering #college #memoir #biography #college stories #group project #quantum physics #senior project #people are awesome #Babylon-Lore #Babylon-TopPick

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aight-griffin · 4 months ago

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You ever not consider how important something is until it’s swapped with something else?

Yeah, that’s how I’m feeling about this edit.

On the surface, red Vi and blue Jinx just seems obvious, they’re an important duo who are very different people, so give them contrasting colors. Then the blue contrasts with Jinx’s pink pants, and the red contrasts with Vi’s blue gauntlets, it’s all nice and simple.

Then I see this edit, and holy shit the colors are really important actually.

Vi is bright red(and also pink) because she’s violent and physical. She’s not the hulk, per say, but one of the most fundamental and consistent aspects of Vi’s characterization is her tendency to solve all of her problems by punching, that’s all over both seasons.

Furthermore, blue is the color of science in Arcane, it’s the color of technology and of Piltover. Vi doesn’t wear it because she’s a Zaunite who’s not a scientist or an inventor. Look at it in terms of her gauntlets:

When Vi first gets her gauntlets in S1A3, they’re all bright blue and gold, very clearly not any of the colors associated with her, and thus clearly not hers.

In S2A1 when Caitlyn gaslights her into becoming an enforcer, that unfamiliar blue and gold covers her entire design. She’s not just using Piltover’s tools anymore, she’s become part of their system. Now her hair is signaling how uncomfortable she feels in the role.

It’s not easy to see, but Vi actually paints her gauntlets black in her pit fighter era, the hextexh energy still notes that they’re not from her world, but by painting them she has made them her own.

Then in S2A3 she gets new gauntlets that are still black, because Vi is working with Piltover, but not allowing them to take her over like they did in act 1.

Vi actually lots of interesting storytelling in her colors, I could make a whole different post about the meaning of black in her design, but I’ve yapped about her enough by now.

But with all that being said, if blue is the color of Piltover, why is it also Jinx’s color?

First off, Jinx’s blue isn’t the the deep navy of Piltover, that’s Caitlyn’s color, she instead has the saturated, electric blue of hextech. This is not coding her as a Piltovan, it’s coding her as a scientist.

Jinx doesn’t solve her problems by punching, that’s Vi’s thing, she solves them by building bigger and better weapons to shoot and/or blow them up with. She’s very much not Piltovan, but she’s blue because she is very much an inventor. After all, her plotline in season one is all about stealing and reverse-engineering hextech, something even Piltover’s top scientists couldn’t figure out.

However, even if she doesn’t prefer it, when Jinx does fight physically, guess what color follows her?

Jinx may not be a fighter generally, but when she does fight, she channels a little bit of her older sister.

#anyway that’s my monthly yap session out the way #come back next month for a ten thousand word essay on how bad solo leveling is #arcane #vi league of legends #vi arcane #jinx arcane #jinx league of legends #arcane season 2 #arcane spoilers #long post #character design #color theory #colors in character design

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eugenedebs1920 · 2 months ago

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I’ve said it before, I’ll probably have to say it again. Who doesn’t want to be fact checked? F*ckin liars! These claims by Elon musk, a South African immigrant and nationalized Canadian citizen, a man who’s wealth was inherited through his father’s exploitation of black South Africans in his jewel mines, not an inventor or engineer, not some genius businessman, potentially the most infamous and successful welfare queen in American history, who made billions on government subsidies for electric vehicles, a trust fund kid, spreading lies to mislead the American people.

It’s an absolute disgrace the way the right abuses our Constitution. They decry this anthem of free speech. Then use that privilege to deceive and lie. They tout the importance of the first amendment. Then molest it in the most inappropriate manner.

This is what I’m talking about when it comes to the Republican Party. They have no regard for what they pretend to hold dear. To them everything is just a means to an end. Honor, integrity, and truth be damned.

If one were to truly respect the first amendment they wouldn’t use it to spread falsities and mistruths. If one were to revere the Constitution they wouldn’t test the very limits of its meaning. If one truly loved their country, they wouldn’t attempt to transform it into something it’s not simply to form it to their agenda.

The most disheartening aspect is that we have become so polarized, so divided, that nearly half the population doesn’t give a damn regarding the manipulation and mistreatment of the documents, laws and norms that have guided this nation for centuries.

People like Rush Limbaugh, Rupert Murdoch, Newt Gingrich, led to people like, Donald Trump, Elon musk, and Charlie Kirk, peddling lies or at best half truths. Poisoning American against American in a campaign of deception designed to divide and distract, creating the necessary conditions to enact their oppressive agenda.

