this podcast fucking sucks i can't sit through it. If you spent half as much time actually talking about the subject as you all do laughing at your own shitty jokes this might actually be interesting content. Instead its extremely grating bordering on unlistenable. Great subject matter, awful presentation.
20:34 I used a Sikh to generate power for my heater, but when I tried adding more power, the turban started spinning too fast until the Sikh detached and was flung away. In the moments that he was airborne, he was a SIkh heating missile.
Horrible situation, but the stories of preppers eating cold canned food because they couldn't figure out how to cook without the microwave were a bright light in these dark times.
wait theyre prepping but have no camping stove??? even i have one with enough gas cans to survive for 2 weeks and i only need that thing for camping...
Tragically after eighty years of flexing and contracting the much weaker Arkansas will be ripped apart. So really we must make the whole contiguous states out of heavy structural steel. Make it Canada's problem.
It's nowhere near as bad as ireland where we've gotten 3 big snowstorms in like 100 years which means whenever one happens not only are there no snowploughs in our country, there are no snowploughs on our landmass
Extending Alice’s “electron as worker” analysis, superconductivity works when temperatures which keep electrons atomized are lowered, allowing electrons to forge social bonds with one another, achieve class consciousness, and work together in harmonious cooperation to expel bourgeois external magnetic fields. At this point, resistance ceases to exist, and electrons are pleased with their work
That's the best prepping plan; get just enough food, water, and warm gear to last a week or so, and then go around and take whatever you need from the preppers who stockpiled 15,000 rounds of 5.56 and then froze to death because they neglected to buy blankets.
@@guypradel8874 Folks on the internet like to call these people "disaster LARPers", and I really have to disagree...all the LARPers I know have been camping in shit weather for long enough to know at least the basics of getting a fire started and heating up your canned beans :P.
How do you pronounce Arkansan as an Arkansan? Sorry this is out of the blue but I can't make it make sense, is it like Kansan or like Kansawn? Sincerely, guy from new zealand
@@freeaudiojungle4407Quick short story, they actually taught in my state history class that the pronunciation of the demonym for Arkansas was up for debate at one point. Arkansawyer “are can sawyer” and Arkansan “are can zen” were the prominent pronunciations at the time. The latter of these is version used today.
@@akuyume7 Way better than us in Indiana. We’re called Hoosiers. Why? no one remembers. Might as well have called us fobknobblers. Why are we fobknobblers? Because some long dead fogie said so.
Fallon you are wonderful don't hesitate in talking over Liam and Alice interrupting you , it's their jobs and yours is telling them to shut up so you can keep on explaining.
Socialism is when there are catenaries. That's the REAL reason we haven't electrified yet, except for those pinko coasties with their NEC and CalTrain.
Look up the Japanese power grid sometime, it's insane. Half the country runs on 50hz while the other half runs on 60hz. It's an issue that goes back to the late-Meiji Era in the 1890's when Kyoto in the south/west first began to electrify under American guidance but Tokyo in the north/east sought European advice. So when, say, a tsunami hits a city in the northern half, let's call it "Fukushima", they can't just draw more power from the southern half because the frequencies are different.
@@sirrliv Or more precisely, they can't draw enough power. There is switching equipment between them that converts between the frequencies but it can handle only a fraction of what is needed.
The entire Quebec province powerline infrastructure was devastated by the 1998 ice storm, turns out even pylons built out of steel beams aren't meant to sustain the weight of *12 inches of accumulated ice.* Not 12 inches of snow, 12 inches of *solid ice.* It took weeks to recover the power grid back to its normal state.
@@MazHem yep I knew somewhat about the Ice storm, but nevertheless did some googling to find more info about the train as a generator and found a blog site with someone doing a reflection on the whole ice storm with a bunch of useful links on the impact and the recovery. steemit.com/history/@kiligirl/remembering-canada-s-worst-ice-storm-ever-part-5-postscript-what-happened-in-my-home-town
It was a crazy experience. My family lived right in the middle of the most impacted region, and we were out of power for almost a month. We were fortunate to get out of town to live with my grandparents for a couple weeks. They had to deploy the army to make any decent progress on the cleanup and make sure people would not freeze/starve to death. ua-cam.com/video/H1z_cbx9S-Y/v-deo.html
electricity is like water in the sense that it was not meant to be enslaved and always goes where you don't want it. it just happens to be a lot deadlier.
@@MechanicWolf85 You say that jokingly yet Ive seen an argument that Poseidon was a *very* badass underworld god once upon a time before the now popular depiction was codified. The scariest, most realistic underworld is the deep sea after all.....
Had to double check but I had a moment of "Wait, I know Fallon!". Was more in adjacent circles in Drexel and it's been years but it's cool to hear a literal familiar voice.
The reason why you convert the AC to DC when transferring power from one grid to another is because each grid is at a different point in it's 60hz frequency and you can't directly transfer power because you would destroy generators between the grids if you did that you would either speed up generators or slow them down to match the frequency because essentially generators are mechanically linked through the electric grid. So instead of directly transferring power they convert it to DC because it has no frequency and then convert it back to the new AC frequency therefore bypassing this issue.
There's another way to do it - gigantic, spinning, building-sized transformers. Used to be used back before solid state electronics was good enough to make AC-DC-AC conversion practical.
The most efficient way to do this is to use one grid to change up a pile of rechargeable D cell batteries, load them onto trucks, drive them across the border and plug them into the other grid boombox style.
@@bokoloaranyfa3824 Also means no dealing with the fun of reactive power or, worse, the feared harmonics. If we were designing power infrastructure from scratch today (perhaps when we finally get around to colonising Mars), we'd probably go for DC. But at the time it was all put in place, there was no practical way to carry out DC-DC voltage conversion as there is today.
Most groundhogs are rodents, closely related to squirrels and marmots, but since Phil is immortal and can predict the weather, I assume he is some sort of eldritch groundhog-being that can't be biologically explained.
Well, if we assume the average groundhog is perfectly spherical and of uniform density, and further assume it moves through a vacuum at a certain velocity, and that Phil's appearance doesn't immediately lead one to believe Phil is anything other than an average groundhog yet exhibits an inability to die while simultaneously exhibiting clairvoyance, one can postulate Phil may be a Lovecraftian hybrid species intended to trick humanity through the ruse of being a malevolent clairvoyant hedgehog sphere. In order to determine if the hypothesis is false, Phil must be inspected via a spherical electron analyzer (also perfectly spherical and of uniform density) and inspected for non-aristotalian, non-euclidian electrons. Lovecraft advises electrons with a skin tone darker than Pantone 727 are inherently evil (citation needed) and are not to be trusted, but popular theory suggests his findings are influenced by the sociopolitical climate of the 1920s and may yet prove to be false. Submit findings in a report perfectly spherical and of uniform density.
I believe El Paso actually did something. I think they moved from ERCOT to the Western grid, if I recall correctly. They also bought a bunch of backup generators and said "hey, we get warnings about these cold snaps like 10 days in advance - we can totally just heat up the backup generators and make sure they're working before it actually gets cold." Turns out that worked out for them. Go figure.
