@kirk@social.coop
@kirk@social.coop avatar

kirk

@kirk@social.coop

🧪 Itinerant postdoc. Research scientist and engineer fed up with the status quo (electrochemical engineering: batteries and electrocatalysis)

⚙️ Into appropriate technology, open-source hardware, co-ops (of all kinds), solidarity economy, and that sort of thing.

📍 Based in Paris, France

🐣 Grew up across the Mississippi River from Cahokia Mounds (St. Louis, Missouri)

🏕️ Distance running, bikelife, getting off-grid

🏴 In the lower left of the political compass

he/him

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

kirk, to random
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I really like how Benjamin Zephaniah thinks.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/benjamin-zephaniah-why-i-am-an-anarchist

"Most people know that politics is failing. That’s not a theory or my point of view. They can see it, they can feel it. The problem is they just can’t imagine an alternative. They lack confidence . . .

Then I really started to meet people – and, trust me, there is nothing as great as meeting people who are getting on with their lives, running farms, schools, shops, and even economies, in communities where no one has power."

kirk, to random
@kirk@social.coop avatar

watching a great talk from @PKL at the @oshwassociation conference!

kirk, to random
@kirk@social.coop avatar

Happy International Worker's Day from France, where I have the full day off work as a holiday. It began after workers in the US started a general strike for the eight-hour workday on May 1st, 1886 that culminated with the Haymarket massacre. The date of May 1st as a day to celebrate the labor movement was exported to Europe and other countries, but some politicians in the US thought the date would serve as a rallying point for leftist and labor movements, so they moved Labor Day to September.

kirk,
@kirk@social.coop avatar

Instead, in the US, we have on May 1st "Loyalty Day", "a day for declaring loyalty to the United States of America and to acknowledge American history" and "Law Day", "meant to reflect on the role of law in the foundation of the country and to recognize its importance for society".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalty_Day
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Day_(United_States)

kirk,
@kirk@social.coop avatar

So, happy "Real Labor Day" to My Fellow Americans™ who've been scammed out of a legitimate reason to celebrate the accomplishments of the US labor movement, like achieving the eight-hour workday.

kirk, to Batteries
@kirk@social.coop avatar

Really happy to share that our open-source battery project has the support of NLnet/ @NGIZero !!

https://fbrc.dev/posts/NLnet-funding/

With this catalytic funding, our small collaboration to develop an open-source flow battery for stationary energy storage can further develop. We're planning on finalizing our small-scale benchtop kit (for R&D/educational use) before going to a larger cell design.

Very grateful for their support and belief in the project.

#EnergyStorage #batteries #engineering

kirk, to Batteries
@kirk@social.coop avatar

New blog post: set up a website for our open-source battery project at https://fbrc.dev

Details and rambling here:
https://dualpower.supply/posts/setup-FBRC-website/

It's in the very early stages (as is our project) but happy to receive any feedback folks might have.

#Quarto #EnergyStorage #Batteries #FlowBatteries #OpenSource #OpenSourceHardware #OSHW #100DaysToOffload

grrrr_shark, to random
@grrrr_shark@supervolcano.angryshark.eu avatar

I truly never thought that I'd get to the point where visiting Germany would give me the "relief of home" vibes, but Switzerland is very hard, and there are people I love in DE.

kirk,
@kirk@social.coop avatar

@grrrr_shark I feel this... me, when I leave France (where I am integrating poorly into society IMO), feeling oddly comfortable visiting the UK, where I used to live after leaving the US.

kirk,
@kirk@social.coop avatar

@grrrr_shark ah so you understand! I worked near Munich for one summer (tech uni in Ingolstadt), definitely a different vibe from France (though I am in Paris which is bit of an outlier).

I'm going to live in the Bay Area for the first half of next year while my partner has a scholarship. Going to be culture-shocked again haha, I only lived in Missouri and Oklahoma before. A bit tired of the cultural transience tbh

kirk,
@kirk@social.coop avatar

@grrrr_shark Tulsa! Did undergrad at TU. Had a couple friends from Bartlesville. I do miss the exciting weather sometimes, provided it didn't hurt anyone...