Some are just pawns, talking heads in this conspiracy of division, others are the brainchild behind the plot. All betraying the United States in their relentless pursuit of wealth and power.

The vast majority of the American people are the victims in this contorted scheme laid out by those who hold no reverence to the core principles of this nation. Yet we act as the expendable soldiers, essential to its fruition, not realizing that the one way to overcome the barriers that shackle us to an existence of mediocrity and a modern form of indentured servitude lies in our united rising against the forces that bind us.

We will never truly be free, we will never live up to the potential granted to us, we will never know liberty until we understand that we can only obtain these fundamental truths when we relinquish the manufactured rift that separates us.

We were gifted with such possibility, squandered in the ongoing culture wars and animosity built to keep us down.

I don’t mean to be a pessimist but the notion of this unshackled prison break from the interests poised to benefit from our segregation appears nothing more than a pipe dream.

Yet if we could become self aware to the villains purposefully pinning us against one another and find that the similarities we have far outweigh the differences limelighted to make us perceive otherwise, all our lives would be exponentially more fulfilling and easy, and mutually beneficial.

I beg of my fellow Americans. Please comprehend that when hate, anger and malcontent are being promoted, stop and contemplate who seeks to benefit from this spread of animosity. When you are being coaxed to harbor distrust and malice against your American counterpart, who will reap the reward of your calloused, untrustworthy view which you were coerced into seeing. Then step back and reflect, does this media personality truly have mine and my country’s interest in mind? Does this person truly reflect the soul of the nation? Is my American counterpart that ideologically opposed to what I consider to be American values.

If you truly internalize it, and mull it over, the answer is we are more alike than we’re portrayed to be. That we have the same goals, hopes, and aspirations, not only personally, but for our nation as a whole.

We will never know freedom until we end the turmoil that enslaves us.

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studyforfe · 3 months ago

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coursesfe · 3 months ago

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jcmarchi · 10 months ago

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Studying astrophysically relevant plasma physics

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/studying-astrophysically-relevant-plasma-physics/

Studying astrophysically relevant plasma physics

Thomas Varnish loves his hobbies — knitting, baking, pottery — it’s a long list. His latest interest is analog film photography. A picture with his mother and another with his boyfriend are just a few of Varnish’s favorites. “These moments of human connection are the ones I like,” he says.

Varnish’s love of capturing a fleeting moment on film translates to his research when he conducts laser interferometry on plasmas using off-the-shelf cameras. At the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, the third-year doctoral student studies various facets of astrophysically relevant fundamental plasma physics under the supervision of Professor Jack Hare.

It’s an area of research that Varnish arrived at organically.

A childhood fueled by science

Growing up in Warwickshire, England, Varnish fell in love with lab experiments as a middle-schooler after joining the science club. He remembers graduating from the classic egg-drop experiment to tracking the trajectory of a catapult, and eventually building his own model electromagnetic launch system. It was a set of electromagnets and sensors spaced along a straight track that could accelerate magnets and shoot them out the end. Varnish demonstrated the system by using it to pop balloons. Later, in high school, being a part of the robotics club team got him building a team of robots to compete in RoboCup, an international robot soccer competition. Varnish also joined the astronomy club, which helped seed an interest in the adjacent field of astrophysics.

Varnish moved on to Imperial College London to study physics as an undergraduate but he was still shopping around for definitive research interests. Always a hands-on science student, Varnish decided to give astronomy instrumentation a whirl during a summer school session in Canada.

However, even this discipline didn’t quite seem to stick until he came upon a lab at Imperial conducting research in experimental astrophysics. Called MAGPIE (The Mega Ampere Generator for Plasma Implosion Experiments), the facility merged two of Varnish’s greatest loves: hands-on experiments and astrophysics. Varnish eventually completed an undergraduate research opportunity (UROP) project at MAGPIE under the guidance of Hare, his current advisor, who was then a postdoc at the MAGPIE lab at Imperial College.

Part of Varnish’s research for his master’s degree at Imperial involved stitching together observations from the retired Herschel Space Telescope to create the deepest far-infrared image ever made by the instrument. The research also used statistical techniques to understand the patterns of brightness distribution in the images and to trace them to specific combinations of galaxy occurrences. By studying patterns in the brightness of a patch of dark sky, Varnish could discern the population of galaxies in the region.

Move to MIT

Varnish followed Hare (and a dream of studying astrophysics) to MIT, where he primarily focuses on plasma in the context of astrophysical environments. He studies experimental pulsed-power-driven magnetic reconnection in the presence of a guide field.

