Sorry to hear you’re feeling crap.

I’m having trouble looking for work for the past few months. Very few replies, the first “no” I got actually made me feel a bit more human.

I’m convinced that some of the jobs I’ve applied for or enquired about are not real or just for external-advertising-before-hire requirements. I’ve gotten some rude responses after daring to ask questions (eg: jobs funded by research money tend to have fixed funding start dates that might not be for another several months). Most straight up ignore me.

An old boss of mine thinks that my CV isn’t conforming and mundane enough, so I’m giving his suggestions a go.

What sort of work are you looking at? I design electronics and get into arguments with computers.

“Eat now, …” is terribly depressing. It sounds like you’re trading financial autonomy in exchange for another basic human right.

Two wrongs make a right. Compress it all into beams and sheets, make bus shelters and illegally install them at every bus stop in the country.

(No that would require guts. They’d rather hope that holding onto it will give them more social license to send it to landfill)

The one real risk is that it’s a respiratory depressant and that it’s LD 50 is only a few tens of times a standard dose

The article claims it’s much closer than that:

Experts and festival-goers agreed on the likely cause of GHB’s disproportionate overdose burden.

“As little as 1 millilitre difference can tip you from what you’re looking for to what you’re not looking for,” Daniel Fatovich, chief investigator of EDNA, told Hack.

I tried to find some stuff to back this up. The “therapeutic index” is probably what I’m after (ratio of effective dose to dangerous dose), despite this technically not being a therapeutic use.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8843350/ - The narrow therapeutic index of GHB renders its use hazardous with poisoning or toxicity not uncommon with small titration of doses.

Thats… annoyingly nonspecific. A number for the T.I. would be a good educational tool.

This paper claims its around 5:1 to 8:1:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4462042/ - Mortality rates after abuse of GHB are high, because there is only a narrow safety margin between a recreational dose and a fatal dose, which is only 5:1 to 8:1 [4-8]. Accordingly, accidental poisoning after recreational use of GHB is not uncommon as evidenced by admissions to hospital emergency departments for treatment [9, 10] and during forensic medical investigations of drug intoxication deaths [11-14].

Someone else in the comments here mentioned that the recreational dosage for different individuals varies, if that’s true then it could make this worse.

polydrug using who get hurt […] education if we want to save lives

Agreed. Most people don’t understand what’s in pills they have bought or the interactions with alcohol.

I think it will take insane amounts of effort to wrangle the model into not doing its own thing. Possibly more than the amount of effort it takes to animate manually.

“Yes this is brilliant, now generate just a few more se… why have you added a clone of my character? What? And why have the emotions on the faces of the other two swapped again? Arghh it’s confusing the subjects again! Now the room has started strobing too, goddammit this is a bathtub not a disco!”

Little do you know that I’m secretly in charge of the Bureua Bureua Bureau. I believe https should be a premium feature that valuable customers will pay for.

Corrected, thankyou. I blindly took the page title.

Do geo storms affect up into the GHz where wifi sits? I can only find material talking about the ionisphere and frequencies up to HF :|

Glad to hear it got cared of :)

This one was only 10m from a creek, so we were not too worried.

Will do.

N.B. It was only upside down whilst we handled it, not as it was found.

Anopheles nonaleggius s.s.

I thought Jobseeker was an emergency fund to assist with seeking jobs.

You’ve fallen for the rename. It didn’t used to be called “jobseeker”. It covers people who can’t work too.

I love the wording of the petition:

functional state after the end of the product’s support period, continuing to operate without any intervention from the publisher.

This completely circumvents the garbage argument that it costs money to keep software running after a certain date. If a car company claimed that letting their cars continue to work after 5 years would cost them money then we’d laugh at them. Software and computers, however, are magic.

I love the little gatekeepers huts everywhere with their chimneys. Can’t have the employees freezing :) Woodpiles or coal?

Really interesting. Photos & shots are well staged too (I think the narrator mentions collecting them from over a year). Thankyou :)

Generally not, no. Most manufacturers would rather turn it off as needed rather than turn it on as needed. Unpredictable outputs require unpredictable staffing rosters, introduce more risk into plant operations and does not give confidence to customers (“we need to delay your shipment”).

Desal would need very big reservoirs to be able to erratically run, but perhaps that is done off peak in some places? Aluminium is complex, you can’t let it cool too much otherwise you risk the whole process solidying (no recovery, requires rebuilding entire smeltery).

Somethings from further afield to consider: maybe hoisting tanks up onto the circular solar concentrators is a bad idea.

(1) Store and use the NaOH in long, skinny pipes (instead of big tank modules). Then mount them on linear solar concentrators.

(2) Keep the modules, but crane them onto the ground near the solar concentrators and use superheated steam from the concentrators to dry the modules. Less hoisting. The modules already have a piping system in them (isolated from the NaOH) for generating steam, just use it in reverse and open the NaOH chamber so water can escape to the atmosphere as it dries.

(Or, I suppose, a modern diesel with the cab in front, though that might make lifting the boiler more finicky.)

