With all of this talk about datacenters in space, and the pushback along the lines of thermal control, it is worth reviewing what the physics says. Objects in space primarily lose heat through radiative heat loss, also known as Stefan-Boltzmann radiation. This is governed by the…
Two general principles to help understand and defeat overheating
Heat Exchangers: Designing the titans that hold up our world.
How to think like a classical thermodynamic-economist, delivered with many illustrations and some sci-fi metaphors. Particular emphasis on what traditional pedagogy gets wrong. Prerequisites: multivariate calculus and mathematical maturity.
The essay contains: three laws of thermodynamics, entropy, Helmholtz and Gibbs free energy, nonextensive entropy, Caratheodory’s axiomatic thermodynamics, Vladimir Arnold’s contact-geometric thermodynamics, Paul Samuelson’s area-ratio thermodynamics, Le Chatelier’s principle, chemical equilibrium…
entropy
The thorny thought experiment has been turned into a real experiment — one that physicists use to probe the physics of information.
Kevin Kwok had a great essay the other day on Figma, and how its runaway success is based on hundreds of successful loops baked into its product and business model: Why Figma Wins | Kevin Kwok It g…