Key to Varnish’s experiments is a pulsed-power facility, which is essentially a large capacitor capable of releasing a significant surge of current. The electricity passes through (and vaporizes) thin wires in a vacuum chamber to create a plasma. At MIT, the facility currently being built at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) by Hare’s group is called: PUFFIN (PUlser For Fundamental (Plasma Physics) INvestigations).

In a pulsed-power facility, tiny cylindrical arrays of extremely thin metal wires usually generate the plasma. Varnish’s experiments use an array in which graphite leads, the kind used in mechanical pencils, replace the wires. “Doing so gives us the right kind of plasma with the right kind of properties we’d like to study,” Varnish says. The solution is also easy to work with and “not as fiddly as some other methods.” A thicker post in the middle completes the array. A pulsed current traveling down the array vaporizes the thin wires into a plasma. The interactions between the current flowing through the plasma and the generated magnetic field pushes the plasma radially outward. “Each little array is like a little exploding bubble of magnetized plasma,” Varnish says. He studies the interaction between the plasma flows at the center of two adjacent arrays.

Studying plasma behavior

The plasma generated in these pulsed-power experiments is stable only for a few hundred nanoseconds, so diagnostics have to take advantage of an extremely short sampling window. Laser interferometry, which images plasma density, is Varnish’s favorite. In this technique, a camera takes a picture of a split laser beam, one arm of which encounters the plasma and one that doesn’t. The arm that hits the plasma produces an interference pattern when the two arms are recombined. Capturing the result with a camera allows researchers to infer the structure of the plasma flows.

Another diagnostic method involves placing tiny loops of metal wire in the plasma (called B-dots), which record how the magnetic field in the plasma changes in time. Yet another way to study plasma physics is using a technique called Faraday rotation, which measures the twisting of polarized light as it passes through a magnetic field. The net result is an “image map of magnetic fields, which is really quite incredible,” Varnish says.

These diagnostic techniques help Varnish research magnetic reconnection, the process by which plasma breaks and reforms magnetic fields. It’s all about energy redistribution, Varnish says, and is particularly relevant because it creates solar flares. Varnish studies how having not-perfectly-opposite magnetic field lines might affect the reconnection process.

Most research in plasma physics can be neatly explained by the principles of magnetohydrodynamics, but the phenomena observed in Varnish’s experiments need to be explained with additional theories. Using pulsed power enables studies over longer length scales and time periods than in other experiments, such as laser-driven ones. Varnish is looking forward to working on simulations and follow-up experiments on PUFFIN to study these phenomena under slightly different conditions, which might shed new light on the processes.

At the moment, Varnish’s focus is on programming the control systems for PUFFIN so he can get it up and running. Part of the diagnostics system involves ensuring that the facility will deliver the plasma-inducing currents needed and perform as expected.

Aiding LGBTQ+ efforts

When not working on PUFFIN or his experiments, Varnish serves as co-lead of an LGBTQ+ affinity group at the PSFC, which he set up with a fellow doctoral student. The group offers a safe space for LGBTQ+ scientists and meets for lunch about once a month. “It’s been a nice bit of community building, and I think it’s important to support other LGBTQ+ scientists and make everyone feel welcome, even if it’s just in small ways,” Varnish says, “It has definitely helped me to feel more comfortable knowing there’s a handful of fellow LGBTQ+ scientists at the center.”

Varnish has his hobbies going. One of his go-to bakes is a “rocky road,” a British chocolate bar that mixes chocolate, marshmallows, and graham crackers. His research interests, too, are a delicious concoction mixed together: “the intersection of plasma physics, laboratory astrophysics, astrophysics (the won’t-fit-in-a-lab kind), and instrumentation.”

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catenary-chad · 2 months ago

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Why Greaseball is a Really Great train villain: a looong post (4.8k words) on all the historical train context behind replica Greaseball

For all my issues with the other main engines, I think (replica) Greaseball is FANTASTIC. He just works on so many fundamental levels and gets so much better/worse with historical context. If we make him an EMD E9 locomotive (a common headcanon) things get even more interesting, and there’s even a convenient irl engine to base him on!

Note: if you’re into real US trains this info probably won’t be as new to you as my Nez Cassé post, since E and F units are so well preserved and documented in English. A lot of the topics I go on are pretty widely discussed in US railfan circles and not terribly obscure. Also this is just about replica, Elvis-style Greaseball vs Wembleyball… her being more modern and European changes a lot and I would take a very different approach.

Also CW for non-graphic discussion of abuse in the very last section. I have a separate warning before it comes up so you can leave before then.

