Yeah that’s not an option for many people.

Not everyone’s parents are reliable, still alive, willing to watch the kids, and conveniently nearby. You kinda need all four.

Also you can’t just leave your toddler at home when you go out for dinner, or drop your kid off with a boarding facility when you want to go on vacation

Only if we value safety and convenience over freedom.

Personally, I’ll take the freedom.

If you think that’s a satisfactory replacement for the average person you don’t know much about motorsports. The costs alone are outside the reach of most people.

I hope so too

We stopped talking after she got herself stranded in a different city to manufacture a big crisis where people had to rescue her from south central LA at 2AM. She said it was a mistake but we later overheard her bragging about how she did it on purpose to get attention.

I had a friend who would watch this movie over and over. She said it was her “favorite movie”

I later found she was a little messed up in the head.

Seed back then would have just been unprocessed grain. I don’t know about prices in the early 1900s, but the current price of unprocessed wheat is around $230 per metric ton. That’s around $0.10/lb and would put 20 lbs at around $2 given wholesale bulk pricing.

Not even in the ballpark of the $5/lb you cite for grass seed.

It certainly has the potential to be. Remember most of the costs related to fission are safety measures, plant decommissioning, and waste disposal. If we merely had to operate the reactor without concern for those issues, fission would be incredibly cheap. The fuel costs and basic technical requirements to operate a reactor are trivial in comparison.

Fusion produced 4x more energy per mass of fuel compared to fission, isn’t at risk of meltdown, and has the potential to produce negligible radioactive byproducts. In addition, it outputs helium which is an important and finite strategic resource.

Even if the cost of fuel goes up dramatically compared to uranium reactors, it might still outperform nuclear in a big way. However, sourcing He-3 from the moon might be a lot cheaper than you think. My day job is related to space resource utilization. Transporting resources off the surface of the moon could be quite economical once we reach a sufficient level of development.

The usual joke is that fusion is always “30 years away”, not 10. The reason is that fusion projects have historically faced an issue where funding is chronically below predictions

However, this past decade is seeing a number of promising changes that make fusion seem much closer than it ever has. Lawrence Livermore managed to produce net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time. Fusion startups are receiving historical levels of VC funding. ITER is expected to produce as much as ten times as much energy as used to start the reaction. The rise of private space infrastructure is making helium-3 mining on the moon more possible than ever before.

Even that is meaningless because the vehicle you put a battery in is as important or moreso than the battery.

Aptera has a claimed 1,000+ mile range with a 100 kWh lithium battery. Meanwhile, the Rivian R1S has a claimed 270 mile range when equipped with a 106 kWh battery.

The main difference is that the Aptera is a light and aerodynamic car built for maximum efficiency instead of a 6,000 lb pickup truck. Any battery can boast amazing numbers if you are flexible enough with the use case.

I don’t think that is the case. A stratified fluid, in the absence of continued energy exchange with the outside environment, will eventually reach a homogenous temperature distribution due to diffusion.

That said, even if you are were correct, in the context of brewing tea we would only have a few minutes of brew time in which the stratification would have an impact on the extraction.

Search the literature for thermal stratification. There are many contexts where it is used outside of lakes and other large bodies of water, many of which do not consist of three distinct layers. Hell, the paper I cited SPECIFICALLY refers to the temperature gradient in the microwaved glass as “stratification”.

If you can’t understand the use of a term outside your specific area of expertise then thats honestly a you problem and that’s all I can say on that.

If the heating methods were as similar as you say, there wouldn’t be hundreds of publications accepted to various journals across the past two decades investigating the problem where microwaves produce a strong temperature gradient between the top and bottom of a body of liquid. It’s a well known process control problem.

That’s not really showing temperature stratification which is a more extreme separation of temperature from surface

I think the definition you are using is far too restrictive, in many contexts temperature stratification simply refers to a situation where you get temperature gradients across a fluid with the warmer fluid gathered near the top of the body. For example, in a factory you will often have “destratification” fans operating because warm air from equipment rising to the ceiling results in a temperature gradient from floor the ceiling.

It is not a phenomena exclusive to surface heating.

That’s just showing that the hottest atoms gather to the top, which btw, proves Convection currents.

Yes. My point was not to establish that convection is magically absent from fluids in microwaves, but to establish that it differs significantly from stovetop heating. Convection currents in stovetop heating create a strong stirring action that produces a substantially uniform temperature. Microwaves do not create the same stirring action and this produce a significant nonuniform temperature gradient.

The modified glass is just diverting the hotpots to the bottom to make the convection less “unusual”.

Clearly. They make the heating more akin to a stovetop, which is really the point here.

They aren’t claiming that convection doesn’t accrue, only that it’s “unusual convection” resulting in less even heating like that of thermal stratification, not literal thermal stratification where the layers have separate convection currents that prevent mixing all together.

Once again, you are using a definition of thermal stratification that is far too specific. However, arguing over it is really just being pedantic because the core point at issue here is whether or not heating a cup in a microwave or a stovetop produce the same final product. They do not unless you apply some mechanical agitation to mix it up.

I’m well aware of temperature stratification. It doesn’t happen in a microwave.

It empirically does. We can argue about the theory all day but the research says microwaves produce stratified temperature gradients when heating liquids. However, I’d point out that, in atmosphere, when we have localized hot spots the warm air can effectively travel in bubbles without significant mixing for quite some distance. There seems to be a similar phenomena at work when microwaving liquids.

See the screenshot below.

I pulled this from “Multiphysics analysis for unusual heat convection in microwave heating liquid” published in 2020 in AIP Advances.

Relevant excerpts:

“ Usually, the fluidity of liquids is considered to make the temperature field uniform, when it is heated, because of the heat convection, but there is something different when microwave heating. The temperature of the top is always the highest in the liquid when heated by microwaves.”

“ The experimental results show that when the modified glass cup with 7 cm metal coating is used to heat water in a microwave oven, the temperature difference between the upper and lower parts of the water is reduced from 7.8 °C to 0.5 °C.”

“According to the feedback from Midea (microwave appliance makers), when users use the microwave oven to heat liquids such as milk or water, the temperature at the top of the liquid will be significantly higher than the temperature at the bottom.”

I mean, it’s not really a matter of debate TBH. There are a number of peer reviewed journal articles documenting the temperature stratification. Here is one source, where the authors attempt to create a special cup to heat the water more evenly.

From a utility side perspective it’s true to say 240v is the standard we just wire our outlets to use one of the two hot wires instead of both of them.

Convection currents don’t stir water in a microwave because the heat source isn’t on the bottom. That’s the difference. You get temperature stratified water where the surface is hotter than the bottom of the cup and they don’t naturally mix.

Of course, here in America, we have this incredible technology called a spoon. Pull that bad boy out, give a little stir, problem solved.

If you are in a cosmopolitan area there’s plenty of access to tea houses serving loose leaf Japanese and Chinese tea that would satisfy the most demanding tea enthusiast. That doesn’t begin to count the non-traditional items like boba, tisanes, etc.

The USA doesn’t have much of a British style tea tradition, but that’s mostly because it’s a diverse nation and British tea and food is mostly crap to begin with. Why would the US drink British tea when there are so many alternatives that are actually good?

It makes you less jittery because it does not, in fact, have a lot of caffeine in it.

I find it funny this comment got upvoted more than mine. I am a guidance engineer that worked at NASA on lunar lander programs, it’s literally my job to be an expert in this stuff. Modern computing has reduced propellant usage a bit and improved targeting accuracy, but we have had usable solutions to this problem since the 60s.

Atmosphere makes the problem MUCH harder because the dynamics are far more complicated and the uncertainties are higher.