Minh

Snippets of stuff I'm learning/making as a MechE & Energy Systems student at @CUSEAS (and as a slow-living dreamer surviving nyc)

[Minh @efs_minh]

Welp, this deliberation didn’t last very long

[Minh @efs_minh]

Should I cave and get the premium subscription here to lift the word count limit? It's starting to drive me nuts......or should I use this as a stern exercise in being concise?

[Minh @efs_minh]

For sure there are things that only top-down coordination can accomplish when we're talking infra at this scale. And yes, clean energy is a public good that requires some degree of marshaling (by gov't?) if that's what you meant with the Suez Canal.
But our grid does need to evolve and allow decentralized participation by players with market motivation who can move faster if we want to solve the challenge of reliably delivering this public good. Given the intermittent renewable resources we wanna bring on...the traditional centralized system alone isn't gonna make it

[Minh @efs_minh]

@DanMulroyjr AP stats in hs & egn stats in undergrad--thought it was fake math & resented it every time I was forced to take it. Then in my first job I got an opportunity to use it on decisions that impacted actual product/money/lives...suddenly I wished I could go back to all those classes

[Minh @efs_minh]

@DanMulroyjr I took stats in hs but it was pointless... my hot take is that the most important yet missing part is education on the "why" behind statistics--effective messaging about how powerful and pervasive it is--THAT should come before even teaching the basics

[Minh @efs_minh]

but if that person takes a 3-hr flight in a particular day, that's an addition on the scale of 1000s of kWh

[Minh @efs_minh]

Despite learning & doing so many projects about energy, I still can't quickly conjure up common quantities of energy/power. All the kW's & kWh, the G's, M's, and W's...they all just float around amorphously in my head

[Minh @efs_minh]

To start: our daily energy consumption in the high HDI world (eg, US, Canada, EU countries, etc) is in the magnitude of 1-10 kWh a day

[Minh @efs_minh]

@tex1sam @JessePeltan @clawrence Of course this is all just a thought experiment and doesn't accurately capture reality, given how this napkin math ignores huge chunks of the energy system. An interesting puzzle nonetheless--I might try to solve it with some more rigor

[Minh @efs_minh]

@tex1sam @JessePeltan @clawrence plus whatever electricity the human and their electronics are consuming to transmit data/info, so round up to ~2 MWh maybe. Now I don't currently know how to wrangle the numbers for how AI consumes energy to make that same spreadsheet in 5 minutes, so tbc when I figure that out.

[Minh @efs_minh]

@seanpk Question 1 & 2 prompted valuable thinking for me. Q3 is concerning--sounds like a slippery slope to unconscious bias and exclusion of certain groups? (eg, in my first job, I def wouldn't have been invited to after-work beer with my mechanical engineer team nor would I want to go)

[Minh @efs_minh]

RT to bookmark these resources