Spyke

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What are you Reading (September 2023)

I'm finally getting into both discworld and culture. I've read a number of other discworld books before, two of the night watch, mort, I think another I don't recall right now. Now I'm reading The Colour or Magic. It's enjoyable but I'm finding I'm going a little slower on it than the others.

I also have the second culture book, Player of Games, ready to go when I finish the discworld book. I really liked how bonkers Consider Phlebas was (felt like a constant stream of chaos for the crew).

climate

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Gas companies tell us mixing gas and hydrogen is a climate solution. New research shows it's not

Oh neat, I actually know a lot about hydrogen-natural gas blends!

I read the report because of this claim:

And now, a team of British researchers has found adding hydrogen to natural gas actually increases how much natural gas leaks from stove burners and boilers because the smaller hydrogen molecules help the larger methane ones escape.

I've never heard of small hydrogen molecules helping larger molecules leak. I was curious what the mechanism for this was. It turns out the report does not make that claim at all. In fact, the report claims the additional leakage from hydrogen blends is most likely just the hydrogen leaking. I didn't run the numbers myself but the data presented seems approximately aligned with that. Hydrogen leaking through fittings is already a well-known and established challenge of blending hydrogen with natural gas. So the central thesis of this news article is completely fabricated.

I am a little surprised the utility companies are going to soon be mixing in hydrogen. I didn't think we we're quite ready to blend in hydrogen into natural gas for the leakage reason, and also because of production scaling issues that we haven't resolved yet. These challenges are likely within reach soon. For example, the United States department of energy has a large research initiative right now to help lower the cost of hydrogen production to be more competitive with natural gas. We also need to make sure that hydrogen is produced in a carbon-free or carbon neutral way, which is probably going to be dependent upon our electrical grid becoming carbon free.

guitars

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Fret buzz on first and second frets

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This is a new problem, so I'm guessing I was on the right path looking at the truss rod. Was bummed to see the truss rod nut stripped. I just watched a video on using a fret rocker, I'll check with that method and see if I have uneven frets.

It’s unlikely to be (only) your nut though - once you fret a string, the nut is removed from the equation, so it can’t be the source of 2nd fret buzz.

I do have buzzing on the open E and open A strings too, which is why I thought it could be something with the nut. You are completely correct about after I fret the 1st though.

This was very helpful, thank you!

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Exploring the available CAD software

I would also recommend checking out SALOME for 3D modeling. I've been using the shaper toolbox to create geometry for fluid simulations and it's worked well for me. The shaper toolbox is parametric (as opposed to SALOME's geometry toolbox which is not).

After you've created your geometry in shaper you switch to the mesh toolbox to create your stl file. I think there's really good control over the triangle creations with SALOME. For example, you can specify edges and faces you want smaller triangles in (like around tight geometries, holes, etc). I've been able to get much higher quality stl files with this method than with freecad.

SALOME is free and open source software.

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coyotes active during the day?

I'm sorry to hear that a coyote got one of your chickens! I've only ever had problems with racoons, and usually around dusk. I've also only raised backyard chickens in the middle of the suburbs. Have any dogs that are friendly and protective of the chickens?

climate

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Gas companies tell us mixing gas and hydrogen is a climate solution. New research shows it's not

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Also, I think we need to be moving towards 100% hydrogen if we want to use combustion as a green replacement for natural gas. However, I don't think many of the appliances that currently use natural gas could safely use 100% hydrogen because of the properties of hydrogen gas. Primarily, I think the flame speed of hydrogen would require us to redesign the various combustors that use natural gas currently so that we don't have flashbacks. Additionally, the hotter burning of hydrogen might cause material failure issues in our current natural gas burners. The research I've done is shown that we could probably get away with 30 to 40% hydrogen, maybe dependent on the exact burner. I don't think moving to 100% hydrogen is feasible without a massive replacement of all of our gas burning appliances.