thought that's a small, german thing

In the US it's an "I read 2600 Magazine and go to HOPE and I have a point to make" thing.

I mean, it tastes good, and it does carry a decent punch in terms of caffeine. But coffee's a lot more convenient, and you spend less time explaining it.

Also cheaper.

Not anymore. Saw plenty of club mates at defcon talks.

Why can't the heat be converted to electricity?

Because heat is pure entropy; it's what you ultimately end up with after electricity has been used to do work, and the process is irreversible due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics#G...

Only a difference in heat levels can still be converted to electricity, for instance by reverse Peltier effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_cooling

And on a space station, most of your heat differential is created by active cooling, so recovering that via Peltier elements is a bit… counter productive.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics just means the conversion can't be a hundred percent efficient. Indeed, I didn't think of that as a problem.

I think you need a temperature gradient to generate electricity from heat

It's actually the complete opposite - space is not "infinitely cold" it's more like "infinitely isolating" - like the perfect giant thermos. Space suits for example have a whole layer of water tubes just to cool down the astronaught, otherwise they will pass out from their own body's temperature.

Indeed, black body radiation isn't very effective at dissipating heat!

The ISS has an 28 tons active cooling system that barely radiates away as much heat as a one ton HVAC unit on Earth (70kW).

It's hard to generate a temperature gradient when you're blasted from the unfiltered Sun on one side, and reflected IR from Earth.

And surrounded by a near vacuum.

And yet thermos has somehow made billions by assuming the opposite.

Some of it probably could be, but the effiency of those processes are low enough that you'd still have a heat problem. Also, recall that the energy originated with the solar panels to start with. It's a very wasteful way of generating electricity compared to the solar panels, so although it might be worth considering to recover some of the energy investment and eliminate a fraction of the heat, the net output of such a process will probably be an order of magnitude lower than the initial energy investment.

i used a p4 until this year and upgraded only to save power.

I have an old Pentium M notebook with 256 RAM lying around with Linux for optimizing. If you get it to run fast in it, it should run pretty much anywhere. I'm looking to moving to an old netbook though, but I'm not sure because of the architecture of the first Atoms.

Can't you use something like a Raspberry Pi for that?

If I was optimizing for ARM the RPi would be a great machine :)

The Penitum M is sort of like "the missing link" between old and newer architectures. From it "evolved" the Core Duo brand (I also have one of those around), Core 2 Duo, and Core i3/5/7 architectures. And while there are differences, the M is still similar enough to be representative.

Maybe she's just flatterin. Or she thinks that working less and being comfortable with it is clever and she has to admire the skill this takes, which she struggles with to adjust right.

Maybe the author is right, though.

right, writing's about the useful order of the facts.

what's full time, 10 h/week, 40? where did this magic number come from and why is it declining in the last decades, while unemployment rises? surely not because we became less able to work.

That appetite is proportional to the careless feeding of stats and the affinity to fall for the ads.

Out there are a lot of announcements of really existent research results, even popular ones.

I agree but legitimate results are quickly extrapolated to Skynet by the media.

It would also be reasonable to remove the declaration as the variable is "unused".

There's no such thing as the "Untranslatable" Word if universal grammar is for actual. At least up to turing completenes, as any language should suffice to describe a turing machine. Yeah, I don't know about "Magic".