bhauth
Your active search and your writing are both selecting for
(Me not realizing that is the 1st part of the joke, with the 2nd part being that maybe [quote] is the reason I’m like that.)
Your posts on chemistry and engineering revived some curiosity
Thanks!
I already knew 3 out of 4 of the YouTube channels you mentioned, which made me more pessimistic about how much high-quality, easy-to-digest material I might be missing.
I was deliberately choosing popular channels that uploaded a lot. You might also like https://www.construction-physics.com/archive?sort=new but you probably already saw that. As for obscure things you probably haven’t seen, well, here are some random bookmarks of mine:
typical examples of personal projects:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPqGaIMVuLs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdXOS-B0Bus
frequent uploads on China:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT9i1vKkDA0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neOjEHJDjJU
examples of blogs with a lot of posts:
https://eighteenthelephant.com/
https://www.marginalia.nu/log/
https://macwright.com/writing
You can also use something like https://hn-buddy.com/ or look at weekly top posts for mid-size subreddits if you want; a pretty high % of high-quality posts are on blogs that only have 2 or 3 posts.
There’s a trend, I think, towards people making a youtube video instead of a blog post for interesting things, and that has a lot of obvious advantages, but also means that indexing by search engines is worse, they’re buried in a larger amount of junk content, and there’s less cross-linking between people and posts.
The most important factor is probably that mormon women are consistently told by their community as a whole that they should marry a returned missionary.
But if you think there’s no point adding any cinnamon because it has no nutritional value anyway, you’re sort of being more of a robot than a human.
It’s my rant and I’ll complain about what I want! But it’s funny you bring up cinnamon, because I also wrote this:
While I’m an American myself, I’ve come to agree with some of the complaints Europeans often have about American food culture, such as “Americans use too much cinnamon”.
The flavor of cinnamon comes largely from cinnamaldehyde and cinnamic acid, which were so named because...cinnamon contains them. Are those antioxidants? No. They’re anti-microbials. Cinnamon inhibits bacterial growth. That’s what it does for you. But what do Americans do? They make cinnamon rolls where cinnamon-sugar paste is put inside the food. It’s not accomplishing anything, it’s just flavor.
So, why do Americans like that flavor, more than Europeans? That’s because American kids grew up eating sugary stuff with cinnamon. There’s an unconscious reasoning that happens:
This has sugar, so it’s probably a fruit.
This compound is in things that are probably fruits, and fruits tend to be good for you for evolutionary reasons.
Therefore, these compounds are probably good for you, at least if they’re combined with sugar.
But that’s wrong! A cinnamon roll is not a fruit! You’ve been fooled!
Do you like cinnamon when it’s not combined with sugar? If not, is it really cinnamon per se that you like?
there is no point in arguing like the world depends on the outcome when you’re literally just a few guys on a private Discord server
To be clear, that’s what I was saying, yes.
has candles burning it regularly, outside of annual rituals like Petrov Day
That is what I meant, yes.
unless you confidently know that they keep the windows open during & after cooking
It’s pretty obvious when particulate levels are as high as what indoor candles produce. Anyway, normal people don’t “keep the windows open” when they cook, they use a range hood fan.
Burning a candle indoor once or twice a year is just not that many micromorts
OK, but are the candles actually providing value at all? If you want to develop social ties or whatever you could just, say, have a LAN party instead of something highly-scripted with cult-y vibes? Petrov day...yes, there are things that could go wrong with the world, and some people don’t consider that enough, but on the other hand some people already consider it too much. Sure, the guy himself deserves some amount of honor, but I don’t think he’d have been impressed by that.
No, I think that would be worse, and lead to degenerate equilibria.
It is a priority to avoid implementing Neuralese CoT on frontier models because that removes essentially all of our ability to interpret their reasoning.
It seems to me that, if we could get people to do that, then we wouldn’t be in the current situation in the first place.
Is there a signal-to-noise problem if you don’t do hyperpolarization, and just give someone an isotopically enriched molecule
Yes.
17O seems like a good try for that
MRI with oxygen-17 has been done. Here’s a study from 1990. And here’s a more recent paper which mentions some reasons it hasn’t been widely used, including:
low inherent NMR sensitivity
short relaxation time
Sodium-ion (and sodium-metal) batteries are assembled in an uncharged state.
Sodium-ion batteries have the sodium deposited on “hard carbon” when charged.
I don’t expect current approaches to them to be cheaper than Li-ion batteries.
You didn’t include the most important common aspect of cancers: It’s very common for cancer cells to disable mitochondria-mediated apoptosis mechanisms.
OK, in that case we can talk by DMs as well. Some LLMs tend to make formal and polite writing with somewhat awkward wording and can do a cursory web search to add more citations than you should expect someone to read, but maybe you’re a student in a country that also speaks something besides english.
Current biochar carbon removal costs range from $130-180/t-CO₂ according to recent studies
You shouldn’t just be looking at biochar; there are other approaches, like drying, adding CaCl2, etc. I’ve seen some lower estimates for biomass burial, eg $50/ton CO2 here. Burial where gas from decomposition won’t escape is another option, eg this paper.
My general advice to you would be to trust cost estimates in papers less. Professors will effectively lie to make their research seem more useful, and there are bad techno-economic analysis papers too. Judging the quality of such papers and learning what parts are trustworthy is just a skill you have to practice.
First, I’d just like to check: was that response written by AI?
The cheapest sources of CO2 are from ammonia production and fermentation tanks. But if you mean removing CO2 from the air, biomass is definitely the cheapest option.