0:00 - Hey, this is actually my branch of engineering. 0:20 - Oh, that was not a drop from Alice's sound board. 1:33 - There are dozens of us! 3:03 - Boo crimps. Boo. 5:50 - You know it's bad when ARKANSAS has a better government than you. 10:35 - Rectifier 13:33 - VFD make motor go brrr, but brrr at different speed as you vary f to the d. 17:40 - Just remember - High voltage doesn't start until 35,000V. From 600 to there, it's just "Medium." Like you'll be if you touch it. One human - done medium. 22:32 - Oh, really one of us. 23:10 - Roz almost describes it right. Generator doesn't go around 60 times per second because it would fly apart from the centrifugal force (I know that's not a thing) and the bearings would be even crazier. We actually put like 60 sets of magnets in so that it can rotate once per second and give us 60Hz. 28:00 - Exchanges are Communist. 28:50 - Earthy electrons are worthless. 31:30 - Description of my professional life right there. "You need to reconductor 2 miles of line - $8M please." 34:25 - Additional unacknowledged electrical generation pun. 37:54 - Alice thinks the energy market is supposed to be for the consumer. It's supposed to be for utility companies and big consumers. That way someone who thinks they can build a better power generator can connect and sell the juice under PURPA. The crazy starts when you let the consumer touch that stuff. 41:45 - Oh, the IOU's have computers to check on that stuff Alice. Don't go doing that. Especially don't go doing that if you have a smart meter. 44:25 - Quebec - the Texas of Canada. 44:35 - Here's the map with only three colors: www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27152 49:45 - Kangaroo Day 54:30 - 2011 - The last polar vortex that absolutely drove so many energy companies out of business. (No really, it did.) 1:00:05 - Are we going to learn about the difference between radial and network feeds and the protection differences between them? 1:12:48 - Quebec - the Texas of Canada that's actually what Texas wishes it was. 1:17:40 - Barack Obama = James T. Kirk 1:22:20 - No, you are multiplying by $1.20. 1:28:03 - This is why Roz is a civil engineer. (1) 100W * 12hrs = 1.2kWh. 1.2kWh * $9/kWh = $10.80. Still nuts, but off by a factor of 10 - or one civil engineer factor of safety. 1:32:10 - Building History! 1:44:36 - The wrong meme - we all know what he wanted to say 1:51:20 - EIFS = Plastic Formstone 1:56:00 - Oh, that's forboding. 2:00:42 - (We've bypassed the fact that sprinklers and fire pumps need electricity and non-frozen water.)
What you kinda skipped over was the situation when they decided to do rolling blackouts - where they were 4 minutes away from a month-long blackout. The net frequency, which is ordinarily at 60 Hz, had dropped to 59,3Hz. A lower frequency means that your demand exceeds supply. Normal operations are within 0.03 around 60 Hz. Even slight deviations can cause damage to turbines when sustained for longer than a few minutes. Hence, most power plants have protection systems built in. These start activating at 59,4 Hz (when sustained for a certain amount of time) and become progressively more trigger-happy. The first of these kick in when the frequency stays below 59.4 Hz for 9 minutes. So if there's an extreme shortage in demand, the frequency instability will force more generators to trip, further decreasing demand. Had this happened the Texas power grid would have totally disintegrated. Such a collapse is unheard of and recovering from it would take weeks, people believe, if it is even possible. You essentially have to rebuild the entire grid. Now the people at ERCOT saw the writing on the wall when the frequency dropped 59,4Hz and immediately started removing large-scale consumers from the grid. Luckily, they managed to get above the critical frequency within 5 minutes. So Texas was only 4 minutes away from an infrastructure collapse of biblical proportions.
Maybe I am wrong, but I remember, that there were 2 reasons while rolling blackouts became permanent fo rmany: - Some subnets can be switched back only manually. - Some subnets get electricity from industrial consumers and those consumers were cut permanently.
Ted Cruz was just trying to save money on his electricity bill. He did the calculations and worked out that flights to Cancun and a week in a luxury hotel was cheaper than 3 days electricity...
It’s well worth googling the ‘98 ice storm to see the big transmission towers bent over like Godzilla waded through them. That engine in Boucherville was in place for about three weeks- one assumes they occasionally brought some more fuel to it.
I grew up down here. Advice: don't drive in an ice storm here. Even if YOU know how to? We don't. Just stay your ass home. (P.S. it's in the 70's f now here.) Further edit: prepping is only logical to a degree, but having canned food, water, basic first aid supplies, blankets, maybe a really good phone charger? I live in Houston, we have f**king WEATHER here, but thanks to climate change you may have WEATHER too, wherever you happen to dwell.
I live in Atlanta, and we freak the fuck out at flurries. Every few years we get ice storms, and I'm probably one of the only people on Earth who LIKES ice storms.
I had a friend in Mississippi call me in a panic many years ago. It'd snowed there and he had to drive home. He didn't know how to drive in snow. The first thing I said to him is "no one there knows what they're doing and that's your biggest danger.". He put me on speaker and proceeded to babble while going the whole three miles home. When he got home he said "I made it. What now?" "Go inside, silly." He saw so many cars off the road waiting for help along the way.
From what I've seen of the driving of southern licence plates (especially a certain Texan one) that have made their way up North, I'd say that extends beyond ice storms to any significant amount of snow. Do you want to be on the road with people that think that, dispite never having driven in the snow before, being in a 4-wheel drive suv means they can drive faster than everyone who has driven in snow all their life? I'll never forget the dumb sob that I watched crash into the same semi twice in the same accident (because he wouldn't just take his foot off the gas after the first impact) and then continue to drive down the highway in deep snow faster than any northerner in a heavy snowstorm. We eventually passed him in a ditch later. I would not want to be on the roads in any winter storm where that kind of driver was the norm.
WI has been home to the Weather™️ since the ages, but it's been getting even more Weather™️ in the recent decades. Probably a sign of a much larger issue, probably.
Most people have canned food in their cupboards. First aid kits aren't that rare either, although not that many people have any training on how to use them.
y'all really should follow the "Things I Won't Work With" blog. A long litany of absolutely horrific chemicals, the brave idiots who tried to use them, and the horrible ways the former killed the latter.
39:00 "certain people who like this sort of thing" gonna start treating deregulation and free market extremism as if it's some fringe kink or fetish now; thank you for this.
@@uilsoum875 "As long as it's safe, sane, and consensual, so... have you had a frank and honest conversation with your minimum wage worker about whether they're willing to participate?"
@@marinary1326 What’s good for the bedroom ought to be good for the boardroom. Holding work contracts to the same standard of consent would pretty quickly evaporate any notion of just how “consensual” the worker-boss relationship is under capitalism.
My daughter, her infant son and husband tried to tough it out for a couple of days. A friend w power eventually took them in. Within a few months of the freeze, they took jobs in the Pacific Northwest and left Texas in the rear view mirror.
The only Doomsday Prepper show episode I remember is a family that grew a huge garden with, like, brambles and blackberries surrounding the vegetable patches and fruit trees, and the dad tried to make deterrent out of their homegrown peppers and ended up basically pepper spraying himself, his wife, and the production crew.
LOL. Honestly, I'm kind of okay with preppers who make big gardens if they destroy their lawns when they do it. It's a great unintentional plus side of prepper ideology.
You don't need to try to make pepper spray to mace a household... Source: a friend of mine who was making hot sauce with a few ghost peppers forgot about the pot simmering on the stove...
My English class is doing an open- ended project about social justice and I'm using both this video and the Vulcan bridge disaster one as research sources. Specifically my topic is how corporate greed leads to contaminated water and worse living conditions, especially in poor communities. Thanks for these podcasts, and I hope all of you have wonderful days.
"We need a generator, and to move it into town. A train will solve both problems." The more badass version of that is aircraft carriers getting hooked into local power supplies, like _USS Lexington_ in Tacoma, WA in 1929.
AC: flows outside of you, fries your outsides to a crisp DC: goes straight through you, blows a hole in one or more parts of you (track safety training is fun)
@@pamdemonia Britain is a good and normal country that relies heavily on the "blows a hole in you" juice at track level for services in and around London/the SE, right where you can fall onto it. I do not like working shifts there.
Listening to alice impersonate the Quebecois by doing a european french accent is like listening to some one impersonate a guy from baltimore by talking like Sean Connery
The thing about the Québec interconnection is that there are back to back AC DC inverters . This allows for greater redundancy. If there was to be a cascading failure outside of Québec, in practice, it wouldn't be able to propagate through theses converters. In fact, this exact scenario did play out in 2003. There is another set of inverters between the main load centers in the south and the north where most of the giant power generating dams are located. Hydro Québec is busy trying to build more interconnection to sell their surpluses to the northern US.
Bell actually was regulated with “regulated interchanges.” That’s why you could bypass Bell’s long-distance lines by using SprInt long-distance or something. But the neoliberal deregulation and breakup of Bell should be its own episode. I could go on and on about how the NHRR of Bell, SNET, was a bizarre exception to everything but mostly indistinguishable anyway.
