For exactly the same reason : space is scarce but power even more. Power can also become unavailable in a degraded situation much often than on land. Therefore, it is a better design choice to have a chest freezer.
In a city appartement where floor space is scarce, convenience is a key feature and power costs barely nothing, it is a less obvious choice.
EU rollback on reducing gas liability, especially the widely debated rule on « no gas car after 2030 », feels now laughable. Maybe the reason why « technocrats » are good rulers is because they use science and data to do it.
The problem with the EU is that now they depend on rare earth minerals / solar panels / etc. for their infrastructure, which means more dependency on China. However, as the war unfolds, I bet the EU will certainly want to cozy up more with China than whatever the hell that is the Middle East and the US (and hell no they don't want to depend on Russia either!)
While depending on China for Solar panels is of course a liability, it's a very very different liability from relying on fossil fuel imports.
A solar panel has an effective lifetime of 20-30 years. A barrel of oil is literally set on fire.
If China stopped selling solar panels, there wouldnt be any energy crisis, just an inability to install *new* panels.
Same goes for the battery dependencies we have on Chinese imports.
Not a perfect situation of course, but there are some clever things the EU is doing about it. For instance, the recycling requirements is creating a local industry of people who intimately know all the components and construction of Chinese panels and batteries, and these people will be vital in kickstarting the domestic industry if China tries something. It also means that we're getting better and better at recovering rare earth minerals from decommissioned products, and we are building domestic reserves.
Rare earth minerals are often all over the place, they are just very messy to get to and that gets in the way of EU pollution regulations. China is not a sole producer - they are just cheap enough to make mining elsewhere not worth the hassle. That will change fast if they bottleneck the supply.
There's a big find in Norway, largest in Europa according to new estimates[1].
The updated estimate shows that the total rare earth oxide (TREO) content in the mapped resources (Indicated and Inferred) has increased from 8.8 million tonnes in 2024 to 15.9 million tonnes in 2026 – an increase of approximately 80 percent. For the first time, parts of the resource are also classified in the Indicated category, reflecting a higher degree of geological confidence
The WSP report further shows that the proportion of neodymium and praseodymium (NdPr) can be increased from approximately 17 to 19 percent of TREO. These REEs are regarded by the European Commission as the most critical raw materials in terms of supply risk and are important in the manufacturing of permanent magnets for EVs, green energy and defence.
There's no mine there yet though, and they haven't yet determined if it's economically viable. So yeah.
And once enough panels start nearing the end of their lifetime, it's likely that we should be able to recover nearly all the rare earth minerals from them with proper recycling. They don't actually get used up the way, say, fossil fuels do.
Solar panels contain negligible amounts of rare earths, compared to the amount used in wind / gas / steam turbines. They're also still used in oil & natural gas refining (though less than in the past).
Fossil fuel generators are most reliant on them, wind less so, solar barely at all.
Oh, I completely agree—but they're so frequently used as a gotcha for why the rise of solar is just trading one "foreign master" for another. "Oh no, solar panels rely on rare earth minerals, so that means you have to kowtow to China!!!"
And it's true that there is some in them, so it's good to have at least a long-term answer for how we deal with them.
> Oh, I completely agree—but they're so frequently used as a gotcha for why the rise of solar is just trading one "foreign master" for another. "Oh no, solar panels rely on rare earth minerals, so that means you have to kowtow to China!!!"
> And it's true that there is some in them, so it's good to have at least a long-term answer for how we deal with them.
It's the old saying about a man and fish and giving vs. teaching.
Solar panels bought now, at least the quality glass-glass kind, doesn't really go bad in a way that makes them depreciate at-all-quickly.
If in locations that are not themselves at a premium, so lower yield only matters if maintenance overhead per yield becomes so bad it's cheaper to replace& upgrade, they can be expected to stay there for 30~50 years depending on how fast they'll mechanically fall apart after their warranty expires (which is expected to be the duration until which most stay alive). I'd guess something like an agricultural east/west fence install would stay more towards 50y and get individual modules replaced when they break, as they're easy to get to unlike roof/wall installs and the like where they're hard to get to and given they are very low complexity in mounting system ("fence panel") there's little engineering complexity in retrofitting a plain new future panel of the same physical size and sufficiently similar voltage/current.
Rare earth minerals are not consumed in the process of generating solar energy, whereas once you've burned your oil to generate energy, it's gone and you need to buy more. That makes a pretty damn major difference.
Great project and build. I wonder if using a small fan would not help energy transmission, which is eventually the goal of cooking. It may also make the oven work like it’s at higher température while not consuming much energy. It would discharge energy from the walls faster using convection in addition to radiation.
Plus, you can experiment with tray materials depending on what you want to cook.
Suggestions inspired by my experience with convection/classic oven and copper pizza plates
It seems that any problem solving starts by defining the data.
« Always define your variables » is the first thing I learned during my engineering studies, in both math and physics class. Professors were insisting a lot about it. I still consider it is the most important thing I ever learned 10 years later.
Sure, and it's often warranted to be cynical about this, but the work about the work is really really important. Often the lower level worker thinks they do everything and the upper levels just chat and politick around. E.g. if you're a truck driver you may think you are the one doing the real work. But if the bosses miscalculate if it's profitable to enter into a relationship with a customer and haul their stuff from A to B, your job won't exist. If the product managers decide to build a product that nobody will need and buy, then you can do your best engineering work and it will be for nothing. If you're a construction worker operating the drill to build a subway line, it may feel like the bosses are just having meetings and fun chats all the time, but it matters where the metro is built, they have to balance lots of interests and talk to lots of people. Real estate prices will be impacted, noise will be impacted, more people will start to show up in some places, convenience will be impacted, all that needs to be balanced with the soil situation, underground waters, etc. etc.
Decide what work should be done is just as important as the actual work, sometimes more.
That’s powerful. Most of the differences I can see between AI generated output and human output comes from the « broad but specific » context of the task. I mean company culture, organization rules and politics, larger team focus and way of working.
It may take time to build the required knowledge bases but it must be worth it
Interesting site ! There is something playful in the idea of ambigrams that I can’t explain. Maybe something like a puzzle ?
A nice project could be to automate a generator. It must be quite hard because it feels like a mix between a Captcha and an AI hallucination but made right. The « glyph » search part of the site is maybe the best asset to start with a database of possible matches.
Image Diffusion models are already capable of this. There was a research paper and I believe model was released as well, which ch generates visual illusions where an image when flipped becomes something else.
Same idea here. A text needs to be diffused from two views until it looks the same but still matches the input. It might already exist.
Building one is definitely a puzzle. And trying to read it upside down/flipped without actually flipping it is also a kind of puzzle (i.e. like trying to run a compilation in your head, trying to see in your mind first before "running"/"compiling" the program).
They're also like the made-up language from the movie Arrival. You kind of need to know the end and the beginning at the same time.
I wonder how good GenAI is in generating ambigrams. I know they're very good in generating those visual illusions of having a face in a landscape. Perhaps that can be the next "Pelican test" once the Pelican test has been completely absorbed in training.
In a city appartement where floor space is scarce, convenience is a key feature and power costs barely nothing, it is a less obvious choice.
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