John Lee

Do high school nerds still memorize pi to 50 digits?

Only if you say something nice about Trump first though.

"The best time to impeach the president of the United States was January 20. The second best time is now."

—ancient Chinese proverb

It will be great for oligarchs though.

I’m trying to imagine exactly who it would be that would think that reshoring combustion car manufacturing was good business.

It seems a tariff on car buyin might chill the drillin.

I’m not interested in owning a combustion vehicle.

Sell your combustion vehicle.

Neither I nor my spouse have tested positive.

We still mask on public transit.

We are on public transit right now.

I’m George Takei and I approve of this message.

What did she do, sign up for a bluesky account?

It’s worth thinking about how many people cast a protest vote or stayed home in 2016 thinking that they were sending some kind of message to the Democratic Party Establishment in the belief that Donald Trump couldn’t possibly win.

Boy was that effective.

A price worth paying.

The Tesla V3 supercharger is only 5 miles away.

Ethiopia has Faster Chargers than most of Europe, welcome to 2025 🚨🚨
#alwaysbecharging ⚡️⚡️
x.com/africa_elect...

This is a dead mushroom.

Do they provide access to a mushroom treehouse?

(Watt*hr, not Watt/hr)

Kinda like how DJT keeps telling that snake story.

Credit card fees don’t look so bad now.

bsky.app/profile/thud...

Expressing primary energy from fossil fuels in Wh uses the ‘substitution method’, backing out the waste heat to estimate energy services, not BTUs.

I used world BTU consumption and a rough 60% waste heat assumption to estimate a forcing function for waste heat.

So I did a back of the envelope calculation to estimate the global warming forcing function of waste heat produced by burning stuff either for mechanical work, or even just for warmth.

0.02W/m^2

I wonder if someone has calculated this rigorously rather than my back of the envelope approach.

By replacing combustion engines with electric motors and using heat pumps we can avoid the production of both heat trapping greenhouse gasses and waste heat.

Now that we are increasingly getting our energy from renewable sources, we need to look at the Carnot cycle not as a limit for efficiency, but as a way to move heat to where we want it.

I remember Carnot efficiency being stressed in thermodynamics classes, expecting we would get work from heat, since heat was the presumed source of all energy. As humans, we had after all been burning stuff for quite some time.

The primary energy fallacy is that those 600quads of energy need to be replaced by renewable energy. It’s the energy services that need to be provided, not BTUs.

We are interested in the actual work, not primary energy. Carnot losses result in waste heat. Burning fossil fuel creates both greenhouse gas AND waste heat, both of which can be expressed as a global warming forcing function, and I’ve never seen waste heat expressed as a forcing function before.

600 quadrillion BTU of fossil fuel use per year in the world

x 0.6 = ~360 quadrillion BTU of waste heat

/ 510,000,000,000,000 m^2 = 705 BTU/m^2

/ 365 days per year is 1.93BTU per square meter/day

/ 24 hours per day is 0.08 BTU/hour per m^2

/ 3.41 watt/hr per BTU = 0.02 watts/m^2

Found my mistake.

0.02W/m^2

Still, not nothing.