#stellarators

[eldritchadept]

The National Compact Stellarator Experiment (NCSX)

A stellarator experiment at Princeton, which was never completed.

[literallymechanical]

I noticed that the stelerator coils are really particularly shaped based on their location on the ring, compared to tokomak coils. The stelerator plasma at least looks like it's in a ring of similar repeating segments, so surely there must be repeating coil shapes. Does every single coil in a segment have to be unique, or do you have shapes for the twist-over regions and then a shape you can rotate as you go through the softer twisting regions?

I'm the wrong kind of engineer for this and I'm judging entirely by looking at pictures so correct me at literally any step in this question.

Yep! Stellarators have periodicity, meaning that you have some integer number of repeating coil sets. This is easiest to see from the top view:

Source: Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics

Wendelstein 7-X (above) has five-fold symmetry, with five repeating coil sets rotated through a full 360 degrees.

Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison

Whereas HSX has four-fold symmetry...

Source: Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

And Lyman Spitzer's earliest stellarators from the 1950's had two periods, though this was before we started doing optimized coils with those funky shapes.

Fun fact, the Lyman Spitzer who invented the stellarator was the same Lyman Spitzer who came up the Hubble Space Telescope. Back in the day you could just do whatever, I guess!

[emthimofnight]

Stellar's first day at school!!

[enterstellars]

honestly mad respect for pope francis cause he used his dying breath to pray for gaza and to shit on jd vance and that’s an inspiring way to go out

[montereybayaquarium]

Join us in celebrating Women's History Month with Ellen, our senior aquarist who does incredible work with sunflower stars at the Aquarium! 🌟

These once-abundant predators played a key role in keeping Monterey Bay kelp forests healthy, but Sea Star Wasting Disease brought them to the brink of extinction. 

We're partnering with amazing organizations like the California Academy of Sciences, Aquarium of the Pacific, Birch Aquarium at Scripps, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, and the Sunflower Sea Star Lab to bring them back. 

Learn more about our efforts and how we're growing sunflower stars from tiny babies to giant sea stars!

[rythyme]

dev patel really said "i support trans ppls rights....... trans ppls rights to kill bigots with guns and metal pipes and chairs and cool knives'' anyway watch monkey man

[itsthebeastpeddler]

on my bimonthly trip to Silent Hill to buy poly-fil

[cyber-seaweed]

i feel like the wider internet should learn more about the kingdom hearts series bc going into it i expected sora to be wildly different to how he actually is. i expected like a boy madoka crossed with deku mha vibe. this is not sora. sora lands in a foreign world at 14 after having his destroyed with him on it and immediately starts a fight with cid. sora has to be held back by his disney dads multiple times because he wont stop taunting the organization because he wants to murder them more. sora is actively insane about his boy bestfriend and frankly if riku tried to run off anymore than he actually did i believe that little sora could have and would have resorted to kidnapping. like ya hes kind and empathetic but his friends are his power and if needed he will use said power to snap a bitch in half.

[elshe]

I’M GONNA EAT THEM ‼️

[sevilai]

ƎNA wants YOU to PLAY DREAM BBQ ON STEAM FOR FREE ⚡️NOW⚡️

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

hi, i wanted to ask what you think about those japanese zoo's training exercises were someone dresses up as an animal and pretends to have escaped and all that, are they effective? what do U.S zoo's do to train for things like that?

They look silly, but they're a real emergency drill! They force people to think through how they'd problem-solve in real time and in the physical space, which is a very different experience than just thinking about it.

There's no consistent requirement for emergency drills in the US federal regulations for zoos, but there is a contingency planning one. Facilities licensed by the USDA have to identify and create plans for addressing likely emergencies they may have to deal with, which is everything from like natural disasters to animal escapes. That's all done as paperwork and provided to the government to prove they've done it.

BUT. That doesn't mean that zoos and other animal facilities don't do more planning on their own. Some of the third-party accreditations (it might be all of them but I don't have the docs in front of me to confirm) require regular drills for all types of emergency scenarios.

Now there's a slight problem there - a real escape drill, run fully on grounds with real people and stand-in animal, interferes with the daily operations of the zoo. You might not have to physically shut all the guests into buildings during a practice leopard escape, but you do need them to not get in the way, and you don't want to scare people who think a drill is real, etc. So there's an alternate option.

US zoos frequently run emergency management drills as TTRGPs!

Like, they use a printed scale map of the zoo and roll dice to randomize the situation. This is absolutely recommended as a strategy by the Zoo and Aquariums All Hazard Partnership: there's a whole webpage about it, including instructions for the Drill Master.

There are in-person drills, of course, because you have to practice dealing with these problems in meatspace. But a lot of them are done tabletop! I cannot express the extent of my mirth when I first encountered this in the wild at a conference about a decade ago, when the idea was really taking off. It was Very Serious Zoo People on a Very Serious Topic about preventing Really Bad Things from happening... and then suddenly there was a d20 on the screen.

[caffichai]

It's Foxgirl Friday, so please enjoy Franka and her Liskarm!

[Bluesky]

[superbat-lmao]

Before Jason makes his debut as Red Hood, he goes apartment hunting.

And the thing about Gotham is, all of the apartments that would make for good safe houses, are safe houses. The Bat’s safe houses. If Jason wants to set up shop, he’s got to get creative. This means being willing to look the other way about some things. Namely, living with other people.

Jason gets a roommate.

Sure, he’d found a couple of spots that fit some of the criteria he used for making safe houses, but not all apartments were equal. And having a semi-functioning civilian cover was useful. Sometimes.

All this to say that Jason responded to a craigslist post of some guy looking for a roommate. The post was written well enough, decent grammar and a fair enough price. Unlike some of the places he’d “toured.”

He has to trudge up a few flights of stairs to get to the place, because roof access is always high on the priority list, and knocks on the door. He waits a few minutes, hears someone check the peephole, and then the sound of at least five separate locks being undone.

With the door finally open, he gets a good look at the guy’s face. Too good of a look, actually.

Because the man who opens it is Dick Grayson.

[emthimofnight]

Omega finds out about Stellar! :)

Rouge did not elaborate past, "Did you hear that Shadow had a baby with Sonic?" and this is what happens LOL

[definitionofacritter]

Our table for Downfall (and their presumed identities):

Ashley as Trist: Sarenrae the Everlight (mercy), paladin/cleric

Nick as Ayden: Pelor the Dawnfather (dawn), barbarian/cleric/druid/paladin

Laura as Emhira: the Raven Queen (death), warlock

Taliesin as Asha: Melora the Wildmother (nature), monk

Abubakar as S.I.L.A.H.A.: Corellon the Arch Heart (beauty), sorcerer/warlock

Noshir as The Emissary: servant of Erathis the Lawbearer (law), barbarian