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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.












  • I’ve had exactly two dishwashers completely stop functioning in my entire life. Both were GE post Haier and within the last 6 years. Also had a Haier made GE microwave completely fail.

    I replaced the microwave (and the matching stove) with Samsung and haven’t had one bit of trouble with either.

    I thought I had just gotten a lemon, but three separate failures within a couple of years has really soured my opinion of them. I was a lot more worried about the Samsung appliances I bought, but they’ve been a dream.

    Note: I am not recommending Samsung appliances, at all. I got an amazing deal and fully expected them to fail shortly after the warranty was up. I’ve had to repair several of my friends and family’s washers, dryers, and refrigerators. Samsung’s poor reputation is well earned, I just got lucky


  • 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.