Comments by "Psiberzerker" (@Psiberzerker) on "Technology Connections"
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"Energy Efficiency" is a fantastic example, because a lot of industries have marketed Electricity as Energy. Heat is Energy, so Thermal Efficiency is Energy Efficiency. Even in something like a cooler, ideally you want the largest sphere you can insulate, because that's the minimum surface area to insulate over the maximum volume to keep cool. Efficiency is Minmaxing. What do you want to minimize, and what do you want to maximize? Unfortunately, we can't really have perfectly round beercans, because you have to put a pop-top in it so it can be opened, and you can drink beer out of it. It might be nice if you could set it down without it rolling away, and spilling beer all over the place. That's why we have beercans, and honestly all the puzzling features engineered into a beercan. That divit in the bottom is to maintain pressure, because the aluminum wants to bulge out into a sphere like a soap bubble. I'm not going into how it does that, or how we figured that out. For us, the next best thing to a sphere is a cube, because the corners don't waste as much material, the square walls don't waste that much more heat, and it's convenient for stacking in rows. That's why we have corners everywhere, because corners allow other corners to pack in around them, even with room to spare between for things like streets, and intersections, with corners. In an ideal world, the ground would be perfectly flat and even, but unfortunately, we have to work around rivers so we can pump water to your tap, and sewage back to the water treatment plant. We don't live in an ideal world, so we have to design for real people, who're less than ideal ourselves.
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