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Cake day: May 11th, 2026

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  • Yeah they are but it seems like most electrical instructors don’t know that they just think “water is close enough as an analogy to electricity but breaks with AC” when in fact they’re both identical. So they’ll tell you to forget the water model while teaching you AC. The inertia/pipe strain comparison is very rare to hear.





  • iocase@lemmy.ziptoScience Memes@mander.xyzInto the rabbit hole we go!
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    1 day ago

    I went through the same thing with electronics being taught the water model then you’re told to throw that out because AC doesn’t act like water.

    I say bullshit! My instructors didn’t understand AC well enough IMO

    Once you understand AC well enough you realize it still applies to the water model of electrical flow. Induction is inertia, capacitance is pipe deformation from pressure.

    When you slam a valve shut in an old house you make a massive pressure spike (inductive field collapse, flyback voltage spike) which oscillates within a resonant circuit when the pipes absorb that extra pressure by expanding, then releasing that spike back into inertia, which makes a smaller spike back into hoop stress until friction (resistance) saps all of the energy out of the circuit.

    You can make a DC-DC boost converter by opening and closing a valve really quickly on a long pipe and feed the pressure spikes into a check valve.






  • iocase@lemmy.ziptopics@lemmy.worldthey are not wrong
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    3 days ago

    Big fucking agree!

    These are all natural monopolies. Massive, incomprehensible unbelievable amounts of money need to be invested to make a network, and then running the next train, or adding a new gas or power customer is peanuts.

    Any time suggesting “hey, maybe we should build an entirely separate system so we can compete” results in people bringing you in for a forced psych eval, you’re talking about a natural monopoly.

    It’s illogical to duplicate the network so “pRiVaTe CoMpEtItIoN” now has to negotiate common carrier agreements and the admin overhead makes it twice (sometimes 10X) more expensive than just one crown corporation owning the entire fucking thing!



  • 80% of all grocery sales go to one company

    Regulated for by the government of Canada

    And before people get angry assuming I’m against regulations I’m not, they’re just used as a weapon by Plutocrats to protect their own private kingdoms

    In Canada we have:

    2 grocery store parent companies

    5 banks

    2 railroads

    2 telecos

    1 power authority per province (in my province it’s a crown corp which is fantastic. Their shareholders are rate paying citizens not private shareholders)

    3 shipping companies

    What is it for car parent companies now? 3ish?

    1 gas provider per province

    All of our oil and gas companies are American except for 3

    The only competition is among coffee shops and bistros, and even then the biggest chains are owned by 3 companies.



  • I’m prefacing this by saying my background is playing KSP and inadvertantly making my own Kessler syndrome when running out of fuel braking during a station rendezvous 😅

    Yeah you’re fundamentally trading energy. It depends on how the impact happens but orbital scientists think in terms of the average velocity of a collision event and their likely angle. 30⁰ head on at 7km/s is roughly normal I think?

    A head on collision means that you have the full kinetic energy of both satellites to work with. Some parts get thrown up into massive orbits even up into medium earth orbit. Others deorbit due to hitting at the right angle to lose enough kinetic energy that their orbit drops.

    Overall your debris ends up in a plume heading in the direction of both satellites, shaped like a flat cone. In the case of starlink they might have to deorbit the entire constellation while they still have control over them since that cone is invariably going to shotgun blast one or more satellites on the next orbital string


  • The only good news is any debris you generate has some part of its orbit extremely low due to starlink satellites being so low themselves. That’ll stop being true once debris finds something else to hit higher up but it’s easier to deorbit stuff this low since there’s really quite a bit of atmospheric drag at periapse.

    Edit: I should clarify that even after a collision debris has to have an orbit that crosses through the altitude the impact happened at unless some more energy is added higher up in its new elliptical orbit