Sockets, Sparks, and Magic Smoke
summary
Covers concrete numbers and real builds: a proposed mechanical Venus rover that uses wind and reflective semaphore plates instead of electronics, Voyager’s RTGs starting at ~400 W with the probe now ~23 billion km away and a 21‑hour radio delay, AMD FX reaching 8.7 GHz using liquid nitrogen while practical retail CPUs hit a ~5 GHz physics limit, memory studies showing ~1-in-10 systems with serious DRAM faults and ~1-in-25 requiring hard reboot, grid realities like TV pickup 2.6 GW, storage limits such as pumped storage ~180 GWh, and California’s 230 MW / ~4-hour battery.
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chapters (28)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:24Electricity
- 3:31Mechanical Computing
- 5:42Northern Bomb Site
- 6:21Venus
- 7:47Wind Rover
- 9:46Radiation
- 11:48Batteries
- 14:07Electric Vehicles
- 17:19Pacemaker
- 18:23Voyager 1 2
- 19:30Pale Blue Dot
- 20:35Tape Deck
- 21:48Deep Space Network
- 24:40Magic Smoke
- 26:02Raw Clock Speed
- 26:39Stray
- 27:42Gaming PC
- 28:38Thermal Overload
- 31:54Quantum Tunneling
- 36:05One and Zero
- 40:50Cosmic Radiation
- 42:13DRAM
- 44:04Bad contingency planning
- 45:56Red power sockets
- 47:01Solar power
- 49:43Pump storage hydro
- 54:55Wireless power transmission
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