Lorenzo Venneri Blog
I finished translating Hazard and Hope in the Age of Technics, a booklet by Hans Sedlmayr first published in 1970. It was brought to my attention by my aunt, Giovanna De Lorenzi, retired Professor of Art History at the University of Florence, who studies and reintroduces the works of some of the most interesting thinkers including Hans Sedlmayr, Wladimir Weidlé, Ugo Ojetti, Nicolas Berdyaev, etc.
Designing a reactor core barely half a meter wide sounds simple and quite reasonable for a startup until you start counting neutrons. The reality is that most of the new startups developing micro reactors are making very sketchy claims about cost. This post is about how terrible reactor burnup is going to keep “trash-can” reactors on the drawing board and describes some of the ticks that can…
There's lots of high quality timelapse out there — one of the best is Morten Rustad (@morten.rustad). If you are starting from scratch, start there. The typical approach is to capture relatively slow moving phenomena at 1-120 frames per hour and then running the frames at standard frame rates - 24-60 frames per second. Motion is fluid and properly blurred by keeping exposure coverage to at least…
I made a little webapp for fun navigation and exploration. The compass always points towards where you want to go - the closest ice cream shop. You can tap to cycle through the closest locations. It also has a variometer to beep yourself towards the destination in the same way gliders keep track of altitude.
These are low-cost, not entirely empirical methods to help treat cancer. They are aimed at the poor and desperate, but some also serve as preventative measures for normal healthy people. I was inspired to put it together after hearing about a friend's dad (a neurosurgeon who claims "chemo is a scam") who had a miraculous PSA 5 prostate cancer recovery and various cancer cases from friends and…
Over the years I have often perturbed a design or model or strategy for sensitivity analysis and optimization. The typical situation is that I have a model for something like an optical system, a heat exchanger, or a nuclear core, and the model has a bunch of knobs and inputs, and bunch of outputs including value functions to optimize or observe. I then have to run various extreme cases or choose…
Previously, Len Fisher addressed the issue of biscuits lost at tea . As a cookie soaks, the sugar and fats dissolve,
The solar spectrum shows up at Earth looking pretty close to a black body of 5777 K. As it goes through the Earth's atmosphere, there are various absorption and scattering interactions that change the spectrum to produce some distinct lines and features. I was curious how I might recreate the solar spectrum as measured on the surface of the Earth if I had a beam of light from a warm blackbody of…
Modern economies tend to organize themselves to produce larger volumes of lower-quality goods. This results in lower initial capital expenditures (CAPEX) unlocking greater sales for the seller but at the expense of higher operational expenditures (OPEX) for the buyer, including replacement costs, resulting in higher levelized cost (LC) of goods. This applies to everyday consumer goods like coffee…
Maps are flat. The real world is sometimes flat, but quite often rugged or mountainous. That means the surface area of the real world is always some factor greater than the 2-D map projection. More mountainous regions will have a higher surface area than you'd think from just looking at a map.
Nuclear reactor explainer starting from the basics through to nuclear reactions and reactor control.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 is like a Toyota Corolla – an order of magnitude cheaper than competitor's "high performance" rocket
A common problem in image capture for various active illumination methods is ambient light. Many approaches exist.
A simple design for a wall lamp using a single sheet of aluminum. Also make for good heaters.
A design for a SiC mug utilizing advanced additive manufacturing techniques.
A new approach to eyewear that reduces distortion with a unique accelerationist aesthetic.
The general public and even most nuclear engineers do not understand how easy it is for nuclear fuel to fail. Since the dawn of the nuclear era, nuclear fuels have been designed and built to meet only a small portion of the full requirements. This was due to material and technology limitations as well as costs. The only economical and practical way to use nuclear material for power has been simple…
As a side-project, I collect and maintain information on upcoming nuclear energy extraction systems. Having it all in
A little bit about my work on colloids for single-phase heat transfer at MIT.
Collected health principles that may be useful to others.