DIESEL TRACTION IN THE US

First of all, to clear up a common misconception: 99% of all diesel locomotives are diesel-electric. The diesel engine is used to generate electricity to power electric motors to turn the wheels. This is why dual-mode engines that can switch between drawing third rail/overhead wire electricity and making their own with a diesel engine are so common. Besides the power source, they work similarly, so it’s not hard to incorporate. This is NOT how hybrid cars work, though diesel-electric setups have been used on very heavy trucks for purposes like mining. Diesel-mechanical is more in line with how automobiles work but is basically unheard of outside of very small switchers in the US (mostly in museums now) and 50s-era shunters and that one weird Fell diesel in the UK. The technical reasons of why isn’t really important here, but has to do with the difficult of making an appropriate gearbox for road locomotives and appealing qualities of electric motors for train use (high starting torque).

Internal combustion-based locomotives are actually much more recent than pure electric ones. Electric engines achieved practical use around the 1890s and were well-established in urban and mountainous areas by the 20s-30s…. which is when diesel boxcab switchers first started production in substantial numbers and lightweight diesel trainsets like the Zephyrs, M10000, and Flying Hamburger started to pop up. The earliest diesels were either slow (switchers) or fast but very weak (lightweight trainsets and railbusses). There were major tech limits to maximum horsepower in diesel locomotives until the second half of the 20th century, which is why several of them were often needed to replace one steam or electric engine, and why you had some weird turbine designs in the 50s-70s as an alternative.

Early diesel locomotives in the US actually had a lot in common with their early implementation in the UK. They’re often perceived differently because Thomas the Tank Engine had so many characters based on unsuccessful early British diesel models, while most of the failed earlier US diesels are obscure compared to the successful and widespread ones (that often have the strongest museum presence). There were some notably good early switcher models (some still being used today) that were among the first to replace steam engines because it was one of the tasks that they had the biggest advantage over them in, and limited size wasn’t an issue. Road diesel implementation was messy and due to the early state of the technology, some railroads like the Pennsylvania Railroad had a strategy more akin to early British Rail in that they planned to just slowly phase out steam as they electrified. Higher wages and stronger unions were also a factor in both countries dieselizing, due to the vastly lower labor needed for diesel locomotives vs steam and generally safer, more pleasant working conditions on them. There was also a need to shed a reputation for being outdated to draw in customers again with both. There was also a desperate early demand for diesel power that led to a lot of questionable builders and designs being picked up early on and later dumped for being nonstandard.

The main difference is that dieselization’s serious pursuit in the US started around the Great Depression and really picked up in the late 30s, almost two decades before the Modernization Plan of 1955. So it was a far more mature and well-established technology by the 50s and Greaseball is very much based on this dominant position vs the messy early experiments of the Thomas diesels.

Greaseball’s helmet heavily resembles the fronts of the E and F unit carbody locomotives made by EMD from the 30s-50s. I’ll go into those specific models later, but the manufacturer alone is really interesting and has a lot of great symbolism that works with Greaseball.

Earlier diesel manufacturers included steam builders like Alco and Baldwin, outside companies getting into the diesel locomotive market like Fairbanks-Morse, and EMD, which started as an independent company but quickly became part of General Motors. One of the major advantages EMD would acquire is mass-production in assembly lines, the way cars were made, as opposed to building one engine at a time like steam shops did. So Greaseball has some quiet ties to the auto industry (and boy did GM hurt trains in other avenues). They also used common parts between models, making them relatively easy to repair and rebuild. You had all kind of mods and changes done to their engines over the decades, which is a fun tie-in to the bodybuilder AND greaser aspect of Greaseball. I’ll go into how I think he’d specifically be modified/rebuilt later though.

Another major factor of EMD is… they often weren’t the best in a lot of ways and very much an example of “survival of the good enough”. Until very recently they all used relatively dirty and inefficient two-stroke engines and other manufacturers often had stronger or technically superior competing models… but it was the ease of working on them and relative reliability vs their competitors that contributed to their success and helped make EMD the dominant manufacturer.

Bonus fun fact: EMD (and later General Electric) had a lot of success in the export model market due to their early reliability, especially vs British diesel engines. One of the funnier instances being several colonial African railways holding onto steam into the 70s because they were forced to buy crappy British diesel engines otherwise, and promptly dieselizing as soon as they could buy American ones. EMD made huge inroads into the British freight market with the Class 59 and 66 (the latter also used in continental Europe). These came too late to have had any affect on the development of the show early on, but it’s an interesting instance of American encroachment that could be thematically relevant. The sheer ubiquity of EMD diesels worldwide makes Greaseball weirdly relevant in a lot of countries if you basis swap him a little. I haven’t figured out quite how I’d approach Girlball but I’d definitely make her one of these export models since it fits.