My father went to college in the late 1950s, and did some work as a stage manager for theater productions. The lighting panel was notoriously shoddy and dangerous, and he recalled an incident where, in a matter of seconds: 1) the guy working the lighting panel touched the wrong thing and got electrocuted. 2) someone else noticed #1 and tried to pull him off, and got electrocuted. 3) someone noticed 1 and 2 and tried to pull them off and got electrocuted. 4) someone noticed all of the above and happened to have a long wool scarf. They quickly wrapped the end the scarf around their hands and looped the middle around guy #3 and yanked, then guy #2 and yanked, and lastly guy #1 and yanked. So yes, some people can tell you what it feels like to get a shock that would kill you if it lasted just a bit longer.
So there is a concept from science fiction called an "active support" structure. basically to build taller than steel and concrete can physically withstand you replace the support columns with these high pressure water loops or particle beam loops that have a higher compressive strength, the only hang up is you need a constant and uninterrupted power supply to the beams or the building falls down. I always laughed at this idea, who would want to live in a building that fails catastrophically if it loses power! turns out a lot of us already do.
I was contracted to doing some communications work in a 1 million volt DC inverter substation for an undersea link and they had a rule that no ladders over 6ft. could be used. But they were absolutely fine with asking I erect a 20ft. aluminum antenna mast right in the middle of the station, under the outgoing AC wires, because they were "having trouble" getting signal on the 4G modems built into the boards of their backup control system, inside metal cabinets, inside a steel building under a maze of high voltage wires. aka a triple Faraday cage. Everything in that place was literally vibrating at all times and I could not believe I had to explain to these power company workers why I wasn't going to do what they asked.
I have been listening to 27 picoseconds and they still haven't gotten to the point. Very derivative. I like my social commentary/commedy podcast about engineering disasters to be 10/20 nanoseconds at most.
i agree with you..... but when the jokes are landing flat, and go on for 15 mins..... it kinda gets old, quickly . their have been MANY episodes where one guy HAS TO cut everyone off and says "back to the point....bla bla bla"..... . this show would be WAY more popular if they didnt go into 25 min tangents 10 min tangents.... fine 25 to 40 min tangents.... no
The joke about flushing out "stale" electrons reminds me of instructions I've seen once for building an "electron flusher", by combining a large diode and a halogen flood lamp, allowing electrons to pass in one direction only (and rhus using only one half of the sine wave). I'm fairly certain it was a joke, but it's concerning that I can't be completely sure with the way HiFi enthusiasts fall for esoteric solutions for imagined problems.
They're trying to make water into a stonk too and make a market for it. In California irrc. It's monstrous treating a thing you die without as a commodity.
In Germany, the trains run at 16.7 Hertz (originally it was exactly 16 and two thirds, but it was changed to 16.7 to avoid some problems due to it being an exact fraction of the grid frequency). This is because originally, large single-phase commutated motors couldn't be built to run at the 50 Hz grid frequency, and a third of that was easy to make via motor-generator sets.
meanwhile.... montana had -50 temps with 60mph winds (wind chills in the -80 to 100 range) . and no one died.... power was only cut for 20 mins at a time to help you.....and again, no one died
I live in the PNW. That storm didn't give us much snow (I think there was snow in Portland) but it dropped an inch of freezing rain in the Willamette valley and brought down every tree in the neighborhood into my backyard. We also lost power for most of that saturday.
Arc flashes are no joke fucking terrifying. The amazing thing is that some people survive them. I met a man who literally had 2 hooks for hands after 2 separate incidents working as a linesman.
I lived through that ice storm in Montreal, CN gave us locos that were going they were planning to sell off anyway so they didn't care about fixing them after. They kept them running for over a week.
i am going to guess that all the people who live in Texas where you use basicly your climate unit for both heating and cooling, just all tried to heat up their houses with those, overcharged the transformers and cause one or more of them to melt down.. Those things are huge. Not exactly 5 min job, especially if you don't have a spare one at hand.
One note about the downtown skylines I can’t say if it was the case in Austin or Dallas (but would think it likely) but in Houston at least the downtown high rises are on the same grid as the city and county jails as well as at least one hospital so cutting off that grid to secure more capacity for dedicated residential wasn’t an option. That having been said, I think the waste in lighting up the big buildings to look ‘cool’ at night is a colossal waste of resources every night of the year.
Moderately disappointed you didn't bring the skyline compilation to show the class, specifically our big stupid stadium in San Antonio that was built for the Spurs, used for a few years until they complained about it and made the city build another stadium
Ah fuck, it's a WTYP on a subject on which I am an actual expert, now instead of just laughing at how simplistic Justin's explanations are and imagining nuclear engineers being mad at 'spicy rocks', I am the one who is mad
I’m way behind on my degree but from what I’ve completed as well as years of hobbyist studying I can safely conclude that electricity is dark magic Ben Franklin thought it was light magic but it’s dark magic and that made everything more confusing
This is the first episode I've listened to and I was so surprised and impressed by someone (Alice) actually knowing what misophonia is and apologizing about it that I got a little tiny bit teary-eyed. Thank you!
Suburban Ottawa was out for like two weeks, after the Ice Storm of '98. I was eleven, and still fit on the loveseat in the living room, where the fireplace happened to be, so I slept there in my coat and snowpants for a bit. We borrowed a generator for the fridge and furance after like a week, off cousins that lived a lot more downtown.
I remember the Canadian Locomotive Story! I recall them running it at a very low intensity (sth like 8-12%) as that provides fitting output for a local power-grid, which would mean they could run 1 fuel load for, say, 10x as long as regularly driving it.
The whole "Why don't Americans have electric tea kettles?" is apparently because, while US electricity goes brrr, the UK's electricity goes BRRRRRR and so the British tea kettles boil water much faster than American's. So while we Americans do occasionally have kettles, ours are not nearly as impressive.
Fairly recently, Technology Connections tackled this question, complete with explanations of how electric kettles work, energy usage and timed comparisons of American water-boiling methods, and the requisite amount of snarkiness. His video started with the basic conclusion that more people in North America don't use electric kettles simply because we drink coffee instead of tea. Which honestly makes sense. Anecdotally, the only people I know who use kettles are those who drink tea (I didn't own one until I switched from coffee). ☕️🍍
1:15:26 The engine is an M-420W by the looks of it, it's 2000hp and uses a V12-251C, an updated version of which is still made by Fairbanks-Morse as a backup generator, so it seems like a solid plan.
Please don't give Arkansas too much credit. I'm a trucker who was stuck in 5 hours of traffic on I-30 just after the storm and I watched a DOT supervisor truck try to cross the median from the service road to the highway proper, and immediately get stuck in the deep snow, because that's how deep snow works. Other drivers in traffic helped push him forwards to get through. As soon as they were free a highway patrol officer tried to follow him and was also immediately stuck.
I've heard the Montreal diesel train story before but I always figured they had laid temporary tracks to move it. Holy shit they just drove a train right down a street like it was a truck.
An episode on hell freezing over. This gonna be good. (Congrats on the PE license!) I ended up watching a bunch of substation powerup videos one day and god it's terrifying. RIP the first thumbnail.
I'm reminded of my internship as an electrician when I was 16 and we visited a substation. "this button shuts down half of the city - Don't touch it. This cooper rail caries 10.000 V - Don't touch it.
I had a little electric train set when I was young, and one day I very smartly decided to grab the track while it was running. I remember it took several seconds for me to realize, in order: 1 - I just popped into existence, this moment. 2 - I am a sentient being. 3 - oohhh I don’t feel very good ... 4 - is the thing in my hand DOING this to me...? And just then my uncle knocked it out of my hand and yelled at me. But I didn’t really need the scolding; I’ll ALWAYS remember how much that sucked haha
Coming back to make everyone aware that my friends and I could predict what zip codes would lose power based on median housing cost in those areas here in Dallas-Fort Worth. I'll let you guess what end lost power.
