Sockets, Sparks, and Magic Smoke - Dylan Beattie - NDC London 2023

For thousands of years, humans have watched in awe as lightning flashed across the sky. Benjamin Franklin studied electricity by flying kites in thunderstorms, Michael Faraday discovered the relationship between electricity, magnetism and motion, and today, our world literally runs on electricity. We've built vast power grids that carry hundreds of gigawatts across continents, our cars, phones, and earbuds run on batteries, and we've sent electrical devices to the furthest reaches of space – and implanted them into our own bodies. And within the last century, we've learned to used electricity to represent information; true and false, one and zero, countless electrical bits bouncing all over the planet, carrying news, video, music, games, and the metadata that keeps our society connected.

Join Dylan Beattie for an insightful and entertaining look at how humans have used the power of the electron to build our digital society. We'll demystify the everyday electrical systems which we all take for granted - what's really happening when you charge your phone? Why don't Americans use electric kettles? What's actually happening inside that 8Gb USB stick you've got on your keyring? We'll dig into some of the most remarkable devices and systems ever built. We'll look at the fundamental limitations of physics, why we'll probably never see a 10GHz CPU core, and how quantum computing could be the key to breaking that barrier. Finally, we'll look at what happens when it goes wrong, and what engineers can do about it – from error correcting RAM chips, to why hospitals run backup power supplies, to what happens when entire countries suddenly need more power than we expected.

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[soganox]

I am a simple man. I see Dylan Beattie, I click to watch. Never disappoints :)

[matthewgiallourakis]

New Dylan Beattie presentation, heck yeah!

[ARiverSystem]

Fun fact, in Mary Shelley's book Frankenstein there is actually no mention of lightning at all. It's a common trope in current movies and stuff, but it wasn't in the book. It's not the only way in which it's surprising either, the idea of Frankenstein got changed quite a bit over the years in pop culture. Makes for a really interesting read.

[HeilTec]

Dylan Beattie is always entertaining. He always entrances the audience.

[sundhaug]

34:25 We already have seen retail CPUs clocked at more than 5 GHz, such as the IBM z14 (2017) and Intel Core i9-13900KS has a max boost clock out of the box of 6 GHz

[xdata]

I've binged two of his presentations so far and will likely look for a third.

[unicorn_tamer]

Another inspiring talk! Thank you Dylan!

[hansbaeker]

Just starting to watch and am wondering if he will address the question we all want answered -- what did they call electric eels before the discovery of electricity?

[PaulRedeemed]

Great way to start my day! Coffee and this before work

[blackasthesky]

34:23 we have seen a retail CPU clocked at more than 5GHz -- Ryzen 7000 all boost above 5GHz, same for Intel 13th gen. Base clock is lower, though. Nevertheless, it clocks like that out of the factory.

[MrBanzoid]

Slight correction. The cathode in an alkaline battery is manganese dioxide, not magnesium dioxide, which chemically doesn't exist.

[maxcurzi]

small correction 11:30 : AM / FM Radio operate at a much lower frequency (~1000kHz AM to 108MHz for FM) than WiFi (2.4GHz)

[Zlodej]

BRiliant talker, even if for the first time it was out of his scope and it was noticeable with quite few inacruracies. Nobody is perfect every time.

[miszcz]

Great talk. Only one small thing is that LEDs are analog. However, this cheapest dimmers are not. The reason being, the price only. You can make complete continuous dimmer, but you need DC power source with stabilized current. And it's kind of complicated to get it from high voltage ac.

[davidmiller]

Also You are wrong about U.S. voltage. In Residential areas it's 240 to the power box. It's split onto two legs for 120, unless you have a dryer or Ac or other appliance that requires 240. In that case they run both legs to the outlet giving 240.

I'm starting to think i should make a list.
The majority Like 90% plus of the crude oil in the world, has NOTHING to do with dinosaurs. It does have a lot to do with plants. Ferns mostly.


Edit: i have big fingers and didn't look until after i hit send. Fingures.

[GrantDiffey]

ARRRG! that's a TEMS machine not an electroshock therapy machine (Electroshock therapy is much higher voltage applied to the temples as a neurological/psychiatric treatment)

[Lmr]

Funny and all but incredibly wrongish / half-truthisch / missing important stuff...
I'm waiting for the disclaimer that none of the information presented is researched to any reasonable depth. He's at most skimming the surface of every topic...

I'm not a 100% sure but I think one of Konrad Zuse's mechanical computers was/is Turing complete.

@38:23 - LEDs aren't digital devices. They aren't just on or off. Limit the power (=current in this case) and you can dim them quite a bit.
But that is not how classical dimmers nor how most LED bulbs(!) work.

@43:00 - AFAIK you can tell Linux (kernel!) at start time which memory blocks to ignore.
I'm sure there are automatism doing that on their own too...

@45:57 - Hospitals usually have three different sockets: A) normal. B) UPS. C)
Granted, AFAIK the third option is only available in intensive care and operation rooms (the sockets stay powered even if ONE(!) device has a ground fault).

@50:10 - The same is true for the opposite: When an power-equivalent number of devices are switched off at the same time it's just as difficult for the power grid. (EDIT: Fixed timestamp by ~-40s)

@56:50 - "Bolt of lightning can carry(!) 13*10^6 Volts of electricity(!) across .... miles(!)"
Wtf? that makes no physical sense at all. Carrying "Volts of electricity" over a distance is just nonsense.

[ICountFrom]

One of my favorite short story fictions involves aliens invading us by breaking electricity. They somehow blanket earth in a field that makes it so that only organic electric actions occure, and they just happen to have organic tech. (insert handwave here). We end up fighting back with mechicanally aimed rockets. Feels inspired by babiage and russia.

[diablominero]

Some old pacemakers had plutonium and metal plates to collect the electric charge of the radiation it emitted and ran on that energy for the rest of the person's life without being recharged.

[bloody_albatross]

"There's only one type of radiation." Well, particle rays are also counted as radiation (e.g. alpha and beta radiation, cosmic rays, and others) and there are gravitational waves etc. 🤓