Anyways, back to the general history timeline because it’s important for the other reason EMD was so successful. By the late 30s, diesel switchers were widespread and road models were starting to come out in limited numbers. Widespread dieselization would have happened nearly a decade earlier if not for World War II. When the US entered the war, copper, oil, and diesel engines became critical to the war effort. Coal was not and steam engines don’t use much copper, so the existing steam manufacturers were forced into building them. EMD’s FT series had proven itself prewar and the company was among the few to be able to develop their locomotive lines during the war. This gave the company a huge advantage post-war and their E and F units dominated the road locomotive market afterwards (switchers remained more competitive since they had more development before and during the war).

If you’re European and know little about American trains, you may wonder when things started getting electrified after that. They didn’t. Outside of one stretch of the Northeast Corridor, a recent project by Caltrain, and some isolated freight lines… the US didn’t electrify anything after WWII, and if anything de-electrified much that had existed. The oil crises of the 70s almost led to something, but the subsequent drop in prices in the 80s made that dry up too. Leading to the modern day status of having only 1% electrified rail mileage. The rest is all diesel domain. They were never a stopgap here. Due to railroads remaining private businesses post-WWII and facing almost unwinnable economic and political conditions vs roads and air travel, the cost of electrification was out of the question and the much smaller up front cost of diesel engines made them take permanent hold over most of the country post-steam. To this day, railroads avoid paying up front for things vs just paying more in yearly maintenance for diesel locomotives, and the price of fuel has never gotten high enough to incentivize electrification. There’s also a whole carrot vs stick situation with state governments raising emissions standards without providing assistance to electrify that leads to a crappy state of limbo that just gives automobiles even more of an unfair advantage, but that’s another tangent that’s not relevant enough to go into.

This is all a long way to say that Greaseball as the conservative, oppressive establishment is spot-on to the status of diesel traction in the US. It really can’t be overstated how dominant and inescapable it is. It’s kind of hilarious hearing people from the UK or Europe talk about how gross and stinky and backwards they are and how much more disliked they are there. This is why the Greaseball vs Electra feud is so appealing to me- the US is one of the few places where they would be considered remotely competitive and where that matchup is politically relevant. There’s this compelling thread of Greaseball being a “pragmatic compromise” that’s held on so long it’s become status quo, but would be viewed as a regressive relic elsewhere in the world, akin to how the US’s economic politics are seen in much of the rest of the world. Greaseball is the majority who very much has capitalism and inertia on his side, Electra is the more qualified but long-sidelined minority who wishes things were even a little more like Europe economically and politically. They’re so rural vs urban, right vs left wing coded it hurts. Diesel power mainly thrives where frequencies are low and distances are long and rail is a private business that often can’t afford to electrify. Urban trains are almost exclusively electric due to their inherent frequency and pollution requirements, and are almost synonymous with being state-owned.

Him being particularly nasty to steam engines also checks out, he’s the era of diesel locomotive that often directly replaced them and I’ve seen claims EMD did deceptive things if not outright cheated on tests vs steam engines. At the very least they had fairly aggressive marketing. There’s a reason why I object to the idea that Electra would cheat against a steam engine (even in the early days electric ones trounced them so thoroughly it routinely exceeded railroads’ expectations), but think Greaseball doing it makes sense. Him playing dirty against Electra also makes sense because they’d have similar top speeds (and that’s being very conservative with Electra’s abilities and keeping them a relatively old model) but Electra benefits far more from a clean setting and would be relatively vulnerable to attack. There’s been decades of cultural downplaying of the advantages of electric vs diesel trains due to the latter’s sheer dominance in the US too. Further tying into the political aspect, electric trains are one of those things whose status only goes up the more you actually learn about them… and it really knocks combustion engines down several pegs, paralleling how right wing politicians in the US tend to be actively anti-education because they quietly rely on voters being low-information and uneducated about how negative the effects of their policies often are.

