[-] Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Getting real SAO Abridged vibes here

100
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world to c/xkcd@lemmy.world

Alt text:

Update: The physics department has recruited an astronomer who studies meteor fireballs.

Explain: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3061:_Water_Balloons

11
submitted 5 months ago by Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world to c/xkcd@lemmy.world

Alt text:
I wonder what surviving human held the record before balloons (excluding edge cases like jumping gaps on a mountain bridge). Probably it was someone falling from a cliff into snow or water, but maybe it involved something weird like a gunpowder explosion or volcano.

Explainxkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3039:_Human_Altitude

103
submitted 5 months ago by Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world to c/dadjokes@lemmy.world

Because they use a honey comb.

[-] Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 74 points 7 months ago

Take any tech bro take on transit, and if you try to perfect it, you'll almost always end up with a train.

[-] Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 74 points 8 months ago

Relevant xkcd about these xkcd's:

image

292

TRANSCRIPT:

Me: Is this birdcage made out of nickel?
Pet Store: Aluminum I think
Me: So there's no nickel in this cage?
Pet Store: Don't you dare!
Me: It's a nickleless cage
Pet Store: GET OUT!

[pictured is a long-haired Nicholas Cage, looking fabulous in the sun and wind. To his left, it's captioned with the text "Worth it"]

[-] Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 59 points 1 year ago

Every sixty seconds, a woman in Britain gives birth. She. Must. Be. Exhausted.

[-] Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 66 points 1 year ago

To be Devil's Advocate:
Given that the rest written in Comic Sans, it may be an early elementary school exercise, aimed at teaching kids to do multiplications. In this case, it's tolerable and/or defensible to find a simplification for pi.

That said, making pi equal to 3 would have been more accurate for that...

[-] Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 53 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I heard/read a story somewhere once, where there was a statue somewhere of someone who's better off not glorified. The statue was defaced regularly, and every time it was defaced, there'd be someone cleaning it up.

Over time the statue went on to look worse for wear until one day, the authorities decided it was better to remove and replace the statue.

It turned out the guy cleaning it up was always the same guy, who hated the subject of the statue with a passion, and alway used salt water to clean it, hoping to corrode & wear down the statue. Some people suspect he and the vandal were the same person.

[-] Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 67 points 2 years ago

Men, do yourself a favour.

If a girl ghosts you because of the phone you use, she's clearly too shallow to bother with, and it's worth ghosting her back.


Girls, do yourself a favour.

If you've got a problem that a guy uses a 'droid, you may want to reconsider your priorities.

[-] Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 55 points 2 years ago
  • construction is Hella pricey
  • there are few maglev manufacturers, allowing vendor locking and exacerbating the first point
  • they must be built grade-separate, which can complicate route planning
  • they are incompatible with existing rail tech, which results in having to build new, expensive infrastructure for 100% of your route, further exacerbating the first point
  • their switches are slow, limiting capacity

Ultimately, their competition is regular trains, which are simpler, more tolerant to buying from multiple manufacturers, still significantly more efficient and faster than anything roadborne, able to switch over the course of seconds instead of minutes, able to interoperate with different tiers of intensity and speed, able to be built at grade, cheaper and having the better part of two hundred years of technological refinement behind it. Ultimately, maglev has specific, niche advantages that make it a hard sell for any system that already has regular rail.

[-] Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 105 points 2 years ago

Same. Though can we also add a button to hide all content pertaining to US state politics? "The governor of Arkansas-" I live in The Netherlands, that shit has no bearing on me

[-] Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 89 points 2 years ago

I remember someone got into such a billboard and replaced the ad with IKEA-style instructions on how to replace the ads in those billboards.

[-] Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 72 points 2 years ago

Can somebody build & sell a dumb electric car? Or at least one not permanently internet-enabled and/or that has no functionality and capabilities locked behind software and subscriptions?

[-] Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 57 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Let's face it, he's trying to build a vacuum tube over many hundreds of km's. The energy you need to keep that at reduced pressure is more than a Little Boy or a Fat Man. The pods are the size of somewhere between a coach and a railway carriage, with seating built to Frecciarossa Executive Class. It's propelled using Maglev tech, so you need a not-insignificant amount of power to also move your pods. And getting into or out of your vactube is going to take some extra work.

One thing that I've seen being pointed out by some critics is that a maglev system is often quoted to cost about a billion per unit distance, while high speed rail is quoted at about 500 million, about half. But then the Hyperloop shows up and is quoted at 250 million. How do the economics of that work? I mean, you take a maglev, which is twice as expensive as conventional but very precise regular railway, but by adding a vacuum tube, which is an added system that takes a ton of energy to even get it start making operational sense, you somehow cut costs in half from effectively a regular railway? I'm no economists, but that makes no economic sense.

The tech looks really snazzy in CGI renderings until you start to look into the engineering and physics to make it actually work. At which point it becomes awful.

So what if we tried?

First thing, the vacuum tube has to go. This is the number one obstacle preventing it from ever working. We'll still accept the special right of way for high speeds though, we'll just make our pods amazingly aerodynamic. Given the fact that our constraining factors may just become simpler, we can rig our pods to form a hyperpod chain, which allows us to bundle power and improve reliability and efficiency via an economy of scale. We can lower the seating quality in some of these pods and sell those seats for a lower price, making up for it in volume. We can still power everything with green energy, we're still using our own hyperway, with a very narrow path that our hyperpods can take, so rigging up an electrification scheme via an infrastructure power supply is quite easy. If we want to deploy quickly and make true on our 250 million quid per unit distance, we may have to rely on proven technology, so we probably base our new hyperway structure on two steel beams being kept a fixed distance of 1435mm apart. Bonus: there's a lot of largely compatible infrastructure at both ends that we can now use, as well as a giant pool of trained professionals around the world, so we can cheap out on stations and hyperway maintenance can be quite cheap and quick.

I just invented a train again, didn't I?

Elon is a con artist and I will take no criticism.

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Iron_Lynx

joined 2 years ago