15:35 Talking about how electricity works... Amperage is the murdery part! Shake hands with danger: I’ve grabbed a 10,000 volt electric fence and it sucked but since it’s “only a few amps” (as the boss said) and comes down the wire in short pulses, it doesn’t paralyze you or hurt the animals long term
Nice to have a fellow EE on the pod, I’ve never related more when Fallon was trying to explain how electrons work in layman’s terms. I still get nervous when working around high voltage as well
I'm something of a leftist prepper myself. I can say that there's definitely way too many different processes/industries to maintain society for one person to reasonably manage/rebuild (IE: pharmaceuticals). I've got my preparations organized into multiple phases, which requires steadily increasing the amount of material wealth I've acquired. Prepping is seriously expensive but it's manageable at first if you are mostly buying things that you'll use. But the big thing is getting a group of people to prep with. I know some right wingers from work who are also preppers who plan to secure their neighborhood (but their long term plans after ammo runs out are pretty nonexistent from what I can tell).
If you want to open an electroplating plant next to your hydrolysis plant next to your massive "vegetable" grow facility you can 100% do it, but you're gonna need to pay 20k a mile to run new 3phase out to well there's your problem industries. ~Sauce, interned at a power company.
1:06:45 They can get away with selling not-good products because if society collapses and you bust out the generator but it's broken, what're you gonna do, sue them? I'm pretty sure there was a recent scandal where a company was selling prepper cases of "canned food" but it just turned out to all be full of water.
You are correct about the Great Mosque of Djenne, the modern structure was largely a french colonial project, but the designs which informed it were mostly African
i know you guys talk about this in the ep but i'm here to post as a person who was in texas, this isn't nearly the worst snowstorm we've had even in the last 5 years, but the major problems were that it was so cold and it was the entire state. most cities set 70-year record low temperatures and as we approached zero degrees F every electric heater in the state turned on. generally snowstorms only cover a portion of the state so the grid in total can handle increased load up north, but in this case it was every metro area except el paso which is on the national grid. pretty bad system. anyway i know you talked about this but i'm posting it anyway because i love to type my little words.
I'm shocked no one mentioned the reason electric kettles are more common in the UK. Their outlets output 240 volts and the US has only 120 volt mains power. So US kettles can't heat water as quickly. I had heard the UK grid has special peak power plants that know to start generating for the demand created by commercial break tea-makers, as Alice mentioned.
@@LukeFergusonMN I believe the kettles switching on is less of a factor than using the bathroom during a commercial break; that causes pumping stations to kick into high gear to meet the sudden spike in demand, and of course those pumping stations run off of mains electricity, and demand a hell of a lot more of it than household appliances do. But yes, that's basically the reason why for certain jobs in the energy sector, you do in fact need to have a good understanding of the plotlines of current soap operas and be able to predict whether an upcoming episode is going to elicit particularly high viewership, because it's all of those people who've just sat down for a real Wham episode of Eastenders or Corrie, getting up to use the toilet and/or make tea, that drives that massive spike in demand.
The external insulation in post Soviet states is very important. Some of the large block houses are notoriously energy inneficient, and the 5-9-12 storey housing complexes are very grey. So most of the states here attempt to do renovation with external insulation and it will be a parte of local greening initiatives, as the winters are constantly cold.
![[UA] Team Vitality проти NAVI | IEM Cologne 2024](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/wttO1zVRTC0/mqdefault.jpg)
this podcast fucking sucks i can't sit through it. If you spent half as much time actually talking about the subject as you all do laughing at your own shitty jokes this might actually be interesting content. Instead its extremely grating bordering on unlistenable. Great subject matter, awful presentation.
thank christ i haven't found a pinnable comment in the last 3 episodes
Lryson Bogie
Why are y'alls insults so fucking bland and repetitive lately 0/10
LOGIE LOLLLL
@@Midwest_Urbanist it's all they have really
20:34 I used a Sikh to generate power for my heater, but when I tried adding more power, the turban started spinning too fast until the Sikh detached and was flung away. In the moments that he was airborne, he was a SIkh heating missile.
That was a Sikh joke.
That's way too good a joke for a username that ends in numbers
You can overclock your sikh by putting him in a medieval knight armour.
@@grmpEqweer Fancy seeing you here!
@@Myrea_Rend
😊👋
Horrible situation, but the stories of preppers eating cold canned food because they couldn't figure out how to cook without the microwave were a bright light in these dark times.
The Virgin Prepper vs the Chad 12 year old Scout
Calls himself a prepper; can't use a portable stove.
Is your pfp renaissance Rich Evans?
Nice
Surprised they weren’t relying on electric can openers 😂
wait theyre prepping but have no camping stove???
even i have one with enough gas cans to survive for 2 weeks and i only need that thing for camping...
If all of Texas hade been a single piece of rigid steel this could have been avoided.
High strength steel?
@@DahVoozel Yes. Very strong and very rigid.
Tragically after eighty years of flexing and contracting the much weaker Arkansas will be ripped apart. So really we must make the whole contiguous states out of heavy structural steel. Make it Canada's problem.
Indeed. Plenty of thermal mass
@@gontadigahole As a Canadian I'll say this: never trust Canada.
Living in New England, I cannot fathom a state where everyone owns a truck but no one owns a plow.
They would prefer to just drive their lifted kits through the sh*+ the politicians and big businesses produce
It's nowhere near as bad as ireland where we've gotten 3 big snowstorms in like 100 years which means whenever one happens not only are there no snowploughs in our country, there are no snowploughs on our landmass
Don’t forget they’re all 2wd and let their tires go bald.
When you average snowfall is two inches a year it's not seen as a important purchase
living in montana USA..... i cant either
Extending Alice’s “electron as worker” analysis, superconductivity works when temperatures which keep electrons atomized are lowered, allowing electrons to forge social bonds with one another, achieve class consciousness, and work together in harmonious cooperation to expel bourgeois external magnetic fields. At this point, resistance ceases to exist, and electrons are pleased with their work
Haha, nice analogy.
@@relight6931 Thanks, I couldn't decide if "achieve class condensation" would scan or be a funny pun, and looking back I'm still not sure
@@sammosaurusrex it Nah, I mean the original works good as is, and sometimes less is more. i wouldn't change it.
Oh my gosh I love this so much.
End the alienation of labour... I mean electrons!
"You're beautiful no matter what you do, shut the fuck up" is the powerful energy I needed to get me through today. Yay, indeed, Liam!
Aggressively supportive Liam is the energy we all need in our lives
@@zuthalsoraniz6764 Angrily caring about people
For someone who sells himself as such a curmudgeon he really seems like he can be a sweet guy
This is why we say Yay Liam
Life coach Liam curses you into self-love
im just imagining the 100% prepared doomsday prepper who dies cause his car breaks down on the way to his safehouse
Worst, didn't you saw the twitter thread about the preper who couldn't open cans because he only had an electric can opener ?
@@guypradel8874 that's almost copypasta levels of weird
That's the best prepping plan; get just enough food, water, and warm gear to last a week or so, and then go around and take whatever you need from the preppers who stockpiled 15,000 rounds of 5.56 and then froze to death because they neglected to buy blankets.
@@a.p.2356 something sick inside me laughs at the idea of these preppers fumbling around not being able to find their stashes because of the snow.
@@guypradel8874 Folks on the internet like to call these people "disaster LARPers", and I really have to disagree...all the LARPers I know have been camping in shit weather for long enough to know at least the basics of getting a fire started and heating up your canned beans :P.
As an Arkansan, I too was surprised to see our state government being relatively competent. We can thank Texas for setting the bar so low.
How do you pronounce Arkansan as an Arkansan? Sorry this is out of the blue but I can't make it make sense, is it like Kansan or like Kansawn? Sincerely, guy from new zealand
@@freeaudiojungle4407Quick short story, they actually taught in my state history class that the pronunciation of the demonym for Arkansas was up for debate at one point. Arkansawyer “are can sawyer” and Arkansan “are can zen” were the prominent pronunciations at the time. The latter of these is version used today.
