#coals and coke

[mumblelard]

arlene or i have had a fast growing horde of the tumbling dooms stuck in my chest since i woke up yesterday so i am calling them out and pursuing their eviction with chai and pecan sandies

[vandaliatraveler]

Thomas and Douglas share a common legacy as historic coal mining and lumber towns, both of which reached their zeniths in the first half of the 20th century. The artifacts of area's industrial past, some of which are now being reclaimed by nature, are still evident along Douglas Road, which forks out of Thomas and follows the North Fork of the Blackwater River to Douglas. These include the beehive coke ovens that once lit up the night nonstop to produce coke for local blast furnaces. In addition to the abandoned structures, a number of coal company buildings have been preserved and added to the National Register of Historic Places, including the Davis Coal and Coke Company Administrative Building and the Buxton & Landstreet Company Store, which is now home to the Buxton & Landstreet Gallery and Studios. The area's bittersweet past includes a legacy of human exploitation and racial injustice. Like its brethren, the Davis Coal and Coke Company paid its miners in company scrip that was only redeemable at the company store, which charged inflated prices for goods and ensured it could reclaim their wages at a premium. The area was also home to the Coketown Colored School, a segregated school at the center of an important civil rights victory in 1892, when Carrie Williams, a teacher at the school, teamed with J. R. Clifford, the state’s first African-American lawyer, to defeat an effort by Tucker County to reduce the school’s term. The victory ensured equal pay and terms for African-American schools in West Virginia. The Coketown Colored School closed in 1954 when segregated schools were found unconstitutional.

[trobednation]

coke/coal total drama art🤭

REDRAW OF... JUMPSCARE..

THIS

COAL REDRAW OF

THIS 😭

[supplyside]

integrated steel mill

[digital-dryad]

girl, excuse me?

[urbexscenery]

Cokerie d´Ougrée, Abandoned cokes factory

De cokesfabriek aan de rand van Luik werd in 1957 gebouwd om de nabijgelegen hoogovens in Ougrée en Seraing te bevoorraden, als onderdeel van het bedrijf John Cockerill (voorheen bekend als “Société Anonyme d´Ougrée-Marihaye”). In 1967 werden twee Krupp-Koppers-batterijen in bedrijf genomen, en in 1983 werd nog een paar Coppée-batterijen gebouwd. De productie werd definitief stopgezet in 2014,…

[akayna]

[puzzledemigod]

One very specific modern example of this is steelmaking technology and how it evolved with the exploration of iron. Nowadays, we have a capacity to take off a much higher percentage of impurities from iron ore, and to consume less coal to do it. That's great, right?

But it wouldn't have been worth it a hundred years ago because ores were richer in iron. Because we mined the easiest and richer iron ores, now we're left with ones that have less iron, and so we HAVE to find ways to be more efficient with it. If we installed all the modern technologies and requirements in 1910, it would first of all be a waste of energy because it already had more iron per ore than we do now, and would require higher quality metallurgical coal they couldn't identify or use to make better coke, and which would only be worth it for production of higher quantities of steel, which weren't used

This would only lead to piles and piles of useless but perhaps tougher steel, that no one had the means to know the quality of because fracture mechanics were only invented in the 40s

A historian or a sociologist will say something like “technology doesn’t exist on a simply hierarchy like in a video game,” and I think people whose exposure to history is primarily through pop culture will go “huh? that seems like nonsense. I mean, an automatic rifle beats a sword. 21st century America is richer than 3000 BC Mesopotamia. Our medical technology right now, today, is better than anything in the Middle Ages. Of course you can ‘rank’ technology!”

But the real answer is still no; because no technology exists apart from its context, and the question you are forgetting is–better how? Better in what situations?