Greaseball as a macho jock is also reflective of the perceived strength of diesel vs electric engines. Because the US is infamous for its large heavy freight trains that are almost entirely diesel-hauled (besides a single power plant out west), electric freight is an almost alien concept and people associate electric traction with high speed trains, subways, maybe lighter, faster European freight trains at most. People often act like they’re weak because of this. This is patently untrue, just look at IORE or the Virginian Railway. Also see my earlier discussion of how weak diesel engines were early on. Electric locomotives still have vastly higher horsepower per single unit and the only reason there aren’t ones as strong as diesel engines in the US is lack of demand. It wouldn’t be that hard to build one for that niche. But diesel has strong associations with being the “strong and manly” blue-collar option because of its use by every large freight railroad and almost every shortline for all the tough, gritty jobs, unlike those darn city slicker commuter trains. Let’s just conveniently forget that the Milwaukee Road existed and that mines are full of weird little battery-powered “lokies”. People will even crow about the Big Boy all day and rarely acknowledge the multiple electric engine models of that era with comparable abilities.

EMD E and F UNITS

Finally, we can discuss Greaseball’s more specific basis. Greaseball’s helmet doesn’t have a single explicit one like Electra’s, but its styling is very typical of 30s-50s era carbody diesel locomotives, specifically the “bulldog nose” E and F-Units. These models were and still remain some of the most popular toy and model diesel engines, and are some of the most recognizable American trains in general. Which they totally deserve, they came in a lot of fun colors and were VERY widely used from the 30s to early 80s irl and were still used in limited numbers for decades after that and are extremely common in museums today. It’s probably harder to find a railroad museum in the US that doesn’t have one. They are probably THE symbol of diesel trains in the US, especially circa the 50s. Even highway signs for train stations resemble them.

Carbody locomotives like these made the streamlined body a structural element of the engine to save weight and required indoor walkways for maintenance access vs being able to open external panels. Alco and Baldwin also made far less successful carbody locomotives as competitors but they looked very different. Funny enough, a number of electric locomotives of the era also were built this way, but with cabs at both ends, some of them looking a LOT like Greaseball’s helmet.

The E-units were EMD’s first line of road diesel locomotives, mainly designed for passenger service. Since the 30s there were several different models of the line, the first few being built in smaller numbers, and the later ones being much more widely produced post-WWII. They were relatively long and large for a diesel engine of the time, with atypical A1A -A1A (powered/unpowered/powered x2) wheel arrangements and two seperate prime movers (the actual diesel engine) to produce more horsepower due to the limited abilities of individual engines. While successful compared to their competitors (which were… generally a mess) there’s a sense that they were designed for a time that would never come.

They were very much optimized for being smooth at speed for passenger use and while not useless for freight service, weren’t ideal for it due to their limited strength and not having all powered wheels for traction. Which was a terrible market to be in with the massive decline in passenger rail post-WWII. The E-units still generally had long and successful lives, but were never as successful as their younger, smaller sibling, the F-unit.

F-units visually resemble shorter E-units, but with single prime movers and Bo-Bo wheel arrangements (four powered axles). By modern standards they’re small and not terribly powerful, but for their time they were solid and VERY successful in freight service, and often took the place of E-units in passenger service since they worked for that too, and were more versatile overall. There are a bunch of F-units running in museums because they look good and are easy to find parts for due to the sheer quantity produced (also some, but far fewer E-units). You could totally make Greaseball an F-unit and it would fit with how there’s been some infamously short Greaseball actors.

There’s a lot of fun commonalities between both models that are relevant to Greaseball. Both were explicitly designed to be used in multi-engine sets due to their limited individual strength, which perfectly fits Greaseball having his Gang follow him around. Working in packs that large is a VERY midcentury diesel thing. Both had the massive drawback of having no rear visibility and basically no ability to go backwards for switching. That was one of the main traits that led to this style of engine falling out of favor, roadswitchers that actually had rear visibility were more versatile than having separate road and switch engines. In a race going backwards, Rusty would clean his clock even if he was SUPER crappy and could only go walking pace, because Greaseball would be flying totally blind and crash. It’s also a hassle to perform maintenance and get inside that body style and the noses were reportedly harder to manufacture.

As a cursed side note, ATSF solved these problems with their old F-units by roadswitcherfying them into CF-7s. Hey, they were old and past their prime but still useful and worked GREAT as ugly utilitarian roadswitchers and ran for decades afterwards. There’s several of these things running in museums. I’ve actually worked on one and I approve of roadswitcherfication because they really are way less of a pain to maintain this way.

