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Why has no one thought of this before?!
  • Reminds me of that Atlantropa plan. The idea was to drain most of the Mediterranean sea to create new land between Europe and Africa. Some German guy came up with it in the 1920s and spent like 20 years trying to convince people it's a great idea and totally doable. Unfortunately everyone was busy with other stuff back then...

  • Oxygen
  • This may be a good source for it: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25663961-how-not-to-die

    The book is about food, but mostly it talks about oxidation of the body and how various foods affect that, because that seems to be the main factor for aging and other degradation of the body. (TL;dr: eat a lot of broccoli)

    I'm not an expert though, so cannot judge how accurately the science is presented

  • What can I do to prevent this breaking and how can I fix it?
  • If the electrical connections are still intact, you can use some glue or tape to stabilize it, to prevent it from breaking further.

    To prevent it in the future: always pull cables out by the plug, never pull on the cable itself.

  • help

    I can't recall a time when I wasn't lost in the inner solar system. Currently I'm stuck on the third dot - how do I proceed?

    !

    Alt

    ___ The picture shows today's XKCD comic.

    Transcript:

    [A grayed-out sentence in the Times New Roman font reads "Optimistic aliens measure space typographically". The "O" in "Optimistic" is dark black and indicated as representing the Sun (not to scale). The dots of the letters "i" in the sentence are similarly dark black. The dot in the first "i" in "Optimistic" is indicated as representing Mercury; the dot in the second "i" represents Venus; the dot in the third "i" represents Earth. The dot in the "i" in "aliens" is indicated as representing Mars. The dot in the "i" in "typographically" is indicated as representing Jupiter. A measurement bar indicates that the distance between the "O" and the third "i" in "Optimistic" is equivalent to 1 AU (astronomical unit).]

    [Caption below the panel:] Space tip: if you're ever lost in the inner Solar System, you can just type out the phrase "Optimistic aliens measure space typographically" in Times New Roman and use the dots as a map.

    4
    How to improve my battery measurement circuit?

    I am powering a 5V microcontroller (arduino clone, atmega328p) using a 9V block and a buck converter. Now I want to let the microcontroller occasionally measure the battery voltage, so I can get an idea of how full it is.

    My first idea was to use a simple voltage divider:

    !

    I've chosen the resistor values so that:

    • the voltage at the measure output is < 1.1V, to be able to use the 1.1V internal reference of the atmega's ADC
    • R1 || R2 < 10kΩ, since the atmega datasheet says "The ADC is optimized for analog signals with an output impedance of approximately 10 kΩ or less"

    This is great and all, but what bothers me is that this circuit will constantly draw ~100µA from the battery.

    So, my next thought was to add a mosfet to the divider, to switch it on only while measuring:

    !

    This is obviously bad, because now when the mosfet is off, the ADC input sees the whole battery voltage.

    To address that issue, I've added a second mosfet into the measure path:

    !

    This works, and it does not draw any current, except while measuring.

    However, it's quite a few parts. So I'm curious if anyone has an idea how to do this with just a single mosfet. It seems to me like it should be possible, but I haven't figured out how.

    Oh, and if I'm doing something stupid here, please tell me :)

    11
    Radial resistors... has anybody seen these before?

    I have a whole bunch of them. They are possibly a bit older (70s, 80s) judging by other contents of the junk box they are from.

    There are no labels of any kind, but on the top they have stripes that look hand painted.

    !

    For at least some of them the resistance roughly corresponds to the color code.

    So, I'm just curious why I can't find anything about these on the internet.

    5
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)NI
    nilclass @discuss.tchncs.de
    Posts 4
    Comments 38