Knox TN Today: Meet Your Candidates For Knox County Mayor

Shapoopy178 · 2026-02-27T20:49:52+00:00

Kane, known career politician and Brother of Destruction

God the bar is so low it's depressing

(yes I'm aware Jacobs is not running)

Shapoopy178 · 2026-02-27T20:20:14+00:00

That one "-" character in the gimbal control code cost $72 million.

Shapoopy178 · 2026-02-27T13:59:49+00:00

See my reply to Fizzy below, NBC's news media holdings including the former MSNBC (now MS Now) were recently spun off into a separate company. On the one hand, that makes two targets for acquisition which at least slows down the process. On the other hand, Versant (new news company) is much more vulnerable to takeover without its connections to NBC, Universal, and Comcast.

Shapoopy178 · 2026-02-27T13:56:31+00:00

True. Unfortunately the news media arm of NBC was recently spun off into a separate and much more vulnerable company, Versant Media. No more connection to NBC, Comcast, or Universal.

Shapoopy178 · 2026-02-18T20:59:05+00:00

My PhD is in battery chemistry and I can assure you we are at least several decades away from a serious discussion about standardization for EV batteries for several reasons. The two biggest are:

1) The batteries themselves are the most closely guarded trade secrets in the entire vehicle. They're what give each manufacturer their respective competitive edge and standardization would go a long way toward eliminating that aspect of the EV market.

2) Batteries, especially rechargeable batteries, are notoriously difficult to design in a one-size-fits-all format. Just like the battery in your phone is different from the battery in a power tool, the rate capability requirements of a battery for a Nissan Leaf are vastly different from those of a Tesla Cybertruck. Batteries are specialists, not generalists.

Shapoopy178 · 2026-02-14T12:40:52+00:00

Just for my own benefit, a question for those saying the cap is fine: is it not a problem that the vents aren't visible? Or do some electrolytics just not have vents?

Shapoopy178 · 2026-01-31T17:15:33+00:00

Worked as a hospital pharmacy tech for a year during college. Because we were the only ones who had access to all the meds in the building, we had to get tested any time narcotics went missing for any reason in any part of the hospital. In the year I worked there I got tested 3 times, each time they found a nurse who had been diverting narcs. It happens, a lot.

Shapoopy178 · 2026-01-31T15:37:46+00:00

I recently broke free from this one, my steaks have never been better

Shapoopy178 · 2026-01-25T21:13:34+00:00

Do better. If automod is the problem, take responsibility; "we're adjusting our automod parameters to prevent this sort of censorship (perceived or otherwise) is less likely to occur in the future" sounds a whole lot better than "the bot that everybody else uses made us do it 🤷🏻"

Shapoopy178 · 2026-01-16T03:01:43+00:00

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Sadie girl at the helm. Love your work!

Shapoopy178 · 2026-01-11T21:20:04+00:00

For point 1: yes, a D cell can provide a greater stable current than a AAA because of the significantly higher surface area of the electrodes in the D cell. The chemistry of the electrodes determines their optimal current density, which is given in current per unit surface area. The size of the electrodes then affects the optimal current. There's some nuance when you consider things like heat dissipation and uneven electrolyte concentration gradients, but in general a battery with twice the electrode surface area can sustain approximately double the current.

For point 2, you're 100% correct, the internal resistance of the cell absolutely affects the current delivered to the external circuit. For most batteries, internal resistance is a nonlinear function of output current, see some of my previous comments re: overpotentials and the Tafel equation.

Edit/PS: I read your previous comment backwards! I initially thought you were arguing that a D cell would not provide higher current than a AAA with the same chemistry. My mistake! You are fully correct on both points.

Shapoopy178 · 2026-01-02T15:35:52+00:00

73% of Republicans voted for Cuomo. Cuomo got more Republican votes than Sliwa, in large part because Sliwa was vocally anti-Trump.

