planets are suboptimal

rationalist transhumanist. spacecraft thermal engineer. 🔸🔸🔸

[oscillatingheatpipe]

it is sort of weird that after a decade or more of environmentalism (both professional and lumpen) focusing the vast majority of messaging on carbon dioxide reduction (with anti-nuclear sitting way in the back seat), carbon dioxide is just out

like I can't believe that the green opposition to, say, building a new 9GW natural gas plant to feed a 9GW data center in Utah is primarily focused on how much water the data center might use for cooling chips, with NIMBYish land use fears and heat island catastrophism playing second fiddle. If the Utah guys had proposed exactly the same data center with exclusively wind+solar+battery power the green backlash would look almost exactly the same!

what happened here? Uncharitable guess is that the highest-viz climate groups (e.g. sunrise, extinction rebellion, greenpeace, Sierra club) got hollowed out by 5 years of scope creep (e.g. Gaza, BLM), leaving the field open for off-message influencers on tiktok or whatever.

also nobody in this crowd seems to have noticed that gas plants (like all thermal generation, including nuclear) also generate concentrated low-grade heat and require cooling, traditionally done by evaporating water. Not trying to summon any demons here but like that is exactly what those big towers with big white steam clouds billowing out are doing.

it's all very strange I tell you

[oscillatingheatpipe]

also rapid self reblog to add that the "we're all gonna die in the next 20 years" messaging we all remember from the climate change era is completely unchanged, but instead of the cause being runaway greenhouse effect, it's water scarcity because the AI is drinking it all (and sometimes fear that the data center heat islands are going to literally fry us alive)

doomers gonna doom ofc but man I wish the death of climate change anxiety had lowered the temperature (har har) a bit

[thathopeyetlives]

I'm really bewildered by this.

I tend to assume that Trumpism suddenly replacing climate change as the Doom is a bigger factor. It's all weird.

I haven't heard concern about doom from AI environmental effects. I've been under the impression that AI concerns are largely an realm of local politics.

[oscillatingheatpipe]

Yeah maybe this is a bubble thing: both of us are now (alas) Olds who are no longer With It, so our windows on the zeitgeist are increasingly dim.

But my impression is that the anti-AI leftist youth movement you see on this hellsite has merged with nonpartisan local-politics NIMBYism and conservative-coded farm defenders to form a growing big-tent consensus that new data center construction should be banned or restricted. AOC & Bernie sponsored bills on this last month, but Josh Hawley and Nancy Mace are also in the news as being on this train.

Anyway, the left/green corner of this tent looks to me like what I described above. Agreed though that Trump-based doomerism is also popular with that audience.

[oscillatingheatpipe]

it is sort of weird that after a decade or more of environmentalism (both professional and lumpen) focusing the vast majority of messaging on carbon dioxide reduction (with anti-nuclear sitting way in the back seat), carbon dioxide is just out

like I can't believe that the green opposition to, say, building a new 9GW natural gas plant to feed a 9GW data center in Utah is primarily focused on how much water the data center might use for cooling chips, with NIMBYish land use fears and heat island catastrophism playing second fiddle. If the Utah guys had proposed exactly the same data center with exclusively wind+solar+battery power the green backlash would look almost exactly the same!

what happened here? Uncharitable guess is that the highest-viz climate groups (e.g. sunrise, extinction rebellion, greenpeace, Sierra club) got hollowed out by 5 years of scope creep (e.g. Gaza, BLM), leaving the field open for off-message influencers on tiktok or whatever.

also nobody in this crowd seems to have noticed that gas plants (like all thermal generation, including nuclear) also generate concentrated low-grade heat and require cooling, traditionally done by evaporating water. Not trying to summon any demons here but like that is exactly what those big towers with big white steam clouds billowing out are doing.

it's all very strange I tell you

[oscillatingheatpipe]

also rapid self reblog to add that the "we're all gonna die in the next 20 years" messaging we all remember from the climate change era is completely unchanged, but instead of the cause being runaway greenhouse effect, it's water scarcity because the AI is drinking it all (and sometimes fear that the data center heat islands are going to literally fry us alive)

doomers gonna doom ofc but man I wish the death of climate change anxiety had lowered the temperature (har har) a bit