@@akuyume7 Way better than us in Indiana. We’re called Hoosiers. Why? no one remembers. Might as well have called us fobknobblers. Why are we fobknobblers? Because some long dead fogie said so.
As an Oklahoman, Same here.
Fallon you are wonderful don't hesitate in talking over Liam and Alice interrupting you , it's their jobs and yours is telling them to shut up so you can keep on explaining.
Air, in fact, has a shitload of electrical resistance, that's why lightning is such a fuck
Living in Tampa, can confirm.
Switch the trains to 50hz and make them go twice as fast.
Oh no, fellow europeans. He found our secret to high speed trains!!!!
Which one of you snitched?
@@benoitbvg2888 it was me, I thought it would be funny
Socialism is when there are catenaries. That's the REAL reason we haven't electrified yet, except for those pinko coasties with their NEC and CalTrain.
Look up the Japanese power grid sometime, it's insane. Half the country runs on 50hz while the other half runs on 60hz. It's an issue that goes back to the late-Meiji Era in the 1890's when Kyoto in the south/west first began to electrify under American guidance but Tokyo in the north/east sought European advice. So when, say, a tsunami hits a city in the northern half, let's call it "Fukushima", they can't just draw more power from the southern half because the frequencies are different.
@@sirrliv Or more precisely, they can't draw enough power. There is switching equipment between them that converts between the frequencies but it can handle only a fraction of what is needed.
So thanks to Fallon’s explanation I learned
1. Electrons do in fact go BRRRRR
2. Electrons in the US vibe harder than the rest of the world.
60 hertz VS 50 hertz baby
North America
@@noah3384 whats your point????
.
.
what about south america??
again... i dont understand
@@kainhall 60hz is not just US, it’s all of NA
@@noah3384 North America and like half of Japan for really dumb reasons.
Would you look at that, "The goddamn news" took over the show.
This is going to be good
"The Goddamn Episode"
Well there's your goddamn news
It is good unless you live in Texas…
The entire Quebec province powerline infrastructure was devastated by the 1998 ice storm, turns out even pylons built out of steel beams aren't meant to sustain the weight of *12 inches of accumulated ice.* Not 12 inches of snow, 12 inches of *solid ice.* It took weeks to recover the power grid back to its normal state.
I mean damn, shorted by a hard 12 inches of accumulated ice
sOlId IcE cAnT fReEzE sTeEl BeAmS
@@MazHem yep I knew somewhat about the Ice storm, but nevertheless did some googling to find more info about the train as a generator and found a blog site with someone doing a reflection on the whole ice storm with a bunch of useful links on the impact and the recovery.
steemit.com/history/@kiligirl/remembering-canada-s-worst-ice-storm-ever-part-5-postscript-what-happened-in-my-home-town
I’m guessing that none of the houses in Quebec blew up or burned down?
It was a crazy experience. My family lived right in the middle of the most impacted region, and we were out of power for almost a month. We were fortunate to get out of town to live with my grandparents for a couple weeks. They had to deploy the army to make any decent progress on the cleanup and make sure people would not freeze/starve to death.
ua-cam.com/video/H1z_cbx9S-Y/v-deo.html
the brief pause between alice going "its unprofitable to screw people over" and liam's joker laugh was very good
"It's Bavaria in Texas."
As a German, I think it's right.
Agreed. Both are too big, both are too self-important, and the world would be a better place if both were independent.
Yes (Roz-Voice)
@@dkbmaestrorules i think you said independent when you meant to say ‘destroyed’
Bavaria: Where Prussian charm meets Austrian dilligence.
No
electricity is like water in the sense that it was not meant to be enslaved and always goes where you don't want it. it just happens to be a lot deadlier.
It's deadlier still when electricity and water start collaborating to take out the silly meatbags who think they can control the forces of nature.
Idk I think historically a lot more people have been killed by water
@@CODMarioWarfare huh, fair point
Poseidon is stronger than Zeus
@@MechanicWolf85 You say that jokingly yet Ive seen an argument that Poseidon was a *very* badass underworld god once upon a time before the now popular depiction was codified. The scariest, most realistic underworld is the deep sea after all.....
Had to double check but I had a moment of "Wait, I know Fallon!". Was more in adjacent circles in Drexel and it's been years but it's cool to hear a literal familiar voice.
Small university
Incredibly based
The reason why you convert the AC to DC when transferring power from one grid to another is because each grid is at a different point in it's 60hz frequency and you can't directly transfer power because you would destroy generators between the grids if you did that you would either speed up generators or slow them down to match the frequency because essentially generators are mechanically linked through the electric grid. So instead of directly transferring power they convert it to DC because it has no frequency and then convert it back to the new AC frequency therefore bypassing this issue.
There's another way to do it - gigantic, spinning, building-sized transformers. Used to be used back before solid state electronics was good enough to make AC-DC-AC conversion practical.
The most efficient way to do this is to use one grid to change up a pile of rechargeable D cell batteries, load them onto trucks, drive them across the border and plug them into the other grid boombox style.
High voltage DC is better even if the networks are in sync. It allows transferring more energy on the same cable.
@@bokoloaranyfa3824 Also means no dealing with the fun of reactive power or, worse, the feared harmonics. If we were designing power infrastructure from scratch today (perhaps when we finally get around to colonising Mars), we'd probably go for DC. But at the time it was all put in place, there was no practical way to carry out DC-DC voltage conversion as there is today.
If I remember right, another reason why we do it is because AC, alternative current would have huge losses in power over long distances..
Most groundhogs are rodents, closely related to squirrels and marmots, but since Phil is immortal and can predict the weather, I assume he is some sort of eldritch groundhog-being that can't be biologically explained.
ergo vis a vis a marsupial.
Well, if we assume the average groundhog is perfectly spherical and of uniform density, and further assume it moves through a vacuum at a certain velocity, and that Phil's appearance doesn't immediately lead one to believe Phil is anything other than an average groundhog yet exhibits an inability to die while simultaneously exhibiting clairvoyance, one can postulate Phil may be a Lovecraftian hybrid species intended to trick humanity through the ruse of being a malevolent clairvoyant hedgehog sphere.
In order to determine if the hypothesis is false, Phil must be inspected via a spherical electron analyzer (also perfectly spherical and of uniform density) and inspected for non-aristotalian, non-euclidian electrons. Lovecraft advises electrons with a skin tone darker than Pantone 727 are inherently evil (citation needed) and are not to be trusted, but popular theory suggests his findings are influenced by the sociopolitical climate of the 1920s and may yet prove to be false. Submit findings in a report perfectly spherical and of uniform density.
If he doesn't make it through the winter, the Inner Circle has to run to Walmart to buy a Replacement Groundhog
I believe El Paso actually did something. I think they moved from ERCOT to the Western grid, if I recall correctly. They also bought a bunch of backup generators and said "hey, we get warnings about these cold snaps like 10 days in advance - we can totally just heat up the backup generators and make sure they're working before it actually gets cold." Turns out that worked out for them. Go figure.
0:00 - Hey, this is actually my branch of engineering.
0:20 - Oh, that was not a drop from Alice's sound board.
1:33 - There are dozens of us!
3:03 - Boo crimps. Boo.
5:50 - You know it's bad when ARKANSAS has a better government than you.
10:35 - Rectifier
13:33 - VFD make motor go brrr, but brrr at different speed as you vary f to the d.
17:40 - Just remember - High voltage doesn't start until 35,000V. From 600 to there, it's just "Medium." Like you'll be if you touch it. One human - done medium.
22:32 - Oh, really one of us.
23:10 - Roz almost describes it right. Generator doesn't go around 60 times per second because it would fly apart from the centrifugal force (I know that's not a thing) and the bearings would be even crazier. We actually put like 60 sets of magnets in so that it can rotate once per second and give us 60Hz.
28:00 - Exchanges are Communist.
28:50 - Earthy electrons are worthless.
31:30 - Description of my professional life right there. "You need to reconductor 2 miles of line - $8M please."
34:25 - Additional unacknowledged electrical generation pun.
