Bathtub Thoughts

In scientific literature there's generally two ways to cite someone:

• If you're writing a technical paper about something related to technology, you typically cite the paper in square brackets.[The Art of Citation; Johnson et al.; doi: 10.4208/jcm.1512-m2015-0242]
• If you're writing in sociology, you typically cite the author in round brackets. (Clarke 2013)

Nevermind the square/round brackets, my point is that in technology-related fields, typically the name of the paper is considered more important than the author. A paper can have many authors, and not always all are listed. Meanwhile in sociology, the author is considered more important than the name of the paper.

This reflects the main difference between Mastodon and Lemmy:

• Lemmy is content-centric, where you have communities (focused on a topic) as the central element of organization, and they can have posts.
• Mastodon is people-centric, where you have person/user as the central element of organization, and they can have posts.

This is why lemmy mostly appeals to people working in IT and tech, and that's why there's mostly nerds here.

Technically, there's only two sources of energy in the universe: nuclear energy and the expansion of the cosmos.

Like, solar is fusion, ofc, the light coming from the sun. So is wind and water and bioenergy (indirectly). Geothermal is fission (heat comes from radioactive decay inside Earth).

But then there's another source of energy that nobody ever talks about: tidal power It works by converting the rise and fall of water with the tides into electrical energy. This energy ultimately comes from the moon orbiting around Earth, more precisely, its mechanical energy: The fact that the moon is distant from Earth is only because the universe expanded after the big bang. Had it not done this, the moon and earth would be located at the same location, and there would be no "orbiting" to extract energy out of :P

I wrote more about the subject of extracting (useful) energy out of cosmic expansion in this post here

Just to put things into proportion:

This is vienna. Vienna has an area of around 400 km².

And the blue area is the area that would have to be covered by solar panels to produce enough energy for the whole city:

Source: I did the maths myself. I assumed that per person around 30 MWh of energy/year are needed. Data for this: our world in data, energy usage per person. It's well known that 1 m² of solar panel produces around 200 Wp and that's 200 kWh/year. So you need about 150 m² of solar cells per person. Vienna has about a million inhabitants, so that makes 150 km² of solar panels approximately.