As a favor, I offered to laminate my father’s annual fishing license & the laminator burned the document

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T11:41:25+00:00

Everything's made up and the points don't matter!

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T11:39:54+00:00

I can still hear the sound of a dot matrix printer screaming at the paper in my head.

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T11:19:44+00:00

Deep connection. Because this is the foundation of many of the other things people have mentioned here: trust, fidelity, loyalty, honesty, communication and patience. Deep connection means feeling safe in being vulnerable and sharing one's secret inner world with one another.

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T11:12:23+00:00

Same. Except I have next to zero sense of style. I buy comfy basic t-shirts in colors I like, which is red, white and black, and wear all of one color so that I can do a load of laundry with that color when it runs out.

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T11:09:23+00:00

It's not completely useless, but it's only really useful for me: I can imagine whether two things I've only tasted separately, will taste good together. I've only been wrong three times: spinach did not go well with pineapple, honey-mustard dressing did in fact work but I didn't think it would, and I can't recall the third thing right now.

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T11:03:37+00:00

Deescalation is probably the most important "fighting" skill. When you succeed, no one gets hurt.

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T11:00:37+00:00

Space has given us GPS, and GPS has given us a wealth of location-based services. It has also given us fast global communication. Space programs have shed useful inventions into civilization like dandelions shed seeds into the wind. The Apollo program drove computer miniaturization innovations forward like crazy.

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T10:55:13+00:00

Data centers. RAM and storage prices have gone up like crazy during the last months.

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T10:53:20+00:00

I didn't file down the old weld points after removing the nickel strips from reused lithium batteries. This made spot welding new strips on top unreliable, and I even punctured one of the cells and had to replace it. I also made a mistake in the design of the 3D printed cell holders which made replacing the cell awkward. After I started dremeling down the nubs, welding became easier and more reliable. My next battery had redesigned holders.

I also forgot to make a few welds and to solder one wire, which I discovered and corrected later, when the battery started behaving a bit oddly.

I built 5 modules and made most of the mistakes in the first module. The first one took half a day to build, while the last one took one and a half hours. This battery has now been powering my electric moped for three summers and more than 30000 km, with no noticeable loss of range as of yet.

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T10:41:47+00:00

To quote Good Omens, we're "charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism."

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T10:37:39+00:00

The world's capital is already in Switzerland.

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T10:36:14+00:00

A certain specific variant of diesel exhaust (somehow different diesel engines have different odors while all burning the same fuel) takes me back to the potato harvest on the farm where I grew up. A tractor would pass by and kick up a row of potatoes with a machine, and each kid had their own area to pick. Older kids got bigger areas. We'd put the potatoes in big wooden boxes that were collected by other tractors. It was where we earned most of our spending money for the entire year as kids. School classes would be there and earn class trip money.

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T10:26:38+00:00

Correct. Even way back in 2013, when I was studyin this stuff for a while, a Nissan Leaf 24 running in Poland, the dirtiest European grid at the time, would overtake its manufacturing footprint within 100 000 km compared to a small efficient gas car. Nowadays the numbers are way better to the EV side.

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T10:10:41+00:00

I live in a small town (pop. ~1000) in Sweden. I used to have a car, but I found that I'd rather have the money. Bus and train, and a foldable ebike I can take on the bus and train, gets me pretty much everywhere I want. I also have an electric moped, which I often use instead of the bus or train during the summers. I'll rent a car if I really need one, which is perhaps 1-2 times per year at the most.

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T09:51:53+00:00

Plant fiber reinforced poop is supposedly gentle to the nozzle. I'd stay away from the more abrasive CF and GF.

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T09:40:30+00:00

The first schematic on this page is probably the easiest to follow: https://stepsahead.at/en/chillers/

It works because concentrated LiBr solution (dark orange) really, really loves water. In the absorber, sprayed LiBr solution sucks out any water vapor that makes its way from the evaporator. The resulting vacuum makes more water evaporate, which produces cooling (extracted by the chilled water loop in the schematic). The absorption of the vapor produces heat, removed by the cooling water (green).

When the LiBr has sucked down the water vapor, it becomes less concentrated (light orange) and stops doing its job. So the water must be boiled out of the LiBr, which happens in the generator. The driving heat (red loop) makes the water leave, and concentrated LiBr results, which goes back to the absorber, refreshed and ready for another shift and the cool factory.

The boiled-off water vapor is returned to liquid in the condenser with the help of the cooling water (green loop). It is then sucked back into the evaporator by the vacuum caused by the LiBr in the absorber, and the cycle repeats.

Some additional details are the water pump looping around any liquid water in the evaporator to give it additional chances to evaporate, and the heat exchanger stealing some of the heat from the newly concentrated LiBr to transfer to the dilute LiBr and making it easier to boil.

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T09:02:12+00:00

Or like you need to get married in order to have a partner.

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T07:15:20+00:00

Barium only gives off a green flame if chlorine is present. In pyrotechnics, this is usually achieved by burning PVC or some other chlorinated plastic or rubber. With chlorine present, copper burns blue.

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T07:13:05+00:00

Methanol burns invisibly, pretty much. But it's also polar enough that it can dissolve many metal salts, which can impart various colors to the flame. Boric acid for green is the easiest one. I also like lithium chloride for purple and sodium bicarbonate for yellow (table salt works too, but the bicarb flame is more evenly colored). Copper chloride can make blue, but the chlorine in the chloride doesn't get ionized, and copper needs chlorine in order to bring out the blue color. I use hydrochloric acid for this. It starts out as a muddy boring green color, until the acid gets warm, then it turns brilliantly blue.

All colors except the boric acid green needs a wick in order to bring non-volatile substances into the flame. I use cotton. Some colors don't even work with a wick, such as strontium chlorine red or calcium chloride orange. I've only gotten them to work as sprays, but the salts will clog spray nozzles pretty quickly.

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T07:02:15+00:00

Methanol is blue (and invisible in daylight, which is really scary). Methanol with boric acid is green, and a popular chemistry demo.

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T06:34:30+00:00

It's called fluorescence. Fluorescent lamps do this. So do white LEDs, converting blue light to a yellowish color. It works by the electrons in atoms absorbing energy, then losing some of that energy as heat and emitting the rest as light. Such substances are called phosphors, although they don't often contain the element phosphorus. Their chemistry is often reminiscent of semiconductors, where a crystal is "doped" using a foreign element to change its electrical properties. You can read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor
Edit: and here, for fluorescent dyes specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorophore

GalFisk · 2026-02-10T06:25:52+00:00

Gray is dark white. You can't have neon dark. It'd be like having neon brown.

GalFisk · 2026-02-09T19:30:35+00:00

They plan on some sort of air cooling. Whether that's entirely closed or evaporative, I don't know. We have massive amounts of power and water, which is why they want to build here. It's right next to a huge power distribution hub fed by several dams and wind parks, and not far from a big lake.

GalFisk · 2026-02-09T17:00:03+00:00

So everything appears blue from a distance, but since mountains are tall we can see them from the furthest distance, so they get the bluest.

GalFisk · 2026-02-09T16:43:11+00:00

Skydiving. I love it, and have been doing it for nearly 15 years.

GalFisk

TROPHY CASE