A few years ago I took his course on thermoelectricity and really liked his way of teaching. The videos were short and to the point and yet gave me all that I needed to know about the topic.
Rousseau was famous for saying that man is born free and is everywhere in chains. He advocated for self rule and formulation of laws by the people. Yet after 100s of years of democracy (thousands really) the corrupting influence of social norms has not really been remedied.
Inequalities still exist,corruption still happens and social institutions that were once liberating become oppressive over time.
His ideal of self governance has not been realised as most nation states have adopted a representative democracy. People don't really make the rules. They just handover the power to someone else who makes them on their behalf.
It's certainly right that Franklin believed in practicing virtue. He famously kept a log of his good and bad actions.
Yet there is another great philosopher that has had tremendous impact on American society whom the author has not mentioned. Emerson believed in transcending societal definition of virtue and vice and follow one's own inclinations. His ideas of self reliance resonated with American people and brought about a change in their thinking when they started to believe in themselves rather than looking to Europe for intellectual guidance.
I find it difficult to accept either Franklin's or Rousseau's view as they were more politically motivated—Rousseau wanted his social contract,Franklin worshiped Socrates but when it came to governence he kicked him aside to chose democracy,an idea that was popular at the time due to thinkers like Locke.
Emerson gave people true agency over their lives and inspired them to think critically and not sheepishly believe a thing to be good or bad. He was more revolutionary than Franklin (Self reliance was released around the time of civil war) and gave people courage to question institutional authority and he eventually became more impactful than Rousseau's collectivism.
I don't know. Content matters more to me. Many of the articles that I read have so little information density that I find it hard to justify spending time on them.I often use AI to summarise text for me and then lookup particular topics in detail if I like.
Skimming was pretty common before AI too. People used to read and share notes instead of entire texts. AI has just made it easier.
Reading long texts is not a problem for me if its engaging. But often I find they just go on and on without getting to the point. Especially news articles.They are the worst.
I have a Garmin with a sapphire screen. I've worn it every day for over 5 years, working on cars, in the garden, snorkelling on coral reefs.
In short, I my watch has NOT had an easy life. I've made no attempt to protect it or taken it off for anything except charging. There is barely a mark on the screen. A sapphire screen will be a hard requirement for my next watch.
I wear mine while rock climbing. The watch has been put through a lot of beating against all kinds of rock. I've already chewed through 3 straps on this watch. The titanium case is lightly scratched, but the screen is absolutely pristine!
This is my second sapphire Garmin, and it's absolutely worth the premium.
I think what they have grown diamond on the transistor which then bonds to the substrate through a SIC interlayer.
From what I understand their idea seems to be that since most heating occurs at channels they act like hotspots and therefore it would be much better to drain away heat from them directly.
This is different from creating transistors on a diamond substrate.
It certainly is a great hobby. I'm not a physicist either but I keep reading papers and taking courses on YT about areas I'm interested in — Materials science,plasma, Electrostatics,fluids,thermodynamics etc.
Good thing is science doesn't change like tech. Once you learn something it's for life. No need to keep learning new frameworks/tools every year. It's stable and yet immensely flexible.
With AI research and studying has become a lot easier. Give it a try if you're interested.Now is a great time to start.
Apologies. I write everything in plain text on my mobile and just copy paste it to blogger/fb. Most platforms automatically create clickable links (hn also does that) but apparently blogger does not do it.
I like full links on the post because it makes it easier to backup. If I embed them in anchor tags they'd have to be parsed from the formatted web page or I'd have to store data as an html file. I don't want to do that.
md is a good alternative and slowly I'm migrating my files to GitHub.
Very likely. The hot plasma generated would form oxides when it's cooled. I read a few papers a while back focussed around generating ammonia and other nitrogenous compounds. I can't find the link to the one I read but apparently other researchers are doing something simillar
In air bubbles NOx would be likely but it would probably lead to nitric acid production after reacting with water. Here's a paper by NASA that pretty much confirms your intuition
Interesting. Nitric acid could be a chemical signature that could be measured, then. Maybe ozone also? I'm thinking equipment monitoring for cavitation.
Absolutely! Ozone is produced as a byproduct but I don't have any refrences at hand.
More generally it can be said reactive oxygen species are produced as an intermediary that turn into several compounds as plasma is cooled.
Whatever gas you make bubbles from is going to be ionised(plasma is created during cavitation) and it's going to produce a cocktail of chemicals inside as it cools below ionisation temperature.
Many of these are shortlived eg oxygen reacts with hydrogen or nitrogen to form more stable compounds but some intermediaries can be stable and be detected.
The absolute max amount of nitric acid you can get for example is proportional to the amount of air dissolved in water. If you cavitate entire 1L of water max HNo3 you can get is about 20mg. Realistically it's not possible to cavitate such a large volume of water at once and there's a competition among reactants to form other products eg oxygen is going to used for hydrogen peroxide as well. Very sensitive instruments are used to detect these.
This is studied in sonochemistry —using bubbles to drive chemical reactions.Not enough for large scale production but small doses of chemicals — mostly radicals can be delivered by bubbles making it useful as a disinfectant.
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