Speaking of rebuilds, the highest horsepower Greaseball would have as an E-unit would as-built is only 2,400 if he was an E9, but because early EMDs got modified so much and routinely re-engined, we can play around with this. It fits the character and the Railways Series routinely did this kind of thing. We’ll suppose Greaseball was re-engined or otherwise modified to get up to 2,700 horsepower… but then there’s the reported issue that the unpowered axles might make him too slippery to actually apply full force, so we’ll get a bit more out there and say he got more substantially rebuilt into a Co-Co (six powered axle) arrangement. Now you have something that would be vaguely comparable with one of Amtrak’s dysfunctional SDP40F diesels of the late 70s-early 80s, if still a bit weaker but probably more physically stable. It’s hard to avoid that Greaseball is kind of statistically wimpy no matter how you slice it. They’d need to tweak the numbers in the song a little, but again, swapping out engines in early EMDs was super common and suits him so it’s not too much of a stretch to bump him to 3700 or something. You still have issue that he’s not large by UP standards specifically (they are INFAMOUS for large single-unit engines) but he’d still be fairly large vs more typical passenger diesels of the time.

Anyways, another VERY fun fact about E and F units is that they were regularly used on corporate trains after most of them were withdrawn from regular mainline service in the 70s-80s. People often complain that Greaseball is barely relevant circa the 80s, which isn’t really true since a lot of E and F units were used on commuter lines for years afterward (if often in cab car form, which are terrifying in any talking train verse). But there’s another huge loophole that gives a perfect excuse for his existence well into the modern day. Union Pacific itself used a set of three E9s on their corporate specials until 2019! They only got pulled due to wheel issues… got no lovers if you got no wheels I guess. But now you have a perfect excuse for why Greaseball is a 50s-era engine with UP colors pulling passenger trains well after the railroad axed those services in the early 70s. He’s a corporate pawn! He’s one of the faces of their company, chauffeuring executives around. Which leads into another fascinating topic with him.

UNION PACIFIC, FREIGHT RAILROADS, AND PASSENGER RAIL

All of the modern big Class I railroads in the US suck in similar ways, but Union Pacific has a stronger identity and seems to have the largest cultural presence abroad, making it the most visible and appealing of them to the public. It tends to be THE American railroad to many, which goes well with Greaseball’s basis being THE American diesel engine. Yes, they do have some cool heritage fleet stuff and really cool heritage unit paint jobs, but you’ll never see me depict them in a terribly positive way (if at all) because they’re a PR campaign like the Budweiser Clydesdales for an infamously awful company. Make no mistake, this is a company that’s been voted “worst place to work” on multiple occasions (and its cohorts aren’t much better). That’s the ironic thing about Electra being made a crappy boss, Amtrak is notably much better to its workers (and steam engines are the most competitive where labor is cheapest and least organized). The main thing is unreasonable on-call hours, lack of sick leave, vacation, and break days in general, and working conditions. Look into the blocked 2022 railroad strike for more on this. Greaseball could be SO nasty to the freight to reflect this if you made him a symbol of railroad leadership. You’d have any railroaders in the audience booing him if they did this in the US, it’s a very relevant political issue. Ironically, things weren’t nearly as bad labor-wise in the 80s, ALW just really bet on the right horse in terms of railroads to align a train villain with. But there’s a more prominant and existing aspect of canon that also fits the crappy things UP and other class Is do.

Passenger rail has never been as profitable as freight in the US. To give a modern ballpark estimate, I’ve heard $30,000 revenue on a fully loaded longer passenger train vs $500,000 revenue on a train of oil tankers. And that’s not even including the higher maintenance standards that passenger rail requires, which adds millions to its cost and makes it almost impossible for it to turn a profit. There is a reason why almost all countries with widespread passenger rail today have nationalized rail systems and even US passenger service is all government-run outside Brightline and museums.

This situation was particularly bad in the 50s-60s before Amtrak took over passenger service. Passenger trains absolutely bled money overall, and many of them were required to keep running even at massive losses per government regulation because they were an essential service. This contributed to the financial ruin of many railroads, and most of them dropped passenger service or sold it to the government as soon as it was offered. UP in particular was more financially stable, but also happily got rid of their passenger trains when offered.

Since then, the giant merged Class I railroads have become almost exclusively freight-oriented and hostile towards Amtrak-run passenger services. They’re almost all terrible, but UP is one of the more visible offenders, holding up commuter services in Chicago, and contributing to the massive delays in long-distance western trains. “Coach sexism” in the form of widespread hostility towards passenger rail by the likes of UP is one of the few canon social metaphors that WORKS. The other engines would not be that way considering the systems they’re aligned with, but Greaseball could be made so, so much worse.