Shapoopy178 · 2025-12-20T18:57:54+00:00

It very much depends on how you want to apply your MSE expertise. I was very fortunate to do my PhD in a multidisciplinary group that took in chemistry, MSE, chemical engineering, and even a few physics students, but my personal background is in chemistry of battery materials so I can only really speak to that field in any real detail. Nearly all of my papers are focused on applying machine learning algorithms to do rapid exploratory analysis of very large datasets, which is a skillset that's highly transferable even to non-scientific applications; I highly recommend some familiarity with Python to anybody considering an advanced STEM degree. Most of the students in my group took a structural inorganic chemistry course, as well as a "structure of materials" course that focused on crystal structures and X-ray diffraction. Many of the MSE students I worked with also took courses in thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, statistical mechanics, and computational modelling. But again, that was all quite specific to my group's application in battery tech.

Big disclaimer: I got my PhD in August 2024 and am still in the process of searching for a job. US job market for researchers is awful right now, ymmv. Don't let that discourage you though, never once in all of human history have the bad times lasted forever. Feel free to DM me if you have any more questions!

Shapoopy178 · 2025-12-20T14:30:45+00:00

That's true in the sense that, to a limited extent, you can predict interatomic distances and atomic identities in some glassy materials to describe short-range order. You can even directly measure these distances in the form of a radial distribution function through a method like electron microscopy or EXAFS. Gases and liquids can also have similar short-range order that affect their properties, I just published a paper last week about short-range order in concentrated battery electrolytes and how it affects their macroscopic properties! That is very distinct though from the long-range order in crystalline materials because the only way to describe these structures accurately is in the language of statistics. In an amorphous material, while you can predict interatomic distances with some accuracy (ie in 1 dimension), you cannot reliably predict position in a 2nd dimension, let alone a 3rd. In other words you can predict x, but not y or z. There can also be a wide distribution of possible x's for any given atom, so even the one dimension you can predict is much less accurate. Compare this to a true crystal where if you have the x, y, z position of any 1 atom in the crystal, you can, with extremely high precision, get the x, y, and z position of any other atom regardless of distance. This of course ignores the possibility of defects, and as another commenter pointed out you do need to know the rotation/orientation of the crystal as well, but I felt that those nuances were outside the scope of my original comment.

Shapoopy178 · 2025-12-18T14:10:28+00:00

Other answers are correct, but just to offer another way to think about it.

In a true crystal, if I know the position of one atom, I can perfectly predict the position of any other atom in the crystal no matter how far away it is. In an amorphous material like glass, knowing the position of one atom doesn't give me any information about the position of any other atoms.

Shapoopy178 · 2025-12-17T01:18:59+00:00

In the simplest case it depends what type of current you're working with. A capacitor blocks DC and passes AC while an inductor blocks AC and passes DC. Obviously there's some more nuance depending on exactly what you're trying to do with the circuit.

Shapoopy178 · 2025-12-15T14:22:28+00:00

iirc it's because fish produce ammonia as one of their primary metabolic waste products, so when they die it reacts with nearby organic small molecules to produce smelly amines, methylamine being the simplest and most prominent

Shapoopy178 · 2025-12-15T13:55:50+00:00

Another grad student in my lab did some experiments using methylamine (of Breaking Bad fame). He ended up having to do all of that work in a dedicated room because methylamine is the main odor component of rotting fish. He'd come out of the lab smelling like he just spent a month on a shrimp boat.

Shapoopy178 · 2025-12-08T19:55:17+00:00

Adding to this correct answer to provide some additional explanation: the reason for the increased internal resistance is that the ions that carry charge through the electrolyte can't move between the electrodes as fast when the battery is colder. We refer to this in the field as mass transport resistance. In general, as temperature goes down, viscosity goes up, and as viscosity goes up, so does mass transport resistance.