37:54 - Alice thinks the energy market is supposed to be for the consumer. It's supposed to be for utility companies and big consumers. That way someone who thinks they can build a better power generator can connect and sell the juice under PURPA. The crazy starts when you let the consumer touch that stuff.
41:45 - Oh, the IOU's have computers to check on that stuff Alice. Don't go doing that. Especially don't go doing that if you have a smart meter.
44:25 - Quebec - the Texas of Canada.
44:35 - Here's the map with only three colors: www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27152
49:45 - Kangaroo Day
54:30 - 2011 - The last polar vortex that absolutely drove so many energy companies out of business. (No really, it did.)
1:00:05 - Are we going to learn about the difference between radial and network feeds and the protection differences between them?
1:12:48 - Quebec - the Texas of Canada that's actually what Texas wishes it was.
1:17:40 - Barack Obama = James T. Kirk
1:22:20 - No, you are multiplying by $1.20.
1:28:03 - This is why Roz is a civil engineer. (1) 100W * 12hrs = 1.2kWh. 1.2kWh * $9/kWh = $10.80. Still nuts, but off by a factor of 10 - or one civil engineer factor of safety.
1:32:10 - Building History!
1:44:36 - The wrong meme - we all know what he wanted to say
1:51:20 - EIFS = Plastic Formstone
1:56:00 - Oh, that's forboding.
2:00:42 - (We've bypassed the fact that sprinklers and fire pumps need electricity and non-frozen water.)
thank you :)
The real MVP right here.
I was under the impression that the steam turbines at power plants rotated at like 1800 or 3600 rpm.
What you kinda skipped over was the situation when they decided to do rolling blackouts - where they were 4 minutes away from a month-long blackout. The net frequency, which is ordinarily at 60 Hz, had dropped to 59,3Hz. A lower frequency means that your demand exceeds supply. Normal operations are within 0.03 around 60 Hz. Even slight deviations can cause damage to turbines when sustained for longer than a few minutes. Hence, most power plants have protection systems built in. These start activating at 59,4 Hz (when sustained for a certain amount of time) and become progressively more trigger-happy.
The first of these kick in when the frequency stays below 59.4 Hz for 9 minutes.
So if there's an extreme shortage in demand, the frequency instability will force more generators to trip, further decreasing demand. Had this happened the Texas power grid would have totally disintegrated. Such a collapse is unheard of and recovering from it would take weeks, people believe, if it is even possible. You essentially have to rebuild the entire grid.
Now the people at ERCOT saw the writing on the wall when the frequency dropped 59,4Hz and immediately started removing large-scale consumers from the grid. Luckily, they managed to get above the critical frequency within 5 minutes. So Texas was only 4 minutes away from an infrastructure collapse of biblical proportions.
Maybe I am wrong, but I remember, that there were 2 reasons while rolling blackouts became permanent fo rmany:
- Some subnets can be switched back only manually.
- Some subnets get electricity from industrial consumers and those consumers were cut permanently.
Ted Cruz was just trying to save money on his electricity bill. He did the calculations and worked out that flights to Cancun and a week in a luxury hotel was cheaper than 3 days electricity...
It’s well worth googling the ‘98 ice storm to see the big transmission towers bent over like Godzilla waded through them. That engine in Boucherville was in place for about three weeks- one assumes they occasionally brought some more fuel to it.
I grew up down here. Advice: don't drive in an ice storm here. Even if YOU know how to? We don't. Just stay your ass home. (P.S. it's in the 70's f now here.)
Further edit: prepping is only logical to a degree, but having canned food, water, basic first aid supplies, blankets, maybe a really good phone charger?
I live in Houston, we have f**king WEATHER here, but thanks to climate change you may have WEATHER too, wherever you happen to dwell.
I live in Atlanta, and we freak the fuck out at flurries. Every few years we get ice storms, and I'm probably one of the only people on Earth who LIKES ice storms.
I had a friend in Mississippi call me in a panic many years ago. It'd snowed there and he had to drive home. He didn't know how to drive in snow. The first thing I said to him is "no one there knows what they're doing and that's your biggest danger.". He put me on speaker and proceeded to babble while going the whole three miles home.
When he got home he said "I made it. What now?"
"Go inside, silly."
He saw so many cars off the road waiting for help along the way.
From what I've seen of the driving of southern licence plates (especially a certain Texan one) that have made their way up North, I'd say that extends beyond ice storms to any significant amount of snow.
Do you want to be on the road with people that think that, dispite never having driven in the snow before, being in a 4-wheel drive suv means they can drive faster than everyone who has driven in snow all their life?
I'll never forget the dumb sob that I watched crash into the same semi twice in the same accident (because he wouldn't just take his foot off the gas after the first impact) and then continue to drive down the highway in deep snow faster than any northerner in a heavy snowstorm.
We eventually passed him in a ditch later. I would not want to be on the roads in any winter storm where that kind of driver was the norm.
WI has been home to the Weather™️ since the ages, but it's been getting even more Weather™️ in the recent decades. Probably a sign of a much larger issue, probably.
Most people have canned food in their cupboards. First aid kits aren't that rare either, although not that many people have any training on how to use them.
This is an episode about how cats are beautiful beings and how markets continue to slaughter people
Mmhm. Capitalism is about profits, not people.
Holding you down and a PE stamping your body is actually what happens after you pass your fundamentals of engineering exam.
that's hot
What’s p in PE? “professional” or hwæt?
As it's now certified by an engineer, is this a load bearing podcast?
y'all really should follow the "Things I Won't Work With" blog. A long litany of absolutely horrific chemicals, the brave idiots who tried to use them, and the horrible ways the former killed the latter.
I thought Derek hadn't added more of those entries in years, or is that its own blog now?
39:00 "certain people who like this sort of thing" gonna start treating deregulation and free market extremism as if it's some fringe kink or fetish now; thank you for this.
"oh, you're into lowering the minimum wage? kinda weird but eh i wont judge"
@@uilsoum875 "As long as it's safe, sane, and consensual, so... have you had a frank and honest conversation with your minimum wage worker about whether they're willing to participate?"
@@marinary1326 What’s good for the bedroom ought to be good for the boardroom.
Holding work contracts to the same standard of consent would pretty quickly evaporate any notion of just how “consensual” the worker-boss relationship is under capitalism.
@@danielludwig647 bold of you to assume they meet those standards in the bedroom
@@quantumblur_3145 "Activision-Blizzard, what are you doing here?"
My daughter, her infant son and husband tried to tough it out for a couple of days. A friend w power eventually took them in. Within a few months of the freeze, they took jobs in the Pacific Northwest and left Texas in the rear view mirror.
The PNW is mucher nicer than Texas although it is rather expensive but we have decent infrastructure here cause its actually funded
The only Doomsday Prepper show episode I remember is a family that grew a huge garden with, like, brambles and blackberries surrounding the vegetable patches and fruit trees, and the dad tried to make deterrent out of their homegrown peppers and ended up basically pepper spraying himself, his wife, and the production crew.
LOL. Honestly, I'm kind of okay with preppers who make big gardens if they destroy their lawns when they do it. It's a great unintentional plus side of prepper ideology.
@@sweetpeabee4983 iirc, their yard was garden circles and mown grass.
You don't need to try to make pepper spray to mace a household... Source: a friend of mine who was making hot sauce with a few ghost peppers forgot about the pot simmering on the stove...
10:45 Please for the love of God bring her back as a guest, or even an intermittent host. I loled so hard at this.
same
My English class is doing an open- ended project about social justice and I'm using both this video and the Vulcan bridge disaster one as research sources. Specifically my topic is how corporate greed leads to contaminated water and worse living conditions, especially in poor communities. Thanks for these podcasts, and I hope all of you have wonderful days.
Alice with the blink-and-you-miss-it Barrett’s Privateers reference
Just go through all the disasters in the Stan Rogers discography. They've already done Molasses.
Ah yes, the God Damn Episode
I'm also studying electrical engineering, so I can confirm that electrons go brrrrrrrrr.
Even more so when it's Baltic.
"Congratulations, today you are authorized personnel." Scary sentence.
