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Cake day: September 28th, 2023

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  • The Idaho researchers observed that reversing the intrinsic angular momentum, or “spin,” of thorium-229’s outermost neutron seemed to take 10,000 times less energy than a typical nuclear excitation. The neutron’s altered spin slightly changes both the electromagnetic and strong forces, but those changes happen to cancel each other out almost exactly. Consequently, the excited nuclear state barely differs from the ground state. Lots of nuclei have similar spin transitions, but only in thorium-229 is this cancellation so nearly perfect.

    Basically, thorium-229 can be excited by conventional lasers instead of gamma rays. Instead of millions of electron volts, it takes less than 10, which means it’s more reliable and more precise.


  • You’re saying that data centers are replacing batteries constantly…just imagine the labor costs on that (and the down time), not even considering the material cost.

    I’m the tech doing the battery replacements. The big boy UPSes are typically a 3-5 year replacement cycle. Something like this:

    (I just picked the last one on my phone so not a great picture, they’re about the size of a small refrigerator)

    On rack mount and desktop style UPSes 18-36 months isn’t unreasonable. Some of the smaller UPSes, like APC 750s, go through batteries even faster. My personal theory is that they just get and stay too hot.

    There is typically zero downtime while servicing any of them, every critical system has redundant power supply and battery replacements usually don’t interrupt power output anyway. It would take multiple failures to cause any sort of significant downtime, and if it would, we just do them during scheduled downtime.




  • Yep, the only reason Motorola stopped producing them is because Motorola sold that business out to Zebra. Hell, zebra still supports the 4000, the 6300 is quite literally just a newer version.

    Same deal with the MC33 scanner. My warehouse has an assortment of Zebra and Moto branded devices and Zebra handles servicing them all. Embedded industrial PCs don’t change much.



  • A corporation is a legal construct. While it’s theoretically possible for a single business to grow very large, most of the exploitation and legal cover provided by the simple act of incorporation becomes nearly impossible.

    Plus without a state to push down competition, it becomes a lot harder to monopolize a market. Ideally there wouldn’t even be a market to monopolize, but that’s a different discussion altogether.






  • I code on my iPad quite a bit, and my kids use theirs for art almost exclusively. File sync isn’t really an issue with Nextcloud/icloud/syncthing/onedrive.

    Also not much of an issue with screen size. I have a 12.9” and it’s only slightly smaller than my primary laptop’s screen(thinkpad x1 carbon gen 10). If I didn’t have to use a console cable to configure stuff all the time, I could stop carrying the laptop entirely.

    For reference, I do dev-ops and network engineering for a large MSP.