The Ancient Greeks knew the principles necessary to build steam engines, and probably would perfectly understand the principle of operation of a steam locomotive; but they didn’t build trains, because they didn’t have the metals to build trains with, and they didn’t have the metals to build trains with because the economy of the ancient eastern Mediterranean didn’t support the manufacture of steel; and it didn’t support the manufacture of steel because bronze and the iron they had solved all the problems they needed metals for, a king of ancient Greece devoting his city-state’s spare productive capacity to mining iron ore and turning it into steel would have been wiped out by neighboring states who didn’t waste time and energy doing that, and spent their time making a bunch of bronze swords and beating the crap out of that king and his soldiers. Even if the Greeks could have built trains, what would they use them for? Railroads are a solution to transportation when you have industrial quantities of goods moving around to support a highly integrated economy, a rich source of high-carbon fuel easily available, and (for instance) warfare based on massive formations recruited from a mobilized, industrialized population.

None of which ancient Greece had. If you Connecticut-Yankee’d your way into 5th century BC Greece, you would find that trying to bootstrap an industrial economy from the ground up would require first speedrunning 2300 years of intervening demographic and economic developments, as well as technological ones, and even then a modern Greece surrounded by a Bronze Age world would be a very different animal, along all those dimensions, than a modern Greece surrounded by a modern world.

If you wanted to go Alexander with modern combined arms tactics and maneuver warfare, you could–but modern combined arms tactics and maneuver warfare is a solution to modern arms, and you might find it was significantly cheaper to arm your hoplites with slightly upgraded versions of the old spear-and-shield, and invest all the materials and energy you would have spent on tanks in building up the wealth of your state–because remember, everything you spend on building a better tank you’re not spending on anything else. This is why German technical skill was a miserable failure in WW2–their overengineered bullshit was expensive, and for each fancy German tank they pumped out (from a much worse position resource-wise than the Allies), the Allies made many less fancy, good enough tanks, and the Nazis got overrun. To recall the earlier metaphor: your automatic rifle is only any good if the other guy is way over there. If he sneaks up on you with his sword, you might wish you had a sword instead, though that won’t help you if you’ve only ever practiced using a rifle, because it’s “better.”

Even the process of innovation is not like most people imagine it, I would argue. The bulk of innovation comes from incremential trial-and-error improvements in processes that accumulate over decades, if not centuries or millennia. Incremential improvement is hard; unless you have a wild overabundance of resources, too much experimentation is just going to waste scarce materials; the thing that drives major innovations is having a problem that needs solving, and (again, until a resource becomes superabundant) a reliable method that produces consistent results is better than wasting time and effort testing a new way of producing something that may or may not work.

If you want an antibiotic or to send a message across the world, or figure out what the Moon is made of, yes, modern technology is better for all those things; and there are periods of cultural and societal change that open up the space for innovations: the steam locomotive was impossible in 5th century BC Greece, and inevitable in 19th century Britain. But it only became inevitable because of economic changes that only became inevitable because of demographic changes that started much earlier; those in turn were dependent on factors beyond the control of any single person or state.

Technologies can be dependent on each other, or on other factors, in the way living organisms are dependent on each other or on environmental factors in a food web; but a shark isn’t “better” than a jellyfish because it has a more complicated anatomy. It’s solving the problem of how to be a shark, while the jellyfish is solving the problem of how to be a jellyfish. Even our industrial, “scientific” technologies can struggle in environments they’re not suited for, which more “primitive” technologies do perfectly well in–because even our best technology (and our best scientists) are constrained by the environments and assumptions they are developed in.

[todayworldnews2k21]

Karnataka Maritime Board floats global tender for development of Pavinakurve Port

A map of the proposed Pavinakurve Port area near Honnavar in Uttara Kannada. | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT The Karnataka Maritime Board has floated a global tender for the development of an all-weather deep water 14 MTPA (million tonnes per annum) cargo handling capacity port at Pavinakurve, near Honnavar, under the public private partnership model. The State government in its 2023-24…

[35gofbeansprouts]

i miss games coming with the 30 page printed manual 😩 they were so fun to read for some reason ?

[reality-detective]

Thinking that countries can run on breezes is worse than delusional.

