grimmstitches

AUTISM RESPONSE: Rubber ducks and other rubber bath toys can accumulate mold on the inside because of small holes underneath where moisture becomes trapped. The mold often goes unnoticed because it's not visible from the outside.

and I forget what I was thinking about but SUDDENLY brain goes 'hey what if another bobbin?'

and at first I was like 'pfft, no, that wouldn't work' but then I thought about it a bit more and

CHAIN PLIED 4 PLY YARN

CHAIN PLIED SELF STRIPING YARN

lessons learned so far:

doing this directly on the wheel is a nightmare task (and probably would get you more variegation than self striping)

if you're going to do a chain ply ball from across the room don't be lazy and just use the lazy kate pins

all done! about 206 yds and 154 grams

notes:

there's both yarn that i did with shorter stripes (chain ply ball from across the room) and longer stripes (chain ply ball from the kitchen table, through the kitchen and into the hallway beyond). the second one is with a measurement that i got from a ball of self striping yarn in my stash

personally i find it interesting how with normal chain plying there's less color mixing with short loops and more mixing with longer loops, but with the nature of using two solid/tonal singles in different colors it's the opposite

the knit swatch uses both yarn from the end of the long stripe skein (bottom) and from that early attempt at chain plying directly at the wheel (top, but there's not much)

fusion happens when atoms hit each other really hard, but they dont usually want to hit each other. they need to be forced into it. you can do this by getting them really hot, which makes the atoms move faster, which much like cars doing 90mph in a 65 zone increases the chance of collision

really hot atoms in a really hot gas become what's called a plasma, where all their electrons fall off so the leftover positive nuclei are floating around with negative electrons

therefore, fusion research consists of trying to get plasma hot enough to fuse.

two problems

it has to be really really really hot to fuse

really really really hot plasma is bad for nuclear reactors, humans, and everything that isnt the sun

solutions arise

plasma is electrically charged, so we can control it with magnets. magnetism and electricity happen at right angles to each other, like if an electron is moving vertically a magnet can pull it horizontally, and vice versa

if we get the plasma to whirl around in a circle, we can hold that moving plasma flow in place with magnets

behold! the tokamak

it would be nice if it worked out that neatly, but plasma is really messy and ends up drifting all over that place. it turns out that doing the spiraling helical thing in the diagram is the best way to contain it, but it's not 100%

and even trying to confine it like that needs a huge amount of energy to get a huge amount of electricity flowing through the plasma to get it magnetically active enough for the magnets to hold it in

when people speak of "nuclear fusion in ten years!" they mean that we will achieve "breakeven", when the amount of energy used to just run the thing is "worth it" because we get more energy out

but plasma remains messy, and every time it messes up it costs energy and damages the reactor. an early tokamak had a hole melted in it by what we later understood to be very similar to a literal lightning bolt

the tokamak is a somewhat brute-force approach. what if there was a more elegant method

though we don't yet understand all the messes of plasmadynamics, we understand many of the biggest ones, so we can come up with ways to cancel them out.

one of the easiest ways is rotation: if the plasma drifts left, let it get halfway and then flip it upside down so it drifts back right. or constantly keep rotating it. you can see the same idea on the helical magnetic field in the tokamak diagram from before

so in a stellarator, we've switched our focus: instead of relying on flowing plasma current to respond to the magnets holding it in place, we've reshaped the magnets to catch plasma drifting outwards and redirect it back inwards.

pros: no messy, power-hungry plasma current to force. a stellarator can operate in "steady-state": instead of constantly touching it up like pottery on the wheel, it just goes until you turn it off (or it runs out of fuel or explodes of whatever). since we're already fucking with the magnet shapes, we can also put in extra little twists to trap plasma messes, smooth out the more obvious tangles, etc.

cons: all that magnet fuckery is complicated. it's harder to calculate and design, harder to physically build, and harder to maintain. depending on the design you can make it so the magnets are movable, so for a research stellarator you can try new magnet designs a little easier, for example, but that movable magnet will never be as good as a properly fixed magnet. also the magnets have to be quite close together so there's not really space to build, like, a door into the interior for maintenance or access

and the real con: tokamaks are better. they quickly got much closer to breakeven as we just continued to refine our plasmadynamics alongside brute-forcing the plasma current

BUT

stellarators are getting better

i almost wrote that theyre getting beautiful. they are. just look at her

NEGLECTED MURDERESSES SERIES

Angelica Transome — so disposed of her infant brother that he was not found until many years later (Nether Postlude, 1889).

Miss Elspeth Lipsleigh — eventually succeeded in causing the death of Arthur Glumm in Towage Regis, 1892.

Nurse J. Rosebeetle — tilted her employer out of the wheelchair and over the cliff at Sludgemouth in 1898.

Mrs. Fledaway — laced her husband's tea with atropine in the spring of 1903 at Locusts, near Puddingbasin, Mortshire.

Sarah Jane (“Batears”) Olafsen — hacked to collops nineteen loggers between March 1904 and November 1907 in and around Bindweed, Oregon.

Madame Galoche — in May 1911 added a tin of insecticide to a potate purée Crécy aux perles at the soup kitchen she operated for the indigent of Berchem-Sainte-Agathe, Belgium.

Miss Emily Toastwater — smothered her father after evening prayers, London S. W. 7 (1916).

Mrs. Daisy Sallow — eviscerated her daughter-in-law with a No. 7 hook afterwards crotcheting, over the course of three evenings her shroud in snowflake pattern (1921).

Natasha Batti-Loupstein — pulverized a paste necklace and sprinkled it over a tray of canapés, Villa Libellule, Nice, 1923.

Lady Violet Natheless — strangeled the hon. Opal Gentian at Gilravage Hall on Midsummer's Eve, 1925.

Lettice Finding — shot Edgar Cutlet, whose mistress she was, during the interval of a touring repertory company production of Rosmersholm in Manchester 1934.

Miss Q. P. Urkheimer — brained her fiancé after failing to pick up an easy spare at Glover's Lane's, Poxville, Kansas, 1936.

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She's groovin'

:) From my insta stories yesterday:

look at her!! she is so cute!!! i want to cry!!!!