logs are for quitters

Copy pasta without source. Book! https://xkcd.com/1162/
- *Boo
  (But having a book instead is always nice.)
  
  I choose to believe it was meant as a warning, because GP is going to yeet a book at your head. But with a fair warning.
  
  I always use “book” as an insult. Especially since my phone autocorrect was updated…
- which is bigger? TREE(3) vs
  ((...(1 room of stacked papers ) room of paper) room of paper)...)) room of paper
  The number of brackets in above expression is, eh, ok, you got the idea.
  /s
- I love book.

Uranium generates that energy by fission. The hydrogen in sugar could generate huge amounts of energy if fused.
- And this boulder could generate huge amounts of energy if I pushed it up to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro and let it roll down.
  44 upvotes and 0 downvotes for a comment that doesn't understand that energy density measurements like this tend to measure the useful energy of a system.
- How much more energy would you get if you fused uranium?
  
  Using the rule of thumb, anything heavier than iron requires energy input to fuse. So you lose energy fusing uranium.
  
  Serious answer: A huge negative amount. Anything above iron requires energy to fuse (which is why it produces energy from fission.) and I'm pretty sure nothing with 184 protons could be stable enough to count as being produced - the nuclei would be more smashed apart than merging at that point.
  
  Ask Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
  In alphabetical order.
  Edit: oops, those are fission, my bad
- It's disappointing that natural selection didn't figure out fusion.
  
  It figured out photosynthesis instead. Why do your own fusion when you can just take advantage of the fusion that's already happening?
  
  There is still time
  
  It's good it didn't, otherwise it's possible that all the hydrogen in the ocean would be fused into helium by now
  Well, more likely it would significantly heat up earth due to the amount of energy released first, cooking everything/starting an endless cooking->extinction->cooling cycle
  
  We have fusion (hydrogen) bombs. We just haven't figured out how to maintain and efficiently harness it for energy.
- Whilst I get your point, their point is still valid in the sense that you just can't extract that energy from gasoline in a more efficient manner than just burning it. For practical purposes, gasoline truly is that much less energy dense.
- and all would generate the same if thrown to something capable of lossless e=mc^2 conversion (maybe a black hole)
  
  sadly black holes go to something like 42% conversion (source: some minute physics video i think)
- For comparison:
  Chemical combustion of uranium: ~4.7 MJ/kg
  Nuclear fission of uranium-235: ~83.14 TJ/kg (or $ 83.14 \times 10^6 \text{MJ/kg} $)
  
  Do you have a Lemmy client that supports mathematical functions?
- In theory, yes. In practice, of those two only fission is currently viable.
- If you can do nuclear fusion yea, it's more efficient. Cold fusion has been a sci Fi thing for a while; they mostly moved on to antimatter-matter annihilation, and ZPE(seems to be a favorite for sg1)

If we could consume uranium, you could have a teaspoon's worth and be done with eating for the rest of your life.
- I think that's technically true regardless.
  
  I wonder if that's actually factual or not. Uranium by itself isn't too terribly dangerous. It's the whole fission byproducts thing that's the buzz kill.
- I have a uranium rock which I could conceivably swallow - probably closer to a tablespoon than a teaspoon. I don’t think any process in my body could extract energy from it.
  Alpha radiation is not too bad. Unshielded helium particles. Like I tell anyone I show my rock too - as long as you don’t eat it, this is safe. (I am a mad scientist who has exposed hundreds if not thousands of children to uranium lol)
  Really, if you could extract the energy from the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, you’d never have to eat again. But also because that’s too much energy for you and you would be dead.

Wrong. You can't scale logs much. logs are 16 MJ/kg

Bah, that graph needs antimatter.
- Is there enough paper on earth?
  
  Antimatter doesn't really do anything by it's own, but if we let 1 kg react with 1 kg of matter (non-anti-matter), we get E = mc² with m = 2 kg. So 1.8 * 10¹⁷ J, or 1.8 * 10¹¹ MJ. If we assume that 10 MJ/kg is represented by about 1 cm, the bar would have to be 1.8 * 10¹⁰ cm or about 1.8 * 10⁸ m. A standard A4 piece of paper is about 30 cm tall, so 6.0 * 10⁸ A4 papers are needed. I.e. 600 million papers.
  So we definitely have enough paper, but it would be a very tall stack.

Incorrect, if you aren't a bitch about it. Fuse that gasoline!
- I was thinking the same thing. It's unfair compare chemical energy to nuclear energy. Coal still kind of sucks, but the hydrogen in the others could definitely be used in fusion...
  