The simplest thing you can do is bury byproducts like sugarcane bagasse, and do something (there are a few options) to prevent decomposition.
The most economically attractive option on a large scale, in my opinion, is conversion to levulinic acid + furfural for chemical products and fuel, and burying the hydrochar. But...
Most countries simply don’t have enough extra land to grow enough grass to replace / compensate for their CO2 emissions.
That requires a better process for conversion than is currently in use and some new uses for those products. Which I have some thoughts on, but that’s a big project.
As for good ways to reduce CO2 emissions in the first place, I think those include:
more working from home where practical
continue improving insulation where it’s bad
shut down old coal plants and build more HVDC lines
Consider this, we’re proposing a moonshot here, not just an incremental product improvement.
If it’s a moonshot, you should either: (1) be working on better chemistries in a university lab or (2) have some experience with manufacturing chemical products relevant to bringing manufacturing costs down or (3) be able to impress people with your understanding of industrial chemistry costs.
In 2022, Hemmatifar showed a stackable bipolar cell capturing at 400 ppm with electrical work of ~0.7 MWh/t while maintaining >90% efficiency[1]. They even ran it continuously for 100+ hours without fouling issues.
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That citation also only shows release of CO2 at similarly dilute concentrations. A bigger difference between absorption and release concentrations obviously tends to require more energy.
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poly(vinylanthraquinone) + carbon nanotube electrodes aren’t particularly cheap.
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When such devices have shown a good cycle life, that’s in a lab with pure materials, not in open air with its dust and various organic compounds.
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Recent TEA in ACS Energy & Fuels modeled a 200 kt/yr electro-swing system with wind power and projected $56-97/t.
That citation says:
The CapEx is estimated by assuming analogies: the regeneration cell of the AEC process is assumed to have the same relative CapEx as redox flow batteries, and the electrochemical cell of the ESA process is assumed to have the same relative CapEx as lithium-ion batteries.
That’s...a non-analysis. Here’s something easy to understand and more accurate than that: the CapEx of an electrochemical MOF thing is much higher than the CapEx of alkaline CO2 direct air capture. This is always going to be true. The stuff required is just more expensive than “sheets of something or other with liquid running over it”. Even if the energy costs are zero, I can’t see total costs being lower. I know about how much it costs to make such stuff, and it’s just too expensive.
Basalt mineralization (specifically the Carbfix method) injects CO₂-water directly into porous basalt formations.
Ah, you’re pressurizing the CO2 and drilling; I didn’t bother reading that far before. That’s certainly possible, though the basalt isn’t specifically necessary for mineralization. Also, while you’re focusing on fast mineralization, that’s kind of irrelevant for underground injection.
Our breakthrough combines metal-organic frameworks with electrochemical triggering to slash costs from $500+ to under $100 per ton.
No, it doesn’t. The cited paper used over 10x atmospheric concentration at the lowest end, the cost estimates you might be thinking of used higher concentrations than that, and those cost estimates were also incompetent and overly optimistic. The lower the concentration, the more fans and MOF you need for the same amount of CO2, and the more MOF degradation happens per CO2 captured. And the fan requirements are worse with a cyclic system than a continuous flow of alkaline liquid. For CO2 capture from air, the equipment required with this approach is much too expensive, and there’s no way you’re getting even close to $100/ton of CO2.
In general, any chemical process involving electricity is more expensive than just running a mixture over a catalyst, because...well, think about it, it’s a lot more complex. You need 2 electric sides and something between them, with high surface area.
(And even if you could get it, $100/ton is apparently still too high. There are lots of things with a CO2 mitigation cost from $70 to $100/ton that aren’t done because they’re too expensive. Well, there are companies paying high rates for direct air capture right now, but that’s in the hope that it’ll become much cheaper in the future, which it won’t. But this is a moot point here.)
As for storage, the cost of digging up rocks and especially grinding them into small-enough pieces is already too expensive for the amount of CO2 they absorb. If you’re going to do that, you don’t need the MOF system for capturing CO2 anyway, you could just spread the rocks around. Also, it’s kind of weird that you say “basalt mineralization” specifically when there are a bunch of rocks that can absorb CO2 if you grind them up; kind of makes it seem like you don’t fully understand the chemistry involved.
Anyway, the economics don’t work out and it’s not even close. Doing stuff with biomass is a lot cheaper, if you have land available for that.
The main problem with this post is that it assumes “AI” is a monolithic thing that can’t include different systems in the future. LLMs can translate from English to German. AlphaZero can beat the best human players at Go. Different systems can do different things. ChatGPT can’t evaluate the result of Javascript programs accurately, but if you set it up to run Node.js, it suddenly can.
I haven’t looked it up; I’m going to live with the risk that I’m wrong, and so are you.
No, I don’t think I will. I started learning about chemistry largely to be able to read ingredient labels and know what things in them are safe. And now, when it comes to molecular toxicology, I’m one of the best in the world.
Oh, maybe you were referring to my Alice/Bob bit, instead of the bit about not using debates as a point-scoring competition. Can you clarify the part you’re talking about by quoting?
If you’re saying you like debates with retrospective point-scoring as a sort of sport, I disagree about adding that scoring being a positive thing, because of the effect it has on the debates.
If you’re saying the Alice/Bob bit has Alice being too serious because debating Substack posts is fun, the point was that:
Alice doesn’t want to talk to Bob because “having Substack subscriptions” doesn’t make you interesting—but Bob thinks it does, which means there’s probably nothing interesting about him.
Bob is saying “we’re discussing the stuff I read” instead of finding something of mutual interest, and without understanding how you’d even go about finding something of mutual interest in an efficient way.