There is a weird element of “I hate my wife” boomer humor when people describe passenger trains. There’s “keeping freight trains in line” schedule-wise due to their time sensitivity. There’s being seen as needlessly spendy for PR reasons (often true in the older days) paralleling “my wife wastes money on stupid things”. There’s being seen as more delicate and refined due to needing better track conditions and gentler handling because you know, humans have standards that grain hoppers and sand don’t. There’s the way that passenger rail isn’t as profitable as freight and basically requires government subsidies… not unakin to caring jobs and “women’s work” in general vs blue collar industrial jobs (Caveat: passenger rail employees were almost all male until Amtrak). In short, yeah the freight railroads’ treatment of passenger trains in the US does have parallels to sexism, if slightly different from how canon does it. Abruptly dumping them in the 70s also fits Greaseball ditching Dinah mid-show.

Even if you go the comparatively mild route of mirroring modern railroads, you still have him treating the coaches as second class vs freight (despite them being legally prioritized). This is a major issue and why Amtrak has so many delays on long distance trains. To summarize a complicated issue: due to the relatively unique economics of railroads, they are incentivized to run fewer, longer, irregular freight trains that have become so large they don’t fit in sidings and can’t physically let prioritized passenger trains through. They then get delayed for hours, especially if the freight train breaks down (bonus: freight trains have a staff of two, engineer and conductor. The conductor may have to walk up to THREE MILES to check out a possible defect on a car, delaying even more). The Class Is have a broadly hostile relationship with Amtrak in general for various reasons related to insurance and minimal investment in track maintenance, and it even affects non-Amtrak passenger services like steam excursions. UP has its personal steam fleet for publicity reasons, but all of the Class Is are various shades of hostile to running steam excursions with passengers now due to those same reasons. Even UP barely sells public tickets for theirs.

Bonus: the reason Mexico has basically no passenger rail now is due to the nationalized railroads being taken over by companies heavily aligned with US freight railroads and with many similar attitudes towards passenger service. They ditched virtually all of it en masse when they took over. Turbo works perfectly as just Greaseball but in Mexico because the same thing happened there… only a few years before the Mexican Stex production happened. Electra might be an even more pathetic and unthreatening character there though, because the single, long-delayed electrified mainline built by NdeM was ripped out after only a few years of service by the private freight railroads.

WARNING: Leave now if you do not want to read about how abusive Greaseball could be made based to US railroads’ treatment of passenger trains pre-70s. It’s not graphic, but it is blunt and dark. I put this at the end for a reason, there is nothing beyond this last section.

Basically, canon even at its worst arguably undersells how awful Greaseball could be to Dinah and the coaches if you make them symbols of UP and other major railroads vs passenger service pre-Amtrak. They could be even MORE toxic. You have a situation now where he outright hates her and wants her gone for above reasons, but is forced to stay in the relationship due to outside requirements and is fundamentally built for that kind of setup as an E-unit. Railroads forced to keep passenger services usually didn’t have mandated quality standards for them. They just had to have something. This led to pathetically short trains (one or two cars), understaffing, and poor maintenance because they just had to have SOME passenger train on that line. Track conditions reached terrible standards in the 70s on railroads that were near bankruptcy and delaying maintenance. I absolute do not blame canon for not going this dark in a kids show, but basically there is no limit to how miserable Greaseball could make her life, short of actually killing her. I can’t understate how much she symbolizes something he’d want to rid himself of at any cost but can’t and will take that out on. It’s BLEAK. I don’t think I’d even write them this dark myself.

Well… now you see why I do not redeem and revise Greaseball the way I do Electra. While the latter is wrongly demonized in an impressive number of ways, Greaseball is awful for all the right ones, to extents deeper than the creators probably ever imagined. He is so versatile and nearly timeless in his awfulness. If Greaseball were portrayed as remotely good I’d be ripping him to greater shreds than I do Rusty, but he’s great as a hateable bad guy who’s entertaining and globally recognizable even by much of the general public. Despite all this, I’m fine with him just being a cartoon bully because it’s more palatable and not wrong. But you could also make him so much nastier than even the workshop if you wanted to go darker.

#Stex #starlight express #technically this is character hate but it’s about how he’s great at that as intended so it’s maintagged #because he really is such a compelling and horrible character the more you look into it #probably the major character i’d most want to play because i’d incorporate a lot of this to make him nastier #he is the embodiment of so many past and present rail issues in the US and weirdly effective abroad too #reference #also lol this is why you will never see me talk very positively of Uncle Pete (or other big US railroads)#the fallen flags i’m fascinated by are more like watching a train crash than stanning. based on who made the funniest bad decisions #can’t overstate that i’m also fine with greaseball being played more stupid and cartoonish and less malicious #it’s genuinely very hard to go wrong with replica greaseball for me because he works in so many ways

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