worstpe
geekystevenSolar panels are some ridiculous fantasy technology. You're using crystals to summon energy from space? Sure buddy, let's put that on an album cover.
The cat who walks thru walls@geekysteven Sure, yeah, and then you tell me you can summon energy from space even without crystals, and use it to change your body's color?
simonbp@geekysteven I had a colleague who works on astronomical x-ray scintillation detectors describe it as "building crystals that glow with ancient invisible cosmic energy".
Nicd@geekysteven Heat pumps are such magic to me.
"Yeah instead of just using electricity for heating, we devised a complicated system of a compressor, liquids that are sometimes gases, and a whole lot of piping. It gives us 5 times the heat energy."
The simple solution should be the efficient one!
@nicd @geekysteven Sounds like someone's been watching Technology Connections. . . It is really cool though how someone realized instead of adding heat energy to something we can just move it from somewhere else
@HiddenPineapple @geekysteven I actually haven't seen that video. But we have a ground source heat pump and being able to warm our home for cheap when it's -25°C outside is magic to me. Also that it's basically solar, just very indirect delayed solar. 😁
christian mock@nicd @geekysteven the magic box that goes "you think it's cold outside? I'll make it even colder, and I'll make you warm in the process". magic!
Tzimisce Flesh@nicd @geekysteven Because it doesn't give you heat energy.
Well, it gives you some heat energy, as most things do.
But it mostly just moves it.
It is less efficient at generating heat, actually.
It just solves the problem of "not enough heat" by moving it from elsewhere rather than making new heat.
Well, it gives you some heat energy, as most things do.
But it mostly just moves it.
It is less efficient at generating heat, actually.
It just solves the problem of "not enough heat" by moving it from elsewhere rather than making new heat.
Oriel Jutty 
@geekysteven I love my energy crystals.
:: Asta ::@geekysteven but the rich necromancers, who profit from stealing the leftover energy from the corpses of dead trees, don't like the space crystals!
Serge 🔻@geekysteven @_thegeoff stuff they feed to rabbits can do it too. It’s crazy efficient as well and we’re still not 100% sure how exactly it does what it does.
Geoff 🏴@xerge @geekysteven Yeah, right, so rabbits just feed on some kind of "captured sunlight" and hop around making more rabbits on that basis?
@_thegeoff @geekysteven yup. Some people seem to think some kind of invisible wizard must be involved. Can’t really blame them when reality turns out to be this insane.
@xerge @geekysteven Next you'll tell me it's all just driven by gravity.
@_thegeoff @geekysteven Everything will become crystal clear as soon as we figure out what gravity actually is.
@xerge @geekysteven Oh, that will be crystal clear as soon as we've sorted out the concept of time.
@_thegeoff @xerge @geekysteven Also, everything will become crystal clear as soon as we figure out crystals. I mean, the stuff crystals are made of. Those small parts that make them up. The ones that are mostly empty space. And somewhere in there, but we can never say exactly where, there is stuff. Or there isn't. Or there is stuff, but it's actually waving at us. And vibrating. Rolled up on itself and just... shivering. And it looks like a piece of string, except it does not. And some of it is dark. Dark shivering strings that we cannot see, but we can feel them. See? Crystal clear!
Lunar 🛸 ♾@lunarloony @xerge @geekysteven Nah, not moving upward, just constantly expanding. Spherically, you flerfs.
(Genuinely is a hypothesis, and isn't all that far from Dark Energy ideas, just more "concentrated" and easily disprovable.)
@_thegeoff @xerge @geekysteven ... So easily disproven, in fact, that I struggle to see how anyone could take it seriously
@_thegeoff @xerge @geekysteven If the planet was expanding fast enough to produce the apparent effect of gravity, we'd be able to see everything getting bigger. (Unless humans and buildings and trees and rocks are also miraculously expanding at exactly the same rate...)
@lunarloony @xerge @geekysteven Well, yes, that's precisely how it works. The Moon is obviously expanding too, but accelerating away from us to maintain angular size in the sky. That's why it was easy for the Apollo astronauts to get there in the 60s, it was much closer.
Blukunfando@_thegeoff @xerge @geekysteven That’s patently absurd—if it all were just driven by gravity, the Earth would be round.
John Maxwell@geekysteven Well, it only works if you use the correct spells to arrange the crystals. The material components are also quite expensive.
@jmax @geekysteven we paid £25 each for our 4 panels of space crystals, and they provided half of our household electricity today. 🤯
Benedikt Neuzweig@geekysteven Combustion engines on the other hand seem to be an idea straight from hell:
Put dead animal bodies under very high pressure so they explode and move even more dead (and live) animal bodies as a result.
@benedikt_lauenburg @geekysteven And move some of them from live to dead.
wrosecrans@geekysteven And basically the exact same kind of crystal that we use to steal energy from outer space, we can also use to shoot out beams of light, or do math.
And by "math," I mean if you etch small enough patterns in the crystals, and feed it the right arcane set of instructions in a strange language, you can make it do so much math that it's a game that shows you an imaginary world.
raptop (𒀯 𒄷 𒄈𒀭𒁇)@geekysteven If you graph belief in the magical powers of crystals vs physics knowledge, it actually follows a J-shaped curve. (The minimum is right before you learn what a phonon is)
Les Orchard@geekysteven clawing MINERALS from the EARTH to harvest POWER from the ANCIENT ATOMIC FIREBALL IN THE SKY - how that's not widely understood as absolutely frikkin' METAL is beyond me
Plausible Human BeingMakin' hay while the sun shines.
"Stone Cold" Yours Truly@geekysteven Even if solar panels did absolutely nothing, you can't say they aren't pretty sweet looking.
llewelly@geekysteven actually energy comes from a nearby star; it only passes through space due to astrographical happenstance and we evolved on a planet some distance away from the star. And we don't summon energy; move the panels and the energy won't change its course. We just place the panels in the way of the energy (that's why it's best if they're perpendicular to the flow). The panels convert the energy into electrical form. Anyway, plants convert the same energy into sugar! How sweet is that?
Sea Cow
The power of the sun, in the palm of my hand
aburka 🫣@geekysteven as a backup for when it's cloudy we can have a power orb on standby https://xkcd.com/2115/
datum (n=1)@geekysteven Huh. I wonder if selling solar panels as album covers would circumvent tariffs.
Earthshine@geekysteven we have fusion power at home.