  It is perfectly fair in the context of "fuel", a resource used to produce energy. Whether energy is generated via chemical or nuclear reaction is irrelavent in this case.
  
  Coal still has carbon in it. Carbon does have a lot of excess energy per nucleus. Just gotta turn it into iron.
- If we're counting future technology, my money are on iron man style reactor. Don't need to fuze shit, infinite energy.
  
  Except the Ironman style reactor is pure science fiction, whereas hydrogen fusion is real, but still has issues of energy capture, which several groups are working on.
  There are two promising avenues, one is a direct physical capture, as in fusion is initiated with huge pistons that are physically moved by the fusion explosion,
  And the other cool one is direct magnetic coupling.
  I expect both to take off long before the tokamak style does.
  But fission power is already here, and much easier to set up. Molten Salt Thorium is also promising. And once some corrosion issues are solved, could power the earth at current levels for the next thousand years.
  All while producing an isotope of actinium that produces only alpha radiation. Which is super useful in killing cancer cells.

Yes boss, I did work out the dynamic range of that log amplifier we wanted to use in our next product's sensor PCB, it's 80dB.
The results are over here. (points to a roll of A-4 paper)
It has 40 data points and only took me 1 week, 10 pencils, and 20 erasers to plot the chart. Yeah I can present it, it'll take me 10 minutes to roll it out, pin it down, and fetch the A-frame ladder.
- This is the real big brain hack with decibels --- you can use a linear scale, it's just that the units are logarithmic instead.
  (Yes I know most people would call a dB axis logarithmic, it's just a silly comment.)
  
  You call this a linear holograph of a non linear phenomenon and earn yourself that promotion.

In recent developments, 10% of the US GDP is now allocated to producing Astronomy and Astrophysics plots. More news at 9.

Log scales are great but cannot be understood by the vast majority of people. They simply aren't taught to a level of comprehension.

would burning fat be carbon neutral?
- In the same way biofuels are: Technically yes, but still not that great of an idea outside special applications. (One I could imagine would be someone wanting to live completely off grid using filtered frying oil in an old-but-ridiculously-sturdy diesel generator)

Weird thing I’ve noticed:
Logs are taught in high school. Absolutely no one seems to remember what they are after the unit test, much less high school. I’ve even reminded other math instructors about how to use them.
Why do people have such a hard time learning to use and understand logs?
I love this comic, and it’s going to replace my weird “let’s talk about how this makes the distance between us and Alpha Centauri, and us and Earendil easier to understand” bit.
- I mean I think a lot of it is that at least in America when it comes to Math a lot of the teaching is more about how to use specific formulas and apply them to certain kinds of problems. They don't really teach you what it is you're actually doing or why you're doing it. It just turns into recognizing a type of problem and applying a certain tool to it rather than understanding what that tool is and what it does.

Jerry Hathaway still wants 5 megawatts by mid-May.
- You win the Internet today!!!
  
  Holy crap, my only ambition was lovely parting gifts!

Wonder what that would look like the even more extreme case of matter-anti-matter?
By the way, energy density is exactly what you look for in bombs. It says nothing about energy prices per joule. It's also great for nuclear submarines or nuclear powered aircraft carriers. So war, basically. Light from the sun has a pretty low energy density, yet powers live on earth.
- The energy density of light from the sun is pretty insane. You can power a lot with 1kg of light
  
  Yep, radiation pressure. Which is a limiting factor for star size too: too big and the radiation pressure gets stronger than the gravity, blows them appart.

log to the base 76000000

now add cost
- Okay but since you're the one trying to make a point by saying that, it's really up to you to add the cost and show that the results really do make the point you want to make.
  
  its a post about uranium being at the top, so the message should be about primary energy generation (unlike sugar -nutritional energy, which is also in the pic)
  Cost per gigawatt of installed capacity: Nuclear power: 7–10 billion euros per GW.
  While Wind energy (onshore): 1–2 billion euros per GW. Wind energy (offshore): 2–4 billion euros per GW. Solar energy: 500 million to 1 billion euros per GW.
  This is evident if you just look at the nuclear power companies like france (who is heavily into nuclear): State-owned EDF - 70 billion euro debt. These companies can't stay afloat because its that unlucrative and therefore need heavy subsidies.
  Then you have environmental cost, which is the funny part, because we cant even evaluate the potential of the damage since we dont understand the effects fully. The scale in the cartoon is literally comedic compared to the half-life of nuclear waste. like 24000 years for plutonium and for uranium over billions
- I wonder what was the cost of making gasoline cheap. Probably like $10 huh.
  
  millions dead
  
  thats one kind of cost