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Yes boss, I did work out the dynamic range of that log amplifier we wanted to use in our next product’s sensor PCB, it’s 80dB.
The results are over here. (points to a roll of A-4 paper)
It has 40 data points and only took me 1 week, 10 pencils, and 20 erasers to plot the chart. Yeah I can present it, it’ll take me 10 minutes to roll it out, pin it down, and fetch the A-frame ladder.
This is the real big brain hack with decibels — you can use a linear scale, it’s just that the units are logarithmic instead.
(Yes I know most people would call a dB axis logarithmic, it’s just a silly comment.)
You call this a linear holograph of a non linear phenomenon and earn yourself that promotion.
Bah, that graph needs antimatter.
Is there enough paper on earth?
Antimatter doesn’t really do anything by it’s own, but if we let 1 kg react with 1 kg of matter (non-anti-matter), we get E = mc2 with m = 2 kg. So 1.8 * 1017 J, or 1.8 * 1011 MJ. If we assume that 10 MJ/kg is represented by about 1 cm, the bar would have to be 1.8 * 1010 cm or about 1.8 * 108 m. A standard A4 piece of paper is about 30 cm tall, so 6.0 * 108 A4 papers are needed. I.e. 600 million papers.
So we definitely have enough paper, but it would be a very tall stack.
That’s only about 180,000km (~112,000 miles) or just under half way to the moon.
Also some quick googling says an average desktop printer can print about 30,000 pages per month, so it would take 20,000 months (~1670 years) to print that out. And a typical toner cartridge can print 3,000 pages and costs $80, so it would take 200,000 toner cartridges and cost $16 million.
Now, those aren’t based on any specific model, just the first result in Google haha
Uranium generates that energy by fission. The hydrogen in sugar could generate huge amounts of energy if fused.
and all would generate the same if thrown to something capable of lossless e=mc^2 conversion (maybe a black hole)
And this boulder could generate huge amounts of energy if I pushed it up to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro and let it roll down.
44 upvotes and 0 downvotes for a comment that doesn’t understand that energy density measurements like this tend to measure the useful energy of a system.
Whilst I get your point, their point is still valid in the sense that you just can’t extract that energy from gasoline in a more efficient manner than just burning it. For practical purposes, gasoline truly is that much less energy dense.
How much more energy would you get if you fused uranium?
Using the rule of thumb, anything heavier than iron requires energy input to fuse. So you lose energy fusing uranium.
Serious answer: A huge negative amount. Anything above iron requires energy to fuse (which is why it produces energy from fission.) and I’m pretty sure nothing with 184 protons could be stable enough to count as being produced - the nuclei would be more smashed apart than merging at that point.
Ask Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In alphabetical order.
Edit: oops, those are fission, my bad
Those are fission. Fusion bombs don’t fuse uranium. They use a fission bomb to fuse Lithium.
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Look at all these nuclear scientists on Lemmy.
How about a nice game of Global Thermonuclear War?
I mean if we really want to be technically accurate here, the lithium is just a moderater for the hydrogen isotopes to fuse.
But for me it gets fuzzy when looking at the reaction.
LiD is 4 protons, 8 neutrons. Add a new neutron, and bam, you have 4 protons and 9 neutrons. But that’s where it gets weird to me. The lithium needs to decay or something into a tritium and dueterium which forces the tritium to fuse with the existing dueterium in the LiD molecule? Clearly the neutron has enough energy to transfer into one of the atoms to increase the chance of tunneling actually occuring.
The only real purpose of the lithium deuteride is that it’s a dry, shelf-stable, room-temperature fuel. The very first hydrogen “bomb” (actually a building-sized device) used supercooled liquid hydrogen as the fusion fuel, but this was obviously not practical for a deliverable bomb.
Oh, they do, but not as the primary or secondary. You can wrap depleated uranium around the core to capture fast neutrons that are leftover from the rest of the process. Changing the number of layers is how you can dial in a desired yield.
For that matter, even the Nagasaki bomb (“Fat Man”) didn’t use Uranium at all - its fuel was Plutonium.
Damnit, you’re right and I’m wrong!
That’s fissed, not fused.
I stand corrected, because I done forgetted.
It’s disappointing that natural selection didn’t figure out fusion.
It figured out photosynthesis instead. Why do your own fusion when you can just take advantage of the fusion that’s already happening?
It’s good it didn’t, otherwise it’s possible that all the hydrogen in the ocean would be fused into helium by now
Well, more likely it would significantly heat up earth due to the amount of energy released first, cooking everything/starting an endless cooking->extinction->cooling cycle
On the fusion planet: “Man, can you imagine if early life figured out how to make poisonous oxygen gas?”
*in a silly high voice due to all the helium
We have fusion (hydrogen) bombs. We just haven’t figured out how to maintain and efficiently harness it for energy.
If you can do nuclear fusion yea, it’s more efficient. Cold fusion has been a sci Fi thing for a while; they mostly moved on to antimatter-matter annihilation, and ZPE(seems to be a favorite for sg1)
In theory, yes. In practice, of those two only fission is currently viable.
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Weird thing I’ve noticed:
Logs are taught in high school. Absolutely no one seems to remember what they are after the unit test, much less high school. I’ve even reminded other math instructors about how to use them.
Why do people have such a hard time learning to use and understand logs?
I love this comic, and it’s going to replace my weird “let’s talk about how this makes the distance between us and Alpha Centauri, and us and Earendil easier to understand” bit.
I mean I think a lot of it is that at least in America when it comes to Math a lot of the teaching is more about how to use specific formulas and apply them to certain kinds of problems. They don’t really teach you what it is you’re actually doing or why you’re doing it. It just turns into recognizing a type of problem and applying a certain tool to it rather than understanding what that tool is and what it does.
log to the base 76000000
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Jerry Hathaway still wants 5 megawatts by mid-May.
You win the Internet today!!!
Holy crap, my only ambition was lovely parting gifts!
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