Since turning 30 I’ve been thinking about the half-your-age-plus-seven rule a lot more. It would feel creepy as fuck to date a 22 year old. Is this all in my head? It feels predatory to swipe right on anyone younger than 25

Hang on, maybe I’m just particularly out-of-the-loop but; how long has the third book had a name?

Is there any “recent” (coupla years) news on the expected conclusion of this story??

EDIT: Cute kitty by the way OP!

Thumbtack? For random odd jobs around the house, I don’t know if that one counts as similar. I’m not certain it’s an exploitative con

20 November 2023 ‘Electrocaloric’ heat pump could transform air conditioning Heat pumps are ubiquitous in the form of air conditioners. Scientists just invented one that avoids harmful refrigerant gases. Davide Castelvecchi

Congested air conditioning units on a building on May 21, 2012 in Mumbai, India. Air conditioners around the world compress and vaporize environmentally damaging gases to cool and heat air. But a new heat pump technology could change all that.Credit: Kuni Takahashi/Getty

The use of environmentally damaging gases in air conditioners and refrigerators could become redundant if a new kind of heat pump lives up to its promise. A prototype, described in a study published last week in Science1, uses electric fields and a special ceramic instead of alternately vaporizing a refrigerant fluid and condensing it with a compressor to warm or cool air.

The technology combines a number of existing techniques and has “superlative performance”, says Neil Mathur, a materials scientist at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Emmanuel Defay, a materials scientist at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology in Belvaux, and his collaborators built their experimental device out of a ceramic with a strong electrocaloric effect. Materials that exhibit this effect heat up when exposed to electric fields.

In an electrocaloric material, the atoms have an electric polarization — a slight imbalance in their distribution of electrons, which gives these atoms a ‘plus’ and a ‘minus’ pole.

When the material is left alone, the polarization of these atoms continuously swivels around in random directions. But when the material is exposed to an electric field, all the electrostatic poles suddenly align, like hair combed in one direction. This transition from disorder to order means that the electrons’ entropy — physicists’ way of measuring disorder — suddenly drops, Defay explains.

But the laws of thermodynamics say that the total entropy of a system can never decline, so if it falls somewhere it must increase somewhere else. “The only possibility for the material to get rid of this extra mess is to pour it into the lattice” of its crystal structure, he says. That extra disorder means that the atoms themselves start vibrating faster, resulting in a rise in temperature.

Cooled by an electric pulse

The researchers then remove the heat by flowing a fluid between slabs of the electrocaloric material, while keeping the electric field on. The result is that the slab goes back to the original, ambient temperature, but has a lower polarization entropy. If the researchers then switch off the electric field, it produces the reverse effect: the polarizations become chaotic again, and entropy pours out of the atomic lattice of the ceramic, carrying heat away with it. The result is that the lattice becomes colder than the ambient temperature and it can cool fluid pumped between the slabs. The cycle then starts again.

In a refrigerator or air conditioner, heat from the warmed-up fluid would be dispersed in the environment, while the cooled fluid would serve to keep the interior or the room cold. For heating, the heat pump would cool down the external environment, extracting heat from it to be pumped into the building.

Defay says that although the technology is not yet ready to be commercialized, with further refinements, the efficiency of his team’s electrocaloric heat pump could be competitive with that of existing heat pumps. That’s a tough standard to meet, because heat pumps based on compressors are already very efficient: when used for heating buildings, for example, they can yield three or more times as much heat as space heaters do, for the same amount of electricity consumption. But unlike a standard heat pump, an electrocaloric heat pump would not need refrigerants such as hydrofluorocarbons or ammonia, which are potentially harmful to the environment. And because it removes the need for a compressor, it could potentially fit into a smaller, simpler device, Defay adds.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03595-1

References Li, J. et al. Science 382, 801–805 (2023).

His ears look like kitten fuzz…

I have been trying to decide between an aeropress or pourover. Maybe I’m ignorant of something, how is the pourover a larger hassle?

I had hoped my facetious tone would be apparent given the topic of this thread. Given the downvotes, that was probably not the case and in the case you felt I was attacking you, sorry. You’re doing language just fine

sport

Oh my god, fucking assholes ending sentences with prepositions!

I am being murdered at about the same rate as I’ve been.

FTFY fuckface

Jesus it makes me so angry I could fucking kill!

…Exposed Industry Greed…

“Exposed”?

…freeform flashy fashy propaganda wordsalad

FTFY

This is the Sound of Freedom conman, right?

I read his final statement as an acknowledgement that “while this sucks, no shit I’m going to do it because cats are necessary for functional human habitation”

I use pelletized bedding instead of clumping litter. It’s still disgusting, it still tracks everywhere, it still needs to be cleaned but it smells less and it’s waayyy cheaper (that link is $7 for a 40lb bag of the stuff)

Fountain soda costs a few pennies per gallon, the lost earnings of which would ordinarily be counted as small beans compared to the wages saved by reducing the bodies you need to pay to run your restaurant. The pandemic taught companies though that you don’t need a body for every job, you need only as many as it takes to keep the door unlocked. The single person whipped and frantic doing the jobs of eight people will just have to work harder and maybe next year they’ll get a fifteen cent raise

Part of what creates in me so much faith in communism is my profession vs my interests.

I am an engineer. If I didn’t need to sell my labor I would be an engineer who solves problems and creates progress. Since I live in America, I don’t.

Survivor of a TBI checking in.

I thought about this a bit actually in my earlyish recovery, though I never did confirm my thoughts with any doctors who might know more about the mechanics I was interpreting me perceptions of.

In summary, I don’t think it would help (for those with injuries exactly identical to mine*). The problem as I constructed it in my mind, was;

1. A problem with my ability to interpret balance from my senses.

• I could still sense all the things I could pre-injury, but the signals would travel down the wires of my body with different kinds of “noise” than my brain had learned to adapt to for the first 20+ years of my life.

2. A problem with my ability to control the fine-motor aspects of all my balance-affecting body parts.

• The relative position and momentum of every moving and not-moving part of your body contribute to your overall “state” of balance. Now my control to each part of my body had (similar to the sensing syste’s “wires”) different levels of noise to adapt for than it has taught itself to deal with so far.

I think a system like the Exoskeleton referred to here would probably fix or at least greatly reduce the second problem, but the first problem would require, at the very least, a “processor” that could replace the thing that determines my balance from all my various senses (my brain, at least one part of it).

I guess I agree with that principle. I’m perhaps unfairly imagining giving more context in the article would have been a better “product”.

Hah, I lived in that shit hole when I was still a conservative, my dad still denies climate change

This is the article?

NORTH TEXAS (CBSNewsTexas.com) — Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial hasn’t started yet, but there is already political fallout. Not just for the attorney general, but for other Republican leaders and lawmakers as well.

When House members first heard details of the 20 articles of impeachment against Attorney General Paxton, Republican Texas Rep. Charlie Geren of Fort Worth dropped a bombshell:

“I would like to point out that several members of this House while on the floor of the House doing state business, received telephone calls from General Paxton personally threatening them with political consequences in their next election.”

The whole article?