There are medical applications where ultrasound is used to ablate small areas of tissue (see High Intensity Focused Ultrasound). It only works if you focus all the energy in a very small area, though. Sound is not an efficient way to heat a large mass. I would be impressed if you could warm a kilogram of plastic more than a few degrees above ambient. The waste heat coming off of your driving electronics (the amplifier, and the speaker/transducer itself) would dwarf whatever heat is generated by the sound waves hitting a target.

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I thought it was a typo, but no. They really are releasing the 2023 annual report in the last few days of 2024.

That makes a lot more sense. I thought the number seemed huge, but everything I could find said they have closed-loop cooling at this particular facility.

Also, the first printing presses that came to England were accompanied by Dutch type setters. They sometimes made spellings more Dutch (changing gost to ghost for example). They were also paid by the line, so would occasionally add unnecessary letters to words.

I went looking for some number for fun. (Every work day needs a good distraction, right?)

The nuclear plant that provides some of my electricity supposedly intakes 24 million gallons of water per day. As far as I can tell, that is entirely to make up for cooling water that is released as steam. There is a lot more cooling water present in the system which is recaptured and reused.

24M gallons/day = 16,667 gallons/minute. That’s a significant amount of water. However, it’s several orders of magnitude less than the flow through the smaller hydro power dams in my area. A few that I looked at have average turbine discharges in the ballpark of 6,000,000 gallons/min.

So for the cost (and vast regulatory headaches) of adding a secondary generation unit onto a nuclear cooling tower, you can just dam a nearby river and get 360x the energy.

Edit: I was way off on that 24M gallon/day number. After more reading, it looks like only around 2% of that water becomes steam leaving the cooling towers. So condensing the steam would give us a flow rate of 333 gallons/min of liquid water. That’s barely enough flow to operate a water slide at a theme park, let alone generate significant electricity through a turbine.

The oddities of the English language will lead you down a strange and fascinating historical rabbit hole. It’s great reading, but be ready to spend some time.

It’s not worth it. The energy you would generate is proportional to the vertical drop and the mass of water. If it were a river’s worth of water then you could generate a significant amount of power, but there just isn’t that much water mass in the steam.

You can use the leftover low-pressure steam for other purposes. For example, some places have combined heat and power (CHP) plants that use the steam to heat buildings, or run industrial operations that need a lot of heat energy. Though that requires you to live or work next to a power plant, which many people don’t like.

There is a giant hexagon on the north pole of Saturn.

It’s more evidence that hexagons are the bestagons.

The Reddit API exodus in 2023 brought hundreds of new instances and tens of thousands of new users to Lemmy. Unfortunately, many of those instances had open registrations, Lemmy’s moderation tools were very basic (they still are), and there were not enough mods/admins to provide 24-hour coverage on the larger instances. A handful of trolls took advantage of the situation by posting grotesque stuff for lulz: CSAM, scat porn, racist memes, etc. Sometimes it would stay up for hours until someone with the right permissions noticed and took it down.

The situation is better now. Though there is still plenty of room for improvement.

Lemmy is community-centric like Reddit, rather than user-centric like X/Twitter. If you want to follow specific users then look for a microblog platform like Mastodon. Or try mbin, which combines multiple platforms as another commenter mentioned.

That’s really neat!

At 28:23 somebody forgot to enter the year of the P. Diddy sample. It just says “(year)”. Lol fuck P. Diddy.

Seems like the world has moved away from that

Assuming that the world was once just, and recently changed to become unjust, is completely flawed. History provides endless examples of people with power and money doing horrible things and facing little or no consequences.

Oh, I completely get it. It’s a battle of delayed gratification versus instant gratification. I can take care of business now and have stress-free fun later, or I can have fun now and let future-me deal with the consequences.

Smooth, predictable operation requires forethought, planning, and willingness to stick to a process. It’s not nearly as fun as living in the moment and improvising.

No information is the best option. How bad the misinformation is depends on intent. Is the misinformation a lie intentionally told to conceal a truth? Or is it bullshit, information intended to persuade regardless of truth?

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

From Harry Frankfurt’s essay On Bullshit

This would fit better in !askmeanything@lemmy.ca.

Loved that show.

In a similar vein, I’m curious about the modern consensus on “you guys,” as in, “what do you guys want to do this weekend?”

Or result in US businesses moving their trade dollars from tariff-affectrd countries to others that could really use the money, like Mexico or Central America.