[oscillatingheatpipe]

it is sort of weird that after a decade or more of environmentalism (both professional and lumpen) focusing the vast majority of messaging on carbon dioxide reduction (with anti-nuclear sitting way in the back seat), carbon dioxide is just out

like I can't believe that the green opposition to, say, building a new 9GW natural gas plant to feed a 9GW data center in Utah is primarily focused on how much water the data center might use for cooling chips, with NIMBYish land use fears and heat island catastrophism playing second fiddle. If the Utah guys had proposed exactly the same data center with exclusively wind+solar+battery power the green backlash would look almost exactly the same!

what happened here? Uncharitable guess is that the highest-viz climate groups (e.g. sunrise, extinction rebellion, greenpeace, Sierra club) got hollowed out by 5 years of scope creep (e.g. Gaza, BLM), leaving the field open for off-message influencers on tiktok or whatever.

also nobody in this crowd seems to have noticed that gas plants (like all thermal generation, including nuclear) also generate concentrated low-grade heat and require cooling, traditionally done by evaporating water. Not trying to summon any demons here but like that is exactly what those big towers with big white steam clouds billowing out are doing.

it's all very strange I tell you

[femme-foucault]

Gentiles/non-Jews of Tumblr, how well did you do in the quiz on Judaism 101 linked below?

0

1-4

5-9

10-14

15-20

21-25

26-31

32 :)

I’m Jewish/show results

Voting ended onMay 20

This is the quiz and I did not come up with it, credit goes to @iswearbyalltheflowers on this post.

Absolutely no judgment, I’m genuinely really curious and I figured more people would answer anonymously here than on the original post.

[oscillatingheatpipe]

There's this Dave Ramsey (avuncular evangelical personal finance guru) clip causing an absolute meltdown on Aspiring Tradhusband Twitter. A young woman calls in with a problem:

She has some debt

Her boyfriend says he won't propose until she has fully paid it off on her own

She has a plan for that, but it will take 1-2 years

Ramsey tells her to drop that man immediately, because he's an unserious child who's stringing her along and clearly already has fundamental disagreements with her about money. She is a princess who deserves better. 👑 👑 👑

The version I watched was kind of shorn of context, but based on that blurb, my wife and I disagreed: she thought it's fine to expect someone who's gotten into debt to prove they can get out before you join finances, whereas I thought Dave was right: if a person shows they're serious about turning things around, then it's crazy to condition a proposal on completing a 2-year grind.

Anyway, we look up the rest of the context and it is:

The debt in question is $90k of student debt from a bachelor's degree

The boyfriend makes $250k/year

Well all right then, wife and I are in perfect agreement now: this isn't a chick who thinks credit cards are free money, she seems to have her head in the game, and the debt to income ratio of the family is "jack shit." C'mon buddy, either man up and marry that princess or admit there's another reason you're on the fence.

Okay, so it turns out that a certain type of Angry Young Man (lower-middle-class conservative with a brain slow-cooked in manosphere slop) is driven into a shrieking rage by this additional context. STUDENT DEBT? Like some sort of WHORE?! Anyway, I'm learning about all this through the replies to Wayne Rowcliffe, a trad/conservative wife guy with four kids and a 14-year marriage.

Come visit the rogue's gallery with me:

Bleak shit out there man

[leviathan-supersystem]

Okay, so it turns out that a certain type of Angry Young Man (lower-middle-class conservative with a brain slow-cooked in manosphere slop)

so have you actually looked into the finances of every person who left those comments or are you just jumping to conclusions on the basis of assuming anyone who holds bigoted views must be poor

[oscillatingheatpipe]

I didn't say poor

[oscillatingheatpipe]

There's this Dave Ramsey (avuncular evangelical personal finance guru) clip causing an absolute meltdown on Aspiring Tradhusband Twitter. A young woman calls in with a problem:

She has some debt

Her boyfriend says he won't propose until she has fully paid it off on her own

She has a plan for that, but it will take 1-2 years

Ramsey tells her to drop that man immediately, because he's an unserious child who's stringing her along and clearly already has fundamental disagreements with her about money. She is a princess who deserves better. 👑 👑 👑

The version I watched was kind of shorn of context, but based on that blurb, my wife and I disagreed: she thought it's fine to expect someone who's gotten into debt to prove they can get out before you join finances, whereas I thought Dave was right: if a person shows they're serious about turning things around, then it's crazy to condition a proposal on completing a 2-year grind.

