Andrew Côté Profile picture
Jul 7, 2024 5 tweets 2 min read Read on X
100,000 flights per day at altitudes from 25,000 to 40,000 ft, mandating a tiny amount of sulfur in the aviation fuel could probably halt and reverse global warming.

🤷‍♂️
The point of this post is to make you think - there's a 100,000 flights every day at high altitude. They will be burning and spitting stuff into the atmosphere.

Is there some compound or substance that can be included that would dramatically counter-act CO2 greenhouse effect?
The answer is: almost certainly, yes. What are its second order effects? Is Sulfur Dioxide the best choice? These are important questions to determine. All we know right now is - SO2 had a dramatic effect on warming when it was emitted by ships.
Any which way you slice it, the fastest way to deploy a solution to an industrial scale problem is to use industrial scale distribution. Planting a tree and recycling a pop can will make you feel better.

If you want to actually change the world, change industry.
This was all a pretty off-hand tweet but it turns out Scott Kirby, CEO of United Airlines, suggested SO2 injection into aviation fuel as a climate change tool last month in an internal all-hands meeting.

🤷‍♂️ Image

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More from @Andercot

Oct 2
Threaded fasteners are among the most commonly manufactured components in world history.

Yet almost nobody understands how they actually work.

This makes you look retarded and incompetent, an abysmal failure, and kills people who trust you.

So listen up: 🧵 Image
The first thing to understand is this:

A bolt is a spring. It applies force by being stretched.

That means it needs to stay within the linear elastic regime of the stress-strain diagram.

"wow" you think. "I never knew that." Of course you didn't. Its not even 1% of bolt-physics.Image
The effective spring constant of a bolt comes from the part of the bolt that is not engaged with any threads.

The clamping force of a bolt is generated by stretching this un-engaged part.

This is why some bolts have an unthreaded shank portion that bypasses threads.Image
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Read 11 tweets
Sep 30
For all of history the engineering limits in every domain are set by the materials we have learned to master.

Self Driving Robotic Laboratories and AI-Accelerated Science

Will create a new Golden Age of Material Science

Starting Now 🧵 Image
The epochs of civilization have been demarcated by materials for good reason.

Steel cuts through the Bronze breastplate. Gunpowder cannons toppled walls of Stone.

Today, Silicon powers our information economy and the rise of AI Image
Silicon is just the beginning.

New computing substrates. Composites. Catalysts. Synthetic Fuels. Smart Textiles.

Every aspect of our built environment is poised for revolution.

This isn’t just a product category. It’s a new Golden Age for good reason Image
Read 18 tweets
Aug 18
What looks to be a bug in a video game making a person hold the pistol sideways - like a gangster - actually reveals something subtle about the shape of space.

It has implications from CAD design to Black Holes + anti-gravity. Differential geometry + parallel transport 🧵 Image
Differential geometry is the mathematics of curved surfaces. Euclidean geometry is the 'nice' flat space - where moving along a direction doesn't change the absolute orientation of your perspective.

In curved space, however, this changes. Image
In both CAD design programs and first-person shooters, the view is inscribed on the surface of a sphere. In CAD its looking inwards, for an FPS its looking outwards.

Yet our mouse controls are Euclidean vectors mapped onto the surface Image
Read 18 tweets
Aug 1
There's this toxic and paralyzing interlocking set of narratives that hijack social empathy into vicious in-fighting.

It poisons the well of public discourse, stagnates economies, in exchange for vapid virtue signaling and paper trading progress.

I call it "The Blight" 🧵
The Blight shields itself from direct criticism by installing hair trigger victim complex in it's adherents, who decry any deviation from it's central narrative of mandated equality of outcomes

Beauty, success, pride, are all immediately equated to Fascism

Strength is a crime Image
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The primary tactic to hijack empathy is, like a shitty LLM, endless semantic inversion.

The Patriot Act defends the constitution by defiling your constitutional rights.

The UK Online Safety Act protects children by banning talking about pedophile Pakistani rape gangs.

Etc.. Image
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Read 11 tweets
Apr 11
Biology evolves to the limits of thermodynamic efficiency, and we know from hardware engineering sending current down a wire is terribly inefficient compared to an optical waveguide.

Photonic computing is the future, and our brains might be doing it already 🧵
Computing means processing information, and Landaurs limit describes the thermodynamic minimun of entropy generated by overwriting a single bit of information.

The entropy cost only goes up as you include the non-reversible processes of mobile charge carriers dissipating heat Image
Getting more efficient computation means wasting less heat, beating the Landaur means making the computational steps information-preserving.

This is the goal of reversible optical computing Image
Read 13 tweets
Mar 20
Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.

A news story broke there's massive structures beneath the Pyramid of Khafre, something far beyond the tech level assumed of ancient Egyptians.

What can back these claims? Extraordinary technology: Synthetic Aperture Radar🧵 Image
First lets start with optics - in general a larger lens lets your resolve finer and finer details.

Roughly, the angular resolution goes like wavelength/diameter.

This makes sense if you think about how waves are diffracted - smaller waves or larger opening, less diffraction Image
But optics just uses a range of radio frequency spectrum we call visible light. The exact same physics applies for radar systems.

But radar uses far far larger wavelengths, on the scale of meters versus nanometers for visible light. What can we do?

Make the aperture massive Image
Read 15 tweets

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