Hah

It’s pretty fantastic. In 2020 (only just beginning my journey of recovery from a conservative upbringing), I decided I should understand what fascism actually was. I found that dictionary definitions were terribly imprecise but eventually found Eco’s essay. I understand there are other methods–of similar scholarly integrity–used to define fascism, but I have not spent the effort to find and compare these other works. It is my (uninterrogated assumption) vague understanding that Eco’s definition isn’t regarded as opinionated.

There’s also the point that a life sentence is wayy cheaper than a death sentence (according to some random guy who once mentioned it)

Hey look, feature 8 of Umberto Eco’s Ur Fascism!

… Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. …

Eco does make a point of clarifying that the presence of absence of any single trait he has identified does not prove a thing is or isn’t fascist.

But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

(The full text of the feature I quoted above)

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

Oh fantastic! I am proud to have observed this exhibit of librarian “humor”, thank you and your children.

My friend is having some trouble too, could someone help me explain it to them?

These aren’t nuclear reactors. This isn’t a miniaturized Chernobyl in your pocket, a delicate balance between control rods and radioactive material maintaining the right proximity to critical mass. This is a rock that’s (metaphorically) kinda warm and takes some decades to become noticably “cooler” and we can use that temperature differential to power tiny devices (and we have used these devices continuously since the 70s)

The thing that nuclear reactors (and weapons) use is the chain reaction of certain radioactive materials whereby the decay of atoms can be triggered by the decay of a previous atom. That is not the mechanism nuclear batteries use and they in fact are incapable of that chain reaction; the radioactive materials that nuclear batteries are made of don’t work the same way as the special isotopes of uranium or plutonium.

(source for what I’m about to say: I vaguely remember basically a couple headlines)

I remember reading a statement from Lewinsky regarding that allegation. Something along the lines of her agreeing that, while she had for many years defended him and declared to anyone asking that their involvement was purely consensual, she didn’t really have the power to consent. I believe it was referenced how the enlightenment of the recent Me Too revelations had influenced her evolving understanding.

20 November 2023 ‘Electrocaloric’ heat pump could transform air conditioning Heat pumps are ubiquitous in the form of air conditioners. Scientists just invented one that avoids harmful refrigerant gases. Davide Castelvecchi

Congested air conditioning units on a building on May 21, 2012 in Mumbai, India. Air conditioners around the world compress and vaporize environmentally damaging gases to cool and heat air. But a new heat pump technology could change all that.Credit: Kuni Takahashi/Getty

The use of environmentally damaging gases in air conditioners and refrigerators could become redundant if a new kind of heat pump lives up to its promise. A prototype, described in a study published last week in Science1, uses electric fields and a special ceramic instead of alternately vaporizing a refrigerant fluid and condensing it with a compressor to warm or cool air.

The technology combines a number of existing techniques and has “superlative performance”, says Neil Mathur, a materials scientist at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Emmanuel Defay, a materials scientist at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology in Belvaux, and his collaborators built their experimental device out of a ceramic with a strong electrocaloric effect. Materials that exhibit this effect heat up when exposed to electric fields.

In an electrocaloric material, the atoms have an electric polarization — a slight imbalance in their distribution of electrons, which gives these atoms a ‘plus’ and a ‘minus’ pole.

When the material is left alone, the polarization of these atoms continuously swivels around in random directions. But when the material is exposed to an electric field, all the electrostatic poles suddenly align, like hair combed in one direction. This transition from disorder to order means that the electrons’ entropy — physicists’ way of measuring disorder — suddenly drops, Defay explains.

But the laws of thermodynamics say that the total entropy of a system can never decline, so if it falls somewhere it must increase somewhere else. “The only possibility for the material to get rid of this extra mess is to pour it into the lattice” of its crystal structure, he says. That extra disorder means that the atoms themselves start vibrating faster, resulting in a rise in temperature.

Cooled by an electric pulse

The researchers then remove the heat by flowing a fluid between slabs of the electrocaloric material, while keeping the electric field on. The result is that the slab goes back to the original, ambient temperature, but has a lower polarization entropy. If the researchers then switch off the electric field, it produces the reverse effect: the polarizations become chaotic again, and entropy pours out of the atomic lattice of the ceramic, carrying heat away with it. The result is that the lattice becomes colder than the ambient temperature and it can cool fluid pumped between the slabs. The cycle then starts again.

In a refrigerator or air conditioner, heat from the warmed-up fluid would be dispersed in the environment, while the cooled fluid would serve to keep the interior or the room cold. For heating, the heat pump would cool down the external environment, extracting heat from it to be pumped into the building.

Defay says that although the technology is not yet ready to be commercialized, with further refinements, the efficiency of his team’s electrocaloric heat pump could be competitive with that of existing heat pumps. That’s a tough standard to meet, because heat pumps based on compressors are already very efficient: when used for heating buildings, for example, they can yield three or more times as much heat as space heaters do, for the same amount of electricity consumption. But unlike a standard heat pump, an electrocaloric heat pump would not need refrigerants such as hydrofluorocarbons or ammonia, which are potentially harmful to the environment. And because it removes the need for a compressor, it could potentially fit into a smaller, simpler device, Defay adds.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03595-1

References Li, J. et al. Science 382, 801–805 (2023).

I get the same math… Seems fucky but… This is assuming the sum of centripetal acceleration and gravity at the peak of the loop is zero. It may be physically possible for a cat to learn to manage a loop with such velocity but I imagine a cat wouldn’t be able to maintain a stride through a zero-g portion of the loop the first time it tried it.

So, instead let’s throw an assumption that the cat must maintain at minimum sum of -1g at the maxima of the loop. That may be badly phrased, assuming the cat must have at minimum a net force of at least one g between it’s paws and the surface of the loop it was currently using to accelerate…

3.5 meters = 11.5 feet

Radius, so still a freaking 7 meter diameter loop feels incredible…

Thank you for this recommendation!