Anyway, we look up the rest of the context and it is:

The debt in question is $90k of student debt from a bachelor's degree

The boyfriend makes $250k/year

Well all right then, wife and I are in perfect agreement now: this isn't a chick who thinks credit cards are free money, she seems to have her head in the game, and the debt to income ratio of the family is "jack shit." C'mon buddy, either man up and marry that princess or admit there's another reason you're on the fence.

Okay, so it turns out that a certain type of Angry Young Man (lower-middle-class conservative with a brain slow-cooked in manosphere slop) is driven into a shrieking rage by this additional context. STUDENT DEBT? Like some sort of WHORE?! Anyway, I'm learning about all this through the replies to Wayne Rowcliffe, a trad/conservative wife guy with four kids and a 14-year marriage.

Come visit the rogue's gallery with me:

Bleak shit out there man

[the-grey-tribe]

90k for an undergrad? Is that just tuition or also food and rent?

[king-of-men]

Yeah that would be the red flag for me, more so than wanting it paid by a sugar daddy. That's like three times the median, what the Devil was she doing in college?

[oscillatingheatpipe]

Scandis DNI!!! 🙅🇳🇴🙅🇸🇪🙅🇩🇰🙅

[oscillatingheatpipe]

Met a new colleague, L. Did five, six years in the air force and space force after her aerospace engineering degree before joining my company. Met her husband too, same resume. But how do I put this. The husband has a baby face, a perfect blond coif, and a sort of. patrician air to his features. Really nice guy, just neutral physical description here. Almost reminds me of someone...

Anyway, I spent the week in a trade show booth with L and two older colleagues. One of the other guys comments while L's at a meeting, "L's husband doesn't look like I expected!" I'm in my tradeshowsona (motormouth, unfiltered), so I chime in "I know what you mean, he looks like she ships Dramione."

Disbelief and guffaws from my comrades. "Where do you even come up with this stuff man?" They don't understand. A modern Cassandra. Fortunately, the next day it's just me and L at the booth.

OHP: Hey L, what do you know about Harry Potter fanfiction?

L: Oh, I'm a connoisseur

OHP: Do you mind if I guess your favorite ship?

L: Okay, shoot

OHP: I think you read Dramione

L (big smile): Exclusively!

[oscillatingheatpipe]

There's this Dave Ramsey (avuncular evangelical personal finance guru) clip causing an absolute meltdown on Aspiring Tradhusband Twitter. A young woman calls in with a problem:

She has some debt

Her boyfriend says he won't propose until she has fully paid it off on her own

She has a plan for that, but it will take 1-2 years

Ramsey tells her to drop that man immediately, because he's an unserious child who's stringing her along and clearly already has fundamental disagreements with her about money. She is a princess who deserves better. 👑 👑 👑

The version I watched was kind of shorn of context, but based on that blurb, my wife and I disagreed: she thought it's fine to expect someone who's gotten into debt to prove they can get out before you join finances, whereas I thought Dave was right: if a person shows they're serious about turning things around, then it's crazy to condition a proposal on completing a 2-year grind.

Anyway, we look up the rest of the context and it is:

The debt in question is $90k of student debt from a bachelor's degree

The boyfriend makes $250k/year

Well all right then, wife and I are in perfect agreement now: this isn't a chick who thinks credit cards are free money, she seems to have her head in the game, and the debt to income ratio of the family is "jack shit." C'mon buddy, either man up and marry that princess or admit there's another reason you're on the fence.

Okay, so it turns out that a certain type of Angry Young Man (lower-middle-class conservative with a brain slow-cooked in manosphere slop) is driven into a shrieking rage by this additional context. STUDENT DEBT? Like some sort of WHORE?! Anyway, I'm learning about all this through the replies to Wayne Rowcliffe, a trad/conservative wife guy with four kids and a 14-year marriage.