Similar scary sentence from my work at a consulting engineering firm: "if you've done something once, you're an expert"
Now there's a disaster name if I've ever heard one.
I laughed SO hard when I saw the title. "That's about right!" I said.
such an engineer solution: "We need power. Locomotives make power. Lets just drive it down the road to the substation and make power"
"We need a generator, and to move it into town. A train will solve both problems." The more badass version of that is aircraft carriers getting hooked into local power supplies, like _USS Lexington_ in Tacoma, WA in 1929.
AC: flows outside of you, fries your outsides to a crisp
DC: goes straight through you, blows a hole in one or more parts of you
(track safety training is fun)
As an electrician I approve this post.
@@pamdemonia Britain is a good and normal country that relies heavily on the "blows a hole in you" juice at track level for services in and around London/the SE, right where you can fall onto it. I do not like working shifts there.
"I work 3rd shift at the editing factory"
Bavaria: Where Prussian charm meets Austrian dilligence.
Listening to alice impersonate the Quebecois by doing a european french accent is like listening to some one impersonate a guy from baltimore by talking like Sean Connery
The thing about the Québec interconnection is that there are back to back AC DC inverters . This allows for greater redundancy. If there was to be a cascading failure outside of Québec, in practice, it wouldn't be able to propagate through theses converters. In fact, this exact scenario did play out in 2003. There is another set of inverters between the main load centers in the south and the north where most of the giant power generating dams are located. Hydro Québec is busy trying to build more interconnection to sell their surpluses to the northern US.
Bell actually was regulated with “regulated interchanges.” That’s why you could bypass Bell’s long-distance lines by using SprInt long-distance or something. But the neoliberal deregulation and breakup of Bell should be its own episode. I could go on and on about how the NHRR of Bell, SNET, was a bizarre exception to everything but mostly indistinguishable anyway.
You got any writing or videos on this? I still don't really understand why Bell was broken up.
The ease in with Alice talks about a man dying is both fascinating and frightening
"excellent work 47"
I’ve seen the pic she’s talking about. It’s crazy
Gotta love that UK level austerity.
after a certain point absorbing bad news everything just kind of becomes a melange of misery and it's all the same shit
And arousing
My father went to college in the late 1950s, and did some work as a stage manager for theater productions. The lighting panel was notoriously shoddy and dangerous, and he recalled an incident where, in a matter of seconds:
1) the guy working the lighting panel touched the wrong thing and got electrocuted.
2) someone else noticed #1 and tried to pull him off, and got electrocuted.
3) someone noticed 1 and 2 and tried to pull them off and got electrocuted.
4) someone noticed all of the above and happened to have a long wool scarf. They quickly wrapped the end the scarf around their hands and looped the middle around guy #3 and yanked, then guy #2 and yanked, and lastly guy #1 and yanked.
So yes, some people can tell you what it feels like to get a shock that would kill you if it lasted just a bit longer.
So there is a concept from science fiction called an "active support" structure. basically to build taller than steel and concrete can physically withstand you replace the support columns with these high pressure water loops or particle beam loops that have a higher compressive strength, the only hang up is you need a constant and uninterrupted power supply to the beams or the building falls down.
I always laughed at this idea, who would want to live in a building that fails catastrophically if it loses power!
turns out a lot of us already do.
Yay Liam!
yay liam!
yay liam!
yay Liam!
Me: Gets home from shitty job.
Also me: Yay Communist Sifus posted today!
"Bad electrons go in the electron wiggler" might be my favorite ever line from WTYP.
I was contracted to doing some communications work in a 1 million volt DC inverter substation for an undersea link and they had a rule that no ladders over 6ft. could be used. But they were absolutely fine with asking I erect a 20ft. aluminum antenna mast right in the middle of the station, under the outgoing AC wires, because they were "having trouble" getting signal on the 4G modems built into the boards of their backup control system, inside metal cabinets, inside a steel building under a maze of high voltage wires. aka a triple Faraday cage. Everything in that place was literally vibrating at all times and I could not believe I had to explain to these power company workers why I wasn't going to do what they asked.
I have been listening to 27 picoseconds and they still haven't gotten to the point. Very derivative. I like my social commentary/commedy podcast about engineering disasters to be 10/20 nanoseconds at most.
i agree with you..... but when the jokes are landing flat, and go on for 15 mins..... it kinda gets old, quickly
.
their have been MANY episodes where one guy HAS TO cut everyone off and says "back to the point....bla bla bla".....
.
this show would be WAY more popular if they didnt go into 25 min tangents
10 min tangents.... fine
25 to 40 min tangents.... no
@@kainhall Keeping the Pod on track is the closest Roz will ever get to driving a locomotive IRL 😎
not being WAY more popular is a feature, not a bug.
@@kainhall someone can do their own cut of the podcasts
Am an electronics technician. Can confirm electrons go brrr especially when you reach into an ATM and try to disconnect power manually.
The wrought iron balconies also generated a convection creating thermal mass which helped raise the air out of the streets both summer and winter.
The joke about flushing out "stale" electrons reminds me of instructions I've seen once for building an "electron flusher", by combining a large diode and a halogen flood lamp, allowing electrons to pass in one direction only (and rhus using only one half of the sine wave).
I'm fairly certain it was a joke, but it's concerning that I can't be completely sure with the way HiFi enthusiasts fall for esoteric solutions for imagined problems.
Friendly reminder we still have geniuses buying faraday cages to block the 5g coming out of their routers.
They're trying to make water into a stonk too and make a market for it. In California irrc. It's monstrous treating a thing you die without as a commodity.
"Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence."
- The good guy in a movie, probably
In Germany, the trains run at 16.7 Hertz (originally it was exactly 16 and two thirds, but it was changed to 16.7 to avoid some problems due to it being an exact fraction of the grid frequency). This is because originally, large single-phase commutated motors couldn't be built to run at the 50 Hz grid frequency, and a third of that was easy to make via motor-generator sets.
Yay, I got my episode!
Boo, I lived through the disaster...
Hey, we made it!
And we got drinkable water back yesterday.
@@Anonarchist
Yeah. We had let our hurricane water get low here, but we made it. Cheers👍
Lol we started sawing the trees in our backyard to burn for warmth. Hahaha... ha... good times.
meanwhile.... montana had -50 temps with 60mph winds (wind chills in the -80 to 100 range)
.
and no one died.... power was only cut for 20 mins at a time to help you.....and again, no one died
I live in the PNW. That storm didn't give us much snow (I think there was snow in Portland) but it dropped an inch of freezing rain in the Willamette valley and brought down every tree in the neighborhood into my backyard. We also lost power for most of that saturday.
That's the Rockies for ya.
there was pretty decent snow in seatac
Arc flashes are no joke fucking terrifying. The amazing thing is that some people survive them. I met a man who literally had 2 hooks for hands after 2 separate incidents working as a linesman.
I lived through that ice storm in Montreal, CN gave us locos that were going they were planning to sell off anyway so they didn't care about fixing them after. They kept them running for over a week.
I hoped Fallon would have said more, I wanted to know more about how the grid works in general and how it failed.
i am going to guess that all the people who live in Texas where you use basicly your climate unit for both heating and cooling, just all tried to heat up their houses with those, overcharged the transformers and cause one or more of them to melt down.. Those things are huge. Not exactly 5 min job, especially if you don't have a spare one at hand.
One note about the downtown skylines
I can’t say if it was the case in Austin or Dallas (but would think it likely) but in Houston at least the downtown high rises are on the same grid as the city and county jails as well as at least one hospital so cutting off that grid to secure more capacity for dedicated residential wasn’t an option.
That having been said, I think the waste in lighting up the big buildings to look ‘cool’ at night is a colossal waste of resources every night of the year.
If I can smell my electrons, things have gone horribly wrong. It's also pretty generous to call Baker Buckets food.
Moderately disappointed you didn't bring the skyline compilation to show the class, specifically our big stupid stadium in San Antonio that was built for the Spurs, used for a few years until they complained about it and made the city build another stadium
YT comment aside: WTYP could totally do an episode on dumb stadium projects.
