Your numbers seem reasonable — more intuitive for me to work in terms of pressure. Atmosphere is (roughly) 1e3 Torr, good UHV can be around 1e-10, so that’s 13 orders of magnitude, which is (roughly) the same difference that you calculated.

Aluminum foil is very common in physics labs. And a main use for it is “baking”! To get ultra high vacuum (UHV)* you generally need to “bake out” your chamber while you pump down. Foil is used same as with baking food — keep the heat in and evenly distributed on the chamber.

Sadly, it’s usually not food grade aluminum foil, as that can contain oils, and oils and vacuum are generally a big no-no.

*Just how good is UHV? Roughly: I live in San Francisco, which is ~7 miles by ~7 miles (~11km). Imagine you raise that by another 7 miles to make a cube. Now, evacuate every last molecule of gas out of it. Now take a family sedan’s trunk, fill it with 1 atmosphere of gas, and release that into the 7 mile cube. That’s roughly UHV pressure.

From TFA:

“I have failed you completely and catastrophically,” Gemini CLI output stated. “My review of the commands confirms my gross incompetence.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(wind-powered_vehicle)

Can go directly upwind (no tacking required). Can also be applied to boats.

99 what you did there…

(I know, IC isn’t valid Roman numeral representation of 99, but it was the only joke I could think of.)

Because it’s not an X at the end, it’s a Greek chi. Same with the arXiv preprint distribution — it’s “archive,” not are-ex-iv.

Sorry you’re getting down voted — lots of replies from folks unclear on what the diffraction limit means, atomic resonances, etc.: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2161094-a-single-atom-is-visible-to-the-naked-eye-in-this-stunning-photo/

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2161094-a-single-atom-is-visible-to-the-naked-eye-in-this-stunning-photo/

Parent didn’t say resolve, they said see — you can’t resolve stars but you can most certainly see them.

Light up a single atom enough and you can see it (unclear if this works with a dark adjusted naked eye or if a long exposure is required): https://www.newscientist.com/article/2161094-a-single-atom-is-visible-to-the-naked-eye-in-this-stunning-photo/

No, they’re too small to resolve. You can see small things if they’re bright enough: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2161094-a-single-atom-is-visible-to-the-naked-eye-in-this-stunning-photo/

A single atom of gold is far too small for any photon in the visible spectrum to interact with.

That’s incorrect — single atoms can, and do, interact with optical photons.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.19671 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13716

And the entire field of super resolution microscopy relies on small things (e.g., molecules) interacting with light.

The energy from nuclear reactions can be astonishingly large (compared to, say, chemical reactions).

But atoms are really, really, really small.

(…I think you may have gotten whooshed…)

Yeah it’s missing the text, “…then the Planck X would be…” for the first two.

And a big plastics shill, unfortunately.

For back-of-the-envelope or mental calculations, pi is often 3 or 10^(1/2).

The latter is better than 1% accurate, and has nice properties when doing order-of-magnitude/log space calculations in base 10.

ZigBee router thing:

I’ve been happy with the SMLIGHT SLZB-06M. You can easily flash firmware, and it has PoE which was important for me. I believe it also supports Thread, but I haven’t tried this yet (and I’m not sure if it supports it at the same time as Zigbee).

Zigbee smart plugs from Third Reality have been pretty solid in my experience, and they report power usage.

For circuit breaker level monitoring, I have an Emporia Vue2. I have it running esphome, completely local — unfortunately this requires some simple soldering and flashing, so it’s not turnkey. But it’s been rock solid ever since flashing it. (Process is well documented online.)

I’ve had decent luck with cheap wifi Matter bulbs, but provisioning them is finicky, and sometimes they just crap out and need to be power cycled; Zigbee bulbs (e.g., Ikea) have generally been reliable, though sometimes I’ve had difficulty pairing them initially. After power cycling a Matter WiFi bulb, it takes a while for it to respond to Home Assistant; Zigbee bulbs generally respond as soon as you power them on.

I have a wired smart light switch from TP-Link/Kasa (KS205), and it’s been completely hassle free (and totally local — Matter over wifi). The Kasa smart switch dongles I have work flawlessly but need proprietary pairing, and I’m afraid to update firmware in case they lose local support.

Good luck! Fun adventure :)

ASCII wasn’t around then, so it would perhaps be stored in 5-bit ITA2, or 6/7-bit FIELDATA. So likely a 5/8 to 7/8 space savings (unless the numbers are for compressed War and Peace).

In San Francisco, a ticket for any event at the big arena (Chase Center — home of the Warriors) gives you free Muni transportation: https://www.sfmta.com/fares/your-chase-center-event-ticket-your-muni-fare

It’s a start.

On the one hand, that sucks, on the other…well, what really sucks is that it’s probably necessary given the state of public transit and bikeability. (Haven’t been to Nashville, so I can’t comment on public transportation there.)