Come visit the rogue's gallery with me:

Bleak shit out there man

[oscillatingheatpipe]

Talked to a guy the other day who's doing this

[femmenietzsche]

WWII was about the last war where you could simply not know where an entire enemy carrier fleet was and it throws me for a loop every time. They had so much of the modern panoply of war but not satellites...

[youzicha]

Surely not.

Focus on Chinese Anti-Surface Warfare This brief focuses on one area in which China has made rapid and substantial relative improvements: its ability to locate and attack U.S. surface ships, especially aircraft carriers, in conflicts centered on Taiwan or the Spratly Islands. During the Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1996, China was reportedly unable to locate, much less attack, two U.S. aircraft-carrier battle groups in the waters around Taiwan. In contrast, China can now hold the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet at risk at significant ranges from the mainland. This threat to the U.S. surface fleet continues to grow.

[femmenietzsche]

Hmm good catch. That does surprise me, even for China in the 90s

[youzicha]

It's not even just China. The Soviet union in the 1980s had ocean surveillance satellites and long range ocean surveillance aircraft, but not enough of them to reliably detect carrier groups:

Fleet exercises conducted in 1981 and 1983 near the far northern and far eastern regions of the Soviet Union demonstrated US ability to deploy aircraft-carrier battle groups close to sensitive military and industrial sites, apparently without being detected or challenged early on. These exercises reportedly included secret operations that simulated surprise naval air attacks on Soviet targets.  In the August-September 1981 exercise, an armada of 83 US, British, Canadian, and Norwegian ships led by the carrier Eisenhower managed to transit the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) Gap undetected, using a variety of carefully crafted and previously rehearsed concealment and deception measures. A combination of passive measures (maintaining radio silence and operating under emissions control conditions) and active measures (radar-jamming and transmission of false radar signals) turned the allied force into something resembling a stealth fleet, which even managed to elude a Soviet low-orbit, active-radar satellite launched to locate it.As the warships came within operating areas of Soviet long-range reconnaissance planes, the Soviets were initially able to identify but not track them. Meanwhile, Navy fighters conducted an unprecedented simulated attack on the Soviet planes as they refueled in-flight, flying at low levels to avoid detection by Soviet shore-based radar sites.  In the second phase of this exercise, a cruiser and three other ships left the carrier battle group and sailed north through the Norwegian Sea and then east around Norway’s Cape North and into the Barents Sea. They then sailed near the militarily important Kola Peninsula and remained there for nine days before rejoining the main group. [...] The projection of naval and naval air power exposed gaping holes in Soviet ocean surveillance and early warning systems. For example, in a Congressional briefing on the 1983 Pacific exercise, the chief of naval operations noted that the Soviets “are as naked as a jaybird there [on the Kamchatka Peninsula], and they know it.”

I don't remember where I read it, but I remember a first-hand account from one of these exercises, when a carrier loitered undetected for like a week off the north coast of the Soviet Union, practicing simulated attack missions (the planes flew in international airspace parallel to the coast, but the same distance as a real mission). Then they deliberately let one of the carrier jets fly next to a Soviet plane to reveal that they were out there, triggering a frantic but unsuccessful Soviet hunt for the carrier. After several days they ended the search by sailing up next to a different carrier (which had not maintained radio silence and was already tracked), so that the next time a Soviet plane flew over it, there were two of them next to each other.

[oscillatingheatpipe]

Stuntin on em

[oscillatingheatpipe]

Wife and I met an extremely outgoing/charismatic schizo (?) girl on the street recently. She got us good with the ol' "here, each of you take one of these art pieces, oh also they're five dollars each" which is totally on us (nice work there Crystal, I respect the hustle). She let us pay by buying her a beer and a shot at a dive bar a few blocks down and we got to talking. Anyway, Crystal's got an interdimensional portal in her phone through which she is in contact with the CIA and Tom Cruise, sure sure pretty standard stuff. But what surprised me was that she believed the CIA was secretly puppeteering the world and her personal actions for the benefit of all. The CIA is an agent of unalloyed good at every scale. She wishes she could work for them directly/openly but for now her setup suits her just fine. FBI? NRO? Same good works, different magisteria.