I’m not sure about the process of lifting them and attaching them, but this is a great start. Maybe they’d use one of those cranes that hangs from the ceiling on rails.

Good catch. Having the boiler in front would make some lifting logistics easier, because you could swing it off in a circular arc rather than needing a crane that can move linearly.

That simple difference might allow smaller, simpler cranes at the various outposts (reserving a full gantry ceiling crane for the workshops or more major stops).

Hey Jacob,

Lovely subtle background with soft edges and technical side profile :) This is way beyond what I was expecting. My only artistic complaints would be the odd reflection on the round tank.

Where is the water stored? The engine will need a tank of its own to hold this. The modular units would only hold water temporarily, you would probably want to drain them before lifting them off. Water would also be consumed during the trip from leaks and from adding it to the caustic soda.

How do you imagine your tank being lifted? It looks like it’s currently setup for a shipping-container style ISO twistlock lift (where you hook onto the top 4 corners with some sort of frame hanging from the crane). I was instead imagining a central lifting point and a traditional single-cable crane. Your idea is probably better – the frame is already strongest at the corners and you can potentially couple/uncouple without needing to climb on top.

A really important question would be whether or not we’re using relatively low pressure steam like classical engines (a few atmospheres) or high pressure steam (a few hundred atmospheres). From my vague uneducated understanding of the rankine cycle that steam engines approximately use: higher pressures and temps might allow better efficiency. Your size of tank might only be feasible for lower pressures, at higher pressures you would use multiple tanks with smaller radius (this makes them much stronger, assuming the same wall thickness in both).

I’ll state again that I’m not a train person nor have proper in-depth knowledge of a lot of areas required to properly design such a train, this is all mostly guesswork.

Some random thoughts of my own, much more rushed and poorly drawn than yours:

• Steam-electric turbine rather than steam-piston direct drive. Electric motors hidden in bogeys underneath.
• 2x2x2.5m replaceable modules (arbitrary choice, I think this it really should have been much bigger for a standard gauge rail train)
• All modules secured to bottom frame using shipping-container style ISO twistlock connectors (not shown sorry, out of time and going to be busy tomorrow)
• Three different types of module:
  • Silver stripes: high pressure caustic soda boilers (get removed & solar mounted to regenerate)
  • Yellow stripes: liquid water storage, pumps and valve. Maybe turbines could go here too?
  • Black: Cabin, battery, motor drivers (inverters/choppers/whatever) and controls.
• Bottom frame is four 2x2m frames stuck together. Can be made longer to hold more modules.

EDIT: Woops, should have made the tanks black rather than shiny silver. They’ll need to be craned onto the solar collectors and then dried, so a darker black body would be better.

Glad you liked it :)

I’d meant to add a concrete spill pool thing at least between the locomotive and building but forgot. (Pretty sure that excuse has shown up on at least one environmental disaster report, lol).

You’re hired!

Swappable boilers […] visually distinct

I was thinking something that looks a bit like a steel-framed ISO tank, but smaller and with more connectors. At a minimum you would need:

• Lots of caution stripes on the frames (80’s/90’s retro futuristic)
• Removable insulation panels from the sides. You would want them installed when on the train (to save heat) but removed when the whole unit is hoisted up onto the solar concentrator. The tank itself will be painted black for this purpose, at least on the curved sides.
• Inlet and outlet for steam. Perhaps stainless high pressure pipe flanges complete with their cute tapered nozzly bit. Maybe 10-20cm or more in internal diameter? I’m not familiar with the impedance tradeoffs and pipe sizes normally used for this. I’m also not sure how you’d connect these to the engine (external pipes taken on and off all the time?).
• Electrical connector for measuring the in-built thermistors & thermocouples. Probably an ISO metric series waterproof with lots of pins like an M24 connector just dangling somewhere.
• A drain tap on the bottom of the steam loop side with a very long handle on it (so the operator doesn’t die if they open it at the wrong time). Looks like a standard ball valve like you’d use on a home water or gas line, but with a very long handle that reaches to the edge of the frame.
• A water inlet for the caustic side. Something small like a household water pipe and ball valve.
• An (optional) place to install your own temp probe. Household pipe sticking out of the top.
• A drain tap on the bottom of the caustic side with a padlock installed (to stop people dissolving themselves with high-temp high-pressure sodium hydoxide).
• Redundant pressure gauges near the draining taps, as a last ditch warning to operators.

Installing and removing the steam pipe flanges would not be elegant, requiring a rattle gun (like tire shops use to change your wheels). Maybe there are some more elegant solutions? Especially since it’s so easy to accidentally pressurise a system after only tightening some of the bolts (woops).

I’ve used some of those fungicides but wouldn’t have put that together.

They wouldn’t look like the nice, uniform, dry powdered stuff you’re used to, instead they’d be unevenly coloured slime :)

I might be wrong specifically about the copper carbonate product, but the others are probably right. No brass, no bronze and no copper allowed (sadly).