The price of everything on Earth. This chart is all of the natural occurring elements, their occurrence rate in Earth's crust (X-axis) and their price in USD (Y-axis). The chart illustrates three clear price regimes. 1. Yellow band is stuff that is economically priced this is

Heat Exchangers, Turbines, Transformer First it was the transformers, then it was the turbines, the next critical industrial equipment to see a supply crunch might be heat exchangers. There are myriad new technologies for transformers, turbines and heat exchangers that nobody

What are the 15 biggest commodities in the world economy by mass? TLDR; water and sand are very cheap, oil is not. Other stuff is surprisingly consistently priced, almost all the same OOM. Which suggests handling dominates pricing rather than scarcity. 1. Water…. 4,000

You know those hyper competent folk who underpin entire divisions of blue chip orgs. Where 800 jobs and $2bn of sales revenue is built on some project they soloed 17 years ago. What happens if you put 25 of them on the same team? Feels like nobody has done it since Apollo.

The Kardashev Scale Humanity produces 2x10^13 watts and is at 0.73 on the scale, but if we define our civilisation as “all life on Earth” we are at 0.95, as biosphere photon capture is 2.8x10^15. The difference is 14,000% I think this context is extremely important for the

This is what 25 years of progress looks like for humanoid robots (above) and aviation (below). Interesting huh?

Here’s one I made earlier.

This is actually very easy to make, as @emm0sh has not provided any tolerance requirements. I can supply this for $5.00

Here’s a 10 year old YouTube video, of how that might go down. This is a horizontal drilling rig breaching the surface from some distance away.

Subterranean Warfare Palmer Lucky recently made a bunch of comments about this and everyone snarked, fair enough tbh… except all the tools to do it already exist today. I’m going to show you that this capability already exists, already exists at industrial scale, already has

Let me tell you about this place… Energy Resources: Oil, Gas, Wind, Waves, Uranium Cooling: Infinity (for all practical purposes) NIMBY Population: 0 … ever been offshore? I’ve visited (I think) 15 different North Sea installations, a couple of MODU drilling rigs, two

Monetising Critical Assets - Auctions Increasingly a lot of critical infrastructure for global supply is seeing longer and longer lead times as demand continues to overtake supply. Think transformers, turbines, converters… This means order books fill up, and lead times extend

Turbines Lots of talk about turbines recently (they’re just big fans), but turbines are rapidly entering the same scenario as grid transformers. Limited manufacturing capacity the is becoming overwhelmed with demand and seeing lead times blow out. A lot of power generation

1 kg of uranium contains 950 MW-days of energy if fully fissioned. That’s 8.2x10^13 joules USA has 700,000 tonnes of uranium stockpiled, mostly in depleted uranium format which is fertile. That’s 5.75x10^22 joules The ONLY way to access this energy reservoir is with fast

Mathematical manifolds & engineering - explained via Flat Earth. This is not easy to communicate and I might fail, but whatever, here goes… A manifold is a thing that can be weird looking and curved, but locally in a small patch it behaves like a flat 2D surface. The whole

Understanding this frame is fundamental to being able to write good requirements. Good requirements set out a min-max operating envelope and those additional requirements make it much EASIER to design a solution, because they exclude a whole lot of low value tail conditions.

Sensors Have a think about this for a moment… All sensors have 2 mandatory functional requirements, one is very obvious and one is much less obvious. 1. A sensor must be sensitive to the parameter that it is intended to measure. Duh. Light sensors have to be sensitive to

Circular ships The oil & gas industry has built a lot of offshore platforms and ships over the past 60 years. The North Sea alone has seen over 450 offshore platforms installed and operated, producing oil and gas in one of the most violent and dangerous seas in the world.

How do LEDs work? LEDs are an amazing technology, we use them for all sorts of things. They’re actually super simple and easy to understand. The picture on the left shows the geometry of an LED. The pic on the right is more of a ‘not to scale’ diagram to better show the active

Engineering is the Highest Form of Art I’ve bought a lot of shipbuilding and structural engineering books this year, lots of books on mechanical fastenings, joints and welds… The sort of books that sell 10-20 copies per year. I just buy them all and read them all, and this is

The Printer Tracking Dot Scandal In 2005 the Electronic Frontier Foundation pursued an online conspiracy that the US government was printing secret codes on every page that every printer ever printed. EFF had the public send them samples of printed pages. The EFF not only