Absolutely fascinating stuff imo. So I don't know that much about psychiatric delusions. Is this delusion idiosyncratic to her? Or is there a whole subset of people who believe that shadowy forces have taken an interest in them, but also the forces give super good advice and make the world a better place? Is this kind of belief stable, or is she gonna flip the valence next month? Frankly she seemed fairly well-adjusted (well. aside from being a twentysomething trans woman of no fixed address. but all things considered y'know). If there are more like her, are they understudied because their lives are going better than people who believe the world means them harm? Much to consider here.

[oscillatingheatpipe]

I love how prairie dogs clearly communicate with each other, but the only word I ever hear from them translates to "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA (humans)"

[oscillatingheatpipe]

God this "mysterious deaths of Top Scientists" narrative is dumb and getting dumber.

One way you can tell it's a conspiracy theory is that it's an insanely big tent. A guy (gender-neutral) who thinks China or Iran or Israel or whoever is trying to Destroy Our Military is coexisting with a guy who thinks the Gray Aliens are trying to keep us from learning about their existence, and both of them are agreeing vociferously with the guy who thinks the Deep State is trying to keep a lid on UAP disclosures or some shit.

Anyway, the list of Canonical Additions to the list now includes an admin assistant at a national lab, an inventory manager at a national lab, a random NASA engineer, and a UFO nut with a fake "antigravity research" org who thought she was being attacked by shadowy figures via directed energy. Come on now.

My wife used to work at a national lab, and one of her coworkers committed suicide in an extremely public and traumatizing way while on vacation with his family in 2024. Surprised I haven't seen his name crop up on these lists yet. Fuckin ghouls.

[deadgenerations]

Being the first actual muslim to sit down and talk to Malcolm X must have been a crazy experience

[oscillatingheatpipe]

I got to watch my beautiful and offline Jewish wife learn about Messianic Jews in real time and that feels related

[literallymechanical]

The other day I had a confusing conversation with a physicist who used "mil" to mean "millimeter," instead of the expected "one thousandth of an inch." He was like "can we do a 5 mil assembly tolerance" and I was like well I'll just go die in the swamp ok then!! Fine!!!

[oscillatingheatpipe]

Using "tenth" to mean decimeter from now on

[javert]

these guys are probably just pigeons but i've never seen pigeons that look like them befire

[oscillatingheatpipe]

I had a pair of them (and two babies) in the pot of a dead bonsai on my back porch when I lived in Arlington! Males and females both sit on the eggs and are almost indistinguishable to me but I'm glad their thang works for them. Famous for having extremely loose requirements for what qualifies as a "nest" and for building them right in the middle of things:

I love these stupid birds.

[oscillatingheatpipe]

Thermal design for lunar orbit be like

[oscillatingheatpipe]

I would say "I hate to explain the joke" but I actually love explaining jokes and this joke is super fucking funny and didn't get enough attention so here's a lightly redacted slide from a presentation I gave at work on the topic:

The surface of the moon is really dark (low albedo) so it absorbs sunlight well. There's no wind to spread heat around. The day is 2 weeks long (as is the night), so the solar heating isn't smeared around the whole surface of the sphere. Lunar regolith is pretty nonconductive as soils go (I think?) so even though there's a layer underground that's at a constant temp like on Earth, the surface temp is barely affected by it.

So when the satellite or lander or rover or whatever is directly between the center of the sun and the center of the moon, you have sunlight warming you up from above and then below you is something SO HOT IT'S RADIATING ANOTHER SUN'S WORTH OF HEAT AT YOU. The satellite is, yes, banged bisexually by the sun and moon. @drchucktingle gets me

Anyway then 45 mins later (if you're in low lunar orbit) or a week later (if you're on the surface) the sun goes behind the horizon and suddenly everything around you is at a temperature so low it's most comfortably expressed in Kelvin. Good luck soldier 🫡