@futurebird love mercury arc rectifiers. I got to see a bank of them running a few years ago during Open House Melbourne down in the Russell St substation. Was the last substation in Melbourne to supply mains DC power to the oldest buildings that still ran on it. Their last DC customer disconnected in the early 2000’s
@vk2gpu@futurebird yup there’s the obvious danger of mercury being flung around inside glass using electricity, and the less obvious danger of it being high-power DC in a building that mostly deals with AC now.
I also love electricity distributor’s definitions of “high” and “low” voltage: “high” voltage is 220kV, “mid” voltage is 22kV, “low” voltage is 240V mains.
@futurebird amazing to see them in action, the brightness of the glowing is proportional to the load. In this video the load bank is switched off, then on again.
@futurebird to study physics you need to train your mind to hold concepts that aren't necessarily intuitive. It takes loads of practice, just like learning to play the piano and read musical notation. It's hard. You don't get endorphins like you do when you practice exercise. Subscripts, superscripts, brackets, derivatives, integrals, vectors, tensors and more. It takes a lot of dedication to train your mind to hold all those abstract thoughts in a meaningful way. That might be why it's called hard science. It's not just Algebra and Calculus though. It's also about measuring stuff, which is the part that makes it not magical. Without measurement, theory is just ideas, which can take any form whatsoever. The fact that abstract ideas can be used to predict stuff that happens in the real world is what grounds physics in reality. #physics
@futurebird And here I am chanting instructions in arcane languages to shape the behaviour of crystals full microscopic runes! Whilst sending communications to distant locations over the ether!
@futurebird
"So you're saying there's a thing you can measure at any point in the universe at any time, and you can always get a value for it, but I can never see it."
"Yes, several of them."
"Several."
"Yeah, like maybe a dozen or so?. Some of them point in directions too!"
"Why tf do you need that many of this thing I can't feel or see?"
"Well, for basically anything I tell you about my field (heh), asking 'why' leads to me saying 'so the universe doesn't fall apart or blow up.'"
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