@@Trendyflute On dumb pubic building projects in general.
Ah fuck, it's a WTYP on a subject on which I am an actual expert, now instead of just laughing at how simplistic Justin's explanations are and imagining nuclear engineers being mad at 'spicy rocks', I am the one who is mad
counterpoint: if you're a relay engineer you can actually be left alone most of the time because no one knows what the hell you do
Spicy electrons go brrr
I’m way behind on my degree but from what I’ve completed as well as years of hobbyist studying I can safely conclude that electricity is dark magic
Ben Franklin thought it was light magic but it’s dark magic and that made everything more confusing
@@CODMarioWarfare pretty much, yes. We understand most of its rituals but shit goes wild from time to time
@@phelan1201 I’m just gonna drill a tiny hole in this rock and now all of the sudden it can do math
This is the first episode I've listened to and I was so surprised and impressed by someone (Alice) actually knowing what misophonia is and apologizing about it that I got a little tiny bit teary-eyed. Thank you!
Suburban Ottawa was out for like two weeks, after the Ice Storm of '98.
I was eleven, and still fit on the loveseat in the living room, where the fireplace happened to be, so I slept there in my coat and snowpants for a bit.
We borrowed a generator for the fridge and furance after like a week, off cousins that lived a lot more downtown.
I remember the Canadian Locomotive Story! I recall them running it at a very low intensity (sth like 8-12%) as that provides fitting output for a local power-grid, which would mean they could run 1 fuel load for, say, 10x as long as regularly driving it.
The whole "Why don't Americans have electric tea kettles?" is apparently because, while US electricity goes brrr, the UK's electricity goes BRRRRRR and so the British tea kettles boil water much faster than American's.
So while we Americans do occasionally have kettles, ours are not nearly as impressive.
Fairly recently, Technology Connections tackled this question, complete with explanations of how electric kettles work, energy usage and timed comparisons of American water-boiling methods, and the requisite amount of snarkiness.
His video started with the basic conclusion that more people in North America don't use electric kettles simply because we drink coffee instead of tea.
Which honestly makes sense. Anecdotally, the only people I know who use kettles are those who drink tea (I didn't own one until I switched from coffee). ☕️🍍
1:15:26 The engine is an M-420W by the looks of it, it's 2000hp and uses a V12-251C, an updated version of which is still made by Fairbanks-Morse as a backup generator, so it seems like a solid plan.
Can't wait for next week's episode on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge!
I have a feeling they might postpone it
Please don't give Arkansas too much credit. I'm a trucker who was stuck in 5 hours of traffic on I-30 just after the storm and I watched a DOT supervisor truck try to cross the median from the service road to the highway proper, and immediately get stuck in the deep snow, because that's how deep snow works. Other drivers in traffic helped push him forwards to get through. As soon as they were free a highway patrol officer tried to follow him and was also immediately stuck.
33:25 "the free-er the markets.... the free-er the people"
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until gamestop goes up 300%..... then we need to regulate
The invisible snow plow of the markets
They / Them
I've heard the Montreal diesel train story before but I always figured they had laid temporary tracks to move it. Holy shit they just drove a train right down a street like it was a truck.
An episode on hell freezing over. This gonna be good.
(Congrats on the PE license!)
I ended up watching a bunch of substation powerup videos one day and god it's terrifying.
RIP the first thumbnail.
I'm reminded of my internship as an electrician when I was 16 and we visited a substation.
"this button shuts down half of the city - Don't touch it.
This cooper rail caries 10.000 V - Don't touch it.
I had a little electric train set when I was young, and one day I very smartly decided to grab the track while it was running. I remember it took several seconds for me to realize, in order:
1 - I just popped into existence, this moment.
2 - I am a sentient being.
3 - oohhh I don’t feel very good ...
4 - is the thing in my hand DOING this to me...?
And just then my uncle knocked it out of my hand and yelled at me. But I didn’t really need the scolding; I’ll ALWAYS remember how much that sucked haha
That Sounds like a very interesting experience...
Coming back to make everyone aware that my friends and I could predict what zip codes would lose power based on median housing cost in those areas here in Dallas-Fort Worth. I'll let you guess what end lost power.
I literally have multiple angles of that groundhog holding up ceremony pic as a wallpaper because I'm going insane.
15:35 Talking about how electricity works... Amperage is the murdery part! Shake hands with danger: I’ve grabbed a 10,000 volt electric fence and it sucked but since it’s “only a few amps” (as the boss said) and comes down the wire in short pulses, it doesn’t paralyze you or hurt the animals long term
Nice to have a fellow EE on the pod, I’ve never related more when Fallon was trying to explain how electrons work in layman’s terms. I still get nervous when working around high voltage as well
I'm something of a leftist prepper myself. I can say that there's definitely way too many different processes/industries to maintain society for one person to reasonably manage/rebuild (IE: pharmaceuticals). I've got my preparations organized into multiple phases, which requires steadily increasing the amount of material wealth I've acquired. Prepping is seriously expensive but it's manageable at first if you are mostly buying things that you'll use. But the big thing is getting a group of people to prep with. I know some right wingers from work who are also preppers who plan to secure their neighborhood (but their long term plans after ammo runs out are pretty nonexistent from what I can tell).
If you want to open an electroplating plant next to your hydrolysis plant next to your massive "vegetable" grow facility you can 100% do it, but you're gonna need to pay 20k a mile to run new 3phase out to well there's your problem industries. ~Sauce, interned at a power company.
"It's a dielectic." "A dielectric?" lol.
1:06:45 They can get away with selling not-good products because if society collapses and you bust out the generator but it's broken, what're you gonna do, sue them? I'm pretty sure there was a recent scandal where a company was selling prepper cases of "canned food" but it just turned out to all be full of water.
I love that, I wish I had the criminal energy to scam prepper types.
You are correct about the Great Mosque of Djenne, the modern structure was largely a french colonial project, but the designs which informed it were mostly African
I've also studied AC/DC in collage, and I can confirm that Electrons go Brrrrrrr in the electrical outlet in your wall.
i know you guys talk about this in the ep but i'm here to post as a person who was in texas, this isn't nearly the worst snowstorm we've had even in the last 5 years, but the major problems were that it was so cold and it was the entire state. most cities set 70-year record low temperatures and as we approached zero degrees F every electric heater in the state turned on. generally snowstorms only cover a portion of the state so the grid in total can handle increased load up north, but in this case it was every metro area except el paso which is on the national grid. pretty bad system. anyway i know you talked about this but i'm posting it anyway because i love to type my little words.
Goddammit alice, I'm American and I make my tea on the stove!
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.
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An electric stove...
I'm shocked no one mentioned the reason electric kettles are more common in the UK. Their outlets output 240 volts and the US has only 120 volt mains power. So US kettles can't heat water as quickly.
I had heard the UK grid has special peak power plants that know to start generating for the demand created by commercial break tea-makers, as Alice mentioned.
@@LukeFergusonMN I believe the kettles switching on is less of a factor than using the bathroom during a commercial break; that causes pumping stations to kick into high gear to meet the sudden spike in demand, and of course those pumping stations run off of mains electricity, and demand a hell of a lot more of it than household appliances do.
But yes, that's basically the reason why for certain jobs in the energy sector, you do in fact need to have a good understanding of the plotlines of current soap operas and be able to predict whether an upcoming episode is going to elicit particularly high viewership, because it's all of those people who've just sat down for a real Wham episode of Eastenders or Corrie, getting up to use the toilet and/or make tea, that drives that massive spike in demand.
friend of the pod, elf the cat
Honestly the Goddamn News theme gives me life in this episode, straight vibin
joke's on you, 5AM in the morning is my 9PM at night.
I'm so glad that the engineers of this country have such a solid command of the theory of electromagnetism.
The external insulation in post Soviet states is very important. Some of the large block houses are notoriously energy inneficient, and the 5-9-12 storey housing complexes are very grey. So most of the states here attempt to do renovation with external insulation and it will be a parte of local greening initiatives, as the winters are constantly cold.