Munich to Rennes is definitely a big transition! Glad you're able to visit and enjoy Munich, after some big life moves

kirk, to random
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🤮 <-- seeing the phrase "Key Performance Indicators" in fundamental science publications

kirk,
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@grrrr_shark it was by Germans unfortunately 😅 but possibly more excusable if English isn't your first language...

kirk, to random
@kirk@social.coop avatar

Pleased to find out that I've achieved my childhood dreams of wanting to be a scientist and electrician (electrochemistry counts??). Thanks mom for keeping those old drawings.

Drawing book page with the prompt "when I grow up I want to be (blank), this is how I'll look" with "electrician" filled in, with a drawing of a an electric utility cherry picker truck and a stick figure fixing a utility power line. Also 6 year old me didn't know the difference between an electrician and a lineman.

kirk, to random
@kirk@social.coop avatar

New blog post on my motivations for developing an open-source flow battery.

Comments here on Mastodon will appear on my blog.

https://dualpower.supply/posts/motivation-OSHW-RFB/

#Quarto #100DaysToOffload #OSHW #EnergyStorage

kirk, to wordpress
@kirk@social.coop avatar

I volunteer for a nonprofit (https://windempowerment.org/) which is made up of many small member organizations around the world that deal with small wind turbine technology. I'd like to have a (RSS) feed on our website (which is WordPress) that republishes the RSS feeds and maybe news items/letters of our member orgs to boost their work and show their activity.

Can anyone recommend some ways to achieve this? We are on a tight budget. I have my own FreshRSS server to test with. 🙏

kirk, to random
@kirk@social.coop avatar

for @SocialCoop - hello, all!

I'm Kirk, an engineer researching the conversion/storage of clean energy: batteries, converting CO₂ into useful chemicals, etc. I'm from St. Louis, USA, did my PhD in UK, now living in France. I'm a lot of things but anticapitalist and antiauthoritarian are good catch-alls.

I plan to transition away from academia and start a worker-owned enterprise around these technologies, with open-source at the core. Here to learn from others and find community.

kirk,
@kirk@social.coop avatar

@BillySmith @edumerco ah, yes! Big fan of AD systems, that's rad. Would totally try one of those planter systems if I had the space at my apartment! There's a cool French org doing micro-AD here too: https://www.picojoule.org/

kirk, to random
@kirk@social.coop avatar

Falling down the rabbit hole, and enjoying it so far. Experimenting with it as a blog and electronic lab notebook, and am keen on the idea of having raw data + analysis + presentation cleanly in the same version-controlled repository to enable understanding and reproducibility (in my work raw data can be on the order of 10s of megabytes).

Wanting to add some more interactivity to published work in a static site, to work client-side (as a sort of interactive "paper").

kirk,
@kirk@social.coop avatar

The first being Bartosz Ciechanowski's blog, with beautifully done interactive visualizations and clear explanations of a number of everyday technologies, from bikes, to combustion engines, optics, watches, etc.

https://ciechanow.ski/

Really excellent work here - imagine if academic papers were more like this, and less like ~ jumbled up PDFs ~

seachanger, to random
@seachanger@alaskan.social avatar

air bnb but it’s a coop and corporate profits are redistributed directly to unhoused members of the communities the units are in

kirk,
@kirk@social.coop avatar

@seachanger sounds kind of like this platform, with an explicitly defined community project? (no affiliation)

https://fairbnb.coop/about-fairbnb/

kirk, to chemistry
@kirk@social.coop avatar

TIL Yi Cui's group at Stanford had a Nature Paper retracted for alleged data fabrication? S/o to the @PubPeer browser extension once again for bringing it to my attention.

Also some other not-great allegations in the PubPeer thread 😬

https://pubpeer.com/publications/58E7E208F57FE1E4F0DFE62D60A408

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