We made rocks glow with the power of lightning.

Good.

Not with that attitude.

Absolutely, just like there’s some things a horse can do that a car just can’t.

I don’t plan on buying a horse or needing to do those things, and I don’t think the vast majority do either.

The end result is that there will still be ICEs in niche applications, but those who know how to operate them and the supply chains that currently make them cheap and dominant will slowly die off.

But solar panel costs are falling way faster than battery costs.

We also use it for engine displacement.

Our heat pump didn’t really kick in the resistive auxiliary heat until temps were well below 0°F, but humidity also plays into that. It wasn’t ever running the resistive heat exclusively.

If sized correctly, heat pumps also don’t really like setbacks in the winter. Just set the thermostat to whatever and leave it – don’t have it cool down at night and warm back up in the morning.

/c/flashlight sends its regards

If you own anything with “white” LEDs, I have some bad news for you…

7? Psh.

Try 40.

No but seriously, it’s addictive. One moment you’re like “I just need a good flashlight” and the next you’re telling somebody how the flashlight they got from Lowes has terrible tint and CRI compared to your hand-assembled copper and titanium pixel camo Emisar D4v2 with dedomed Nichia 519As you got for like $120 from a Chinese guy named Hank.

*since 2020.

If my cowboy math is correct (assuming two parents and two children), that comes out to about 292 people per year or 876 since 2020.

With a population the size of the United States (330 million), that means that, for a given year, 0.00009% (rounded up) of that population dies as a result of a family annihilation. For comparison, around 40,000 people (including around 1,000 children) die in vehicle accidents annually in the US.

Not that family annihilations aren’t horrible. They are. But, from a purely statistical perspective, there are much more frequent horrible things that we don’t talk about as much, for a variety of reasons.

In Iowa, at least, the state had a pre-existing fiber network that got expanded to a shit-ton of rural communities and local (often municipal) ISPs. It’s more expensive than what you’d get in the cities, but much better bang for buck than Starlink.

The only people still struggling to get service are those who live way, way outside those communities – the kind of people for whom “neighbor” means somebody who lives a significant fraction of a mile away. And, outside of comfortably wealthy individuals, those people are a dying breed, at least in Iowa.

If Iowa of all places can pull something like that off, I figure it’s not out of reach of any state (or nation, for that matter) whose inhabitants give a nano-fuck about access to technology.

This is the comic Salvatore based his skit on.

[gestures vaguely]

Speak for yourself.

It definitely could be both.

I see someone else has discovered the gold mine that is SkyCorp Home Video.

Wait, there’s a 3000k SFT-40?

This is fascinating stuff! Now I kinda wanna see one of us build it…

I mean, we’ve already surpassed The Expanse in some ways (at least the first couple books).

Something that struck me was in Caliban’s War they were relying heavily on mirrors to focus sunlight for growing crops out at Jupiter. I guess the authors just didn’t foresee LED technology advancing as rapidly as it did.

Leviathan Wakes was published in June 2011. Caliban’s War was published in June 2012.

The L-prize “60W” category winner was announced in August 2011 (it was Philips). It didn’t become commercially-available until April 2012, but even then, it was like $50 – far from affordable for most people. Now you can get equivalent or better bulbs for less than 1/10th of that.