A two-megawatt windmill is made up of 260 tons of steel that required 300 tons of iron ore and 170 tons of coking coal, all mined, transported and produced by hydrocarbons.

They each consume 10'000 liters (more than 2600 gallons) of crude oil based lubricants per year.

When outdated, the wind turbines are being buried deep in forests, out of public view, due to the high costs associated with recycling them.

A windmill could spin until it falls apart and it will NEVER, EVER generate as much energy as was used in building it. 🤔

[brandonraykirk]

The C&O Shops at Peach Creek, WV (1974)

C&O Railroad Shops at #PeachCreek #WV (1974) #Appalachia #history #csx #railroad #wvhistory

From the Chesapeake and Ohio Historical Newsletter (June 1974) comes this history titled “The Shops at Peach Creek” composed by C.A. Coulter. This is Part 1 of Mr. Coulter’s account. The railroad was first built to Logan in 1904, the first train arriving on September 9 of that year. The line was started at Barboursville, West Virginia, on the main line, and ran up the Guyan River for 65 miles to…

[andrasthehun]

From Railroads to Coal Mines to National Park

From Railroads to Coal Mines to National Park

December 9, 2022 We hiked along the Southside Trail in the New River Gorge National Park near Fayetteville, West Virginia, over Thanksgiving weekend. The trail is wide, and the grade is easy; it follows an abandoned railroad line used by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad company in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Those with longer legs and strides went ahead. I strolled after them, enjoying the…

[materassassino]

Gonna get my dad to recount how he nearly died twice in an Italian coke factory

how bad is the safety 3rd backlog? im writing out a fun* interaction with some EMS crews and got curious

*i nearly died in three separate ways

not bad enough, send your near death experiences to wtyppod@gmail.com

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

so i'm a graduate student at a prestigious university in north eastern united states and one of my professors recently made a very oblique announcement to the class to the effect of "i've noticed some people using chatgpt. won't say who though. won't tell you if it's you i am talking about. but just so you know. i can tell when you do it."

and like the anxious person i am, i have started doing the student equivalent of when you are in the airport security line and wonder if you accidentally packed a gun and a kilo of coke. "what if this essay i wrote accidentally sounds like chatgpt and she hates me now"

from your point of view: is this possible? i have never once used chatgpt, i don't think i even know how, but not every single one of my academic contributions is as stellar as i'd wish (ya girl is sleep deprived). please help me shut down the anxious brain that is saying i am somehow being suspected of using chatgpt when i hand in just plain old, home grown mediocrity.

Haha! It's extremely unlikely that you would accidentally false-positive flag as using ChatGPT. You kind of... get your eye in for this stuff? So generic bland writing isn't enough by itself.

Here's a very quick list:

Fake references and citations. MASSIVE giveaway

Factual errors. But like... BIG errors, and errors that build on each other (it's called hallucination). So first it claims that coal spoil makes poor soil because of drainage (true), then it's because it's sandy soil (false, bad drainage in the wrong direction) and then before you know it it's recommending palm trees and mangroves for planting (wtf)

Sentences of the same/similar lengths in same/similar sized paragraphs

Maddeningly vague topic coverage. Zero analysis. Everything is broad strokes, no real examples or case studies given. If one is given, it turns out to be fake.

And, the standard hallmarks of cheating. If the offending piece was only partly written with an LLM, there's a difference in writing style/language that's super obvious among other things.

The other thing, though, is that you can protect yourself to an extent by saving your assignment on OneDrive (or whatever equivalent your uni offers) and working on it from there, with auto save enabled. This is because modern OneDrive Word allows you to access a file's version history. It's much easier to see when a file has been genuinely written line by line Vs copy-pasted in a block from destinations unknown. So, if you are challenged, you have a bit of a backup if you can go "Here's my version history for you to explore, here's my planning doc, have fun."

But, genuinely, I can assure you that lecturers are actually more accustomed to reading mediocre work than anything else lol. We know what that looks like. It's staggeringly unlikely that your work could be accidentally mistaken for an LLM generated piece.