professorjaytee

professorjaytee t1_j9nn8hg wrote

Reply to comment by Siliskk in Time dilation question by [deleted]

He means this Dragon's Egg:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg

The science in this book is as factual as hard science fiction can get. Zero handwaving or fantasy physics.

Bob Forward was not just an author, he was a career physicist.

>Robert Lull Forward (August 15, 1932 – September 21, 2002) was an American physicist and science fiction writer. His literary work was noted for its scientific credibility and use of ideas developed from his career as an aerospace engineer. He also made important contributions to gravitational wave detection research.

There aren't many people who can do both those things well.

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professorjaytee t1_j46ci1g wrote

I get so sick of the "always success" motivational bullshit you see all the time out there.

If you're not failing sometimes, you're not trying hard enough. You're not accomplishing enough. You're not risking enough. But when you do your best, although you WILL fail sometimes (and it does feel like shit), you will keep on going anyhow.

I live in Japan, where we have a saying, which translates:

"Knocked down seven times? Then GET UP eight!"

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professorjaytee t1_j23k39q wrote

I used to drive an electric forklift; we had two at a warehouse where I worked. Under typical heavy use we'd need to swap out the batteries in each forklift every two hours or so. That said, it was one heavy MF of a battery. Better to have two people changing one together, although I could do it by myself.

Not sure how practical that would be for a heavier vehicle, with a typically longer desired battery life (range) and consequently (in total) much heavier batteries.

Charging each forklift battery took eight hours or more, so we couldn't wait for them. Swapping one only took five minutes. We had to keep a number of spare batteries constantly charging on an array of rechargers just to keep both our vehicles constantly working all day long (ten hours). We had five for each. Yep... we had ten rechargers and twelve batteries total for our two forklifts.

Sure, we could have used four smaller batteries instead of one, but then we'd need four rechargers in place of each one. That would've been forty chargers required. If smaller units sped up the charging time by a factor of four, then we'd still need the original ten chargers each.

How that would play out with tens of thousands of cars, and even more thousands of battery units constantly sitting in more thousands of rechargers...? Not well, I think.

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