I can say from direct experience doing research with hollow-core fibres that they are not easy to splice either to each other or to standard fibre. Imagine trying to use heat to melt together a pipe and a solid cylinder without creating a mess.
I must be missing something. This is recommending folders are numbered. Is that it? Is this a "system" now? I think that may have been used previously - for example by humanity for the last 5,000 years or so.
"the BIPM collects time measurements from national timing laboratories around the world"
I'm really interested in how this is done with multiple clocks over a distance. Can anyone explain? It feels like it would be very difficult since asking "what time is it there?" at the timescale of atomic clocks is kind of a bit meaningless? And that's before considering the absolute local nature of time and the impossibility of a general universal time per relativity.
It's mad that this even needs said. A company's aim should be to be sustainable and profitable, not to be a receptacle for capital. Some companies need external capital to get to that point, particularly hardware or those operating in slow-adopting markets. If you don't need it, don't take it.
Yes - this is precisely what was trialled in the UK a few years ago. You can basically take old decommissioned generators and just take power to spin them up - thus, you've just (re)created rotational inertia on your grid. It's a bit absurd, but it does work!
As another commenter says, it's actually easier the more generators you have because the rotational inertia of all the spinning masses is larger. This (and the storage problem) is one of the reasons that wind and solar destabalise grids - they are interfaced to the rest of the grid by converters that create ac sources - but there's no real rotating mass there, so the inertia is tiny. The result is that as we add more renewable power to the network, it becomes less able to 'roll with the punches' of loads coming on and off line.
PS One of the answers in the SO thread mentions JET in the UK. I spent a few summers there as an electrical engineering student (it's home to the MAST and JET fusion reactors). When the JET tokamak ignites a plasma, it can't sustain it for very long (we are not yet at the point of extracting enough energy to sustain the reaction). As a result they need to ignite the plasma and keep it hot. They can't do it for more than 1-10 seconds. During that time, they draw massive amounts of power - they're permitted to draw up to 1% of the UK's capacity for a short period, whilst they simultaneously dump all the energy stored in two gigantic flywheel generators housed in a nearby building. I've never been there when the flywheels are running but I've climbed around beneath them. There's nothing quite like massive engineering :)
Thanks for the post. On reading it I couldn't help but wonder if burnout might follow you to running your own company. From personal experience, it can be intensely bad for mental health after the initial excitement turns into endless hard grind to survive, grow, keep the support of investors, etc.