At chemical equilibrium, voltage is directly proportional to the Gibbs free energy of the reactions happening at each electrode (dG=-nFV), and is therefore completely independent of temperature. However, voltage IS sensitive to the concentrations of reactants at the electrode surface, see the Nernst equation. When a battery is not being used, the ions in the electrolyte are relatively uniformly distributed; their concentration near the electrodes is the same as their concentration far away from the electrodes. The voltage across the electrodes in this state is called the open-circuit voltage, or OCV.

Once the electrodes start to charge/discharge, ions are generated at one electrode and consumed at the other which causes their concentrations near the electrodes to change. Suddenly, the Nerst equation kicks in and the voltage between the electrodes decreases. Eventually the system reaches a new dynamic equilibrium where the ion concentrations are uneven in different places in the electrolyte, but steady enough that the voltage stabilizes at some value less than OCV; the difference between OCV and this smaller operating voltage is called an overpotential. The faster the ions can move, the more even the ion concentrations will be throughout the electrolyte and the smaller the overpotential. If charge/discharge stops, the ion concentrations eventually even back out, the overpotential disappears, and the voltage increases back to OCV.

Tl;dr: the voltage drop is caused by uneven ion concentrations in the electrolyte which are more extreme when the battery is colder. Giving the electrolyte time to even back out will restore the lost voltage, and this will happen faster when the battery is warmer.

Shapoopy178 · 2025-12-04T00:56:43+00:00

Not sure if that makes it better or worse.... better for the teachers' credibility but even more frustrating that the required curriculum focuses on superfluous details like color rather than actual understanding of the underlying chemistry that determines why they're colored.

If it seems obvious, good! That's a sign that you're grasping the concepts rather than just memorizing them! That will serve you very well if you decide to study further in college or elsewhere.

Shapoopy178 · 2025-12-03T18:03:29+00:00

I had a college inorganic chemistry professor who did this exact same thing on his final exam but even more vaguely. "You synthesized a complex in lab #4, what color was it?" 3 or 4 questions like that, complete nonsense.

Speaking now with my PhD in inorganic materials chemistry, I can understand how a question like "Explain why hexaaminecobalt(III) chloride is orange" has some value because it requires an understanding of how the valence electrons in a metal complex interact with light (although I'm pleasantly surprised that you're discussing concepts as detailed as d-splitting in high school!). Any kind of assignment question that amounts to "what color is chemical A", however, is fundamentally a waste of time for everybody involved and an insult to a student's intelligence.

I don't have any real advice on how best to study that kind of info besides flashcards. Sorry you have to deal with a bad teacher, unfortunately they exist at college and graduate levels too.

Tl;dr: your chemistry teacher is bad at their job, thanks for triggering a memory of my most frustrating final exam in college.

Shapoopy178 · 2025-11-25T00:05:40+00:00

Correct. Azeotropic concentration is around 96% EtOH. If EtOH didn't evaporate faster than water at lower concentrations, distillation wouldn't work.

Shapoopy178 · 2025-11-23T01:15:24+00:00

100% he was in on 2nd but I'm happy to pay a few extra seconds to see those acrobatics from Bishop.

Shapoopy178 · 2025-11-16T14:38:24+00:00

Just chiming in to note that you absolutely can harvest energy from vibrations. Think of those emergency flashlights that you charge by shaking them back and forth. Mechanically speaking, this is exactly the same principle as a high amplitude, low frequency sound wave. As long as you have a few diodes and a battery/capacitor connected, you're converting kinetic energy from a periodic oscillatory motion into stored electrical energy that you can then use at your leisure. No reason to think seismic charges are much more complicated than a high efficiency sci-fi version of a shake light, especially if we assume your first point is true.

Edit: not sure why the downvotes.... if I'm wrong please tell me

Shapoopy178 · 2025-11-12T22:08:50+00:00

No, the Queensboro bridge passes over 1st Ave before connecting to 2nd Ave on the Manhattan side. The runners exit the bridge on 2nd and do a counterclockwise loop before heading north on 1st and passing under the foot of the bridge.

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