Ofc there's auto-zero on start involved, but translated to a people bathroom scale that'd be "comfortably better than +-100g".

A precise bathroom scale just would want a bit more effort on drift prevention as a sample mass at this scale is rather unwieldy, and critically it'd need a toe-operated button to select that you've finished climbing onto the scale, upon which it starts averaging the load to progressively improve the weight measurement accuracy. I'd expect using a bounce-height-freefall-duration based length of timing uncertainty at the start and end of the averaging period to allow proper Bayesian uncertainty quantification of the shown result, say by displaying both the 10th and the 90th percentile on the display which grow closer as you wait while standing on it.

With some cleverness a compact calibration mass might be usable to calibrate absolute scale, transferring up to the "people" range using just a random assortment of stuff that fits on the platform, totalling around 10kg.

Because building the scale to be linear in response good enough for 20k count of resolution is pretty straight-forward.

At distances where Cat.6A is even an option the demands on the fiber are very low. And it uses less power than the BASE-T PHY. The cable at least without integrated power is very thin as well, unless you can't respect it enough to not kink it, in which case you'd want a thicker one just to prevent you from being able to break the fiber.

They've been used to great success since we had the needed power electronics to drive the electric trains of Europe.

E.g. for example for a given electrical frequency and decent radial flux synchronous machine, power density is quite static and torque density can actually be dialed quite freely from 2-pole machine (turboset in gas turbine running on the grid at 3600 rpm (or 3000 rpm outside NA and some Pacific Islands) to 40(+) (example deployed at Hoover dam, 180 rpm). At those higher pole counts, the center of the rotor is no longer electromagnetically active, because the magnetic field lines keep to a narrow ring only about as thick as each pole is wide. Unfortunately it's mechanically not that trivial to handle a cylindrical shell with a small air gap (this needs to be significantly smaller (about at least 10x) than the pole width) when using substantial torque and speed.

Circumferential velocity is practically limited by hoop strength of whatever the outer region of the rotor is made of, even if it's all very nicely balanced, because eventually the magnetic armature flux source (wires or magnets) will fly out.

Higher electrical frequencies limit the field winding core's magnetic permeability (magnetic field/force strength amplification relative to vacuum, for same electrical current) which hurts efficiency by dropping the useful mechanical power component of field voltage while the voltage resulting from the current (that needs to happen to cause the magnetic field in the direction of movement that causes the mechanical force) due to wiring resistance stays. (I think the permeability gives the ratio between voltage and current for otherwise identical mechanical load conditions and winding shape?)

Thinner wires have less fill factor because the insulation has to stay the same thickness as per-winding voltage stays, but magnetically inactive terminations are less wasteful (for losses and mass) when a decent number of effective turns (>>1, think >10~50 for most of the benefits) are used.

Note while the armature necessarily has an even number of poles in it's construction (north/south), the field is not forced to that.

Indeed, the iirc most smooth torque (under practical mechanical feasibility limitations and without undue sacrifice of efficiency) results from having a prime number (of field windings, in WYE-style connection) exactly one off from the armature pole count. Note that for low losses all these torque-smoothing techniques _require_ only a single electrically directly driven winding in each slot (per mechanical field pole) and with that only GCD(field_slots, (armature_poles / 2)) windings get to share an electrical half-bridge (one single wire going to a single voltage-output terminal on the electronics board; note mainstream BLDCs have 3 of these, classic fridge compressors have 2, and modern stepper motors (e.g. 3D printer) have 4).

Any time you have multiple windings driven by different electrical source voltages you're wasting heat in the winding because the lowest-loss would require all conductor in the slot to to perfectly evenly share current.

There's just one problem with that: you need a nearby slot with exactly opposite phase to even possibly use more than a single (half) turn of "winding" in the slot.

If the voltage is still enough to not loose too much in the connections, you can use transistors developed for efficiently powering modern computer chips from comfortable voltages like 12V, but even then a "winding" has to be much longer than an armature pole to mitigate the losses of spreading the return current sideways to where a slot carries the current in the reverse direction. Once the voltage at the transistor is over around 10V the benefits of more precise control of the field magnetization to the armature position (and how the shapes distort the field lines from anything that would look like a sine wave) could be useful. In theory that'd also provide direct access to electronically control the air gap (well, net force normal to the air gap "surface") which _could_ be an alternative to mechanical bearings for very thin-shell constructions. See maglev trains for a pretty practical application of using an electric motor to also levitate the "rotor" in a place where a mechanical bearing ("train wheels + bogies") performs poorly.

And alirack style datacenters have large 3-phase converters between the grid and some 240 (nowadays often 350) V DC bus, with the battery banks directly (with just fuses and sometimes a little bit of balancing/nudging power (think 10% of battery power rating)) on the bus, and then the servers also directly consuming from that bus.

The large converters on the battery bus thus allow synthetically smoothing load transients to the grid using the batteries to smooth that power draw. This has just minor additional wear on the batteries and a small power efficiency impact from hitting through the batteries, both of which are easily paid by anything market-rate of providing that grid service. Because they already need the power electronics and batteries anyways, unlike a utility battery farm that at best can argue day/night load shifting of solar production as the reason for the electronics and batteries to exist.

In that same spirit it's also effective to put batteries on the DC bus (between MPPT and inverters) of large solar farms, because they need the electronics anyways and it's actually reducing the required inverter&transformer capacity of the solar farm by peak-shaving.

Though if you want to do a smoothing action on real power flux you'll have to colocate battery capacity with the converter. Which to be clear is fairly cheap to do as long as you get compensated for the substantial frequency stabilization capacity this represents. I'm talking like 15~120 minutes at converter nominal AC power of battery capacity.

The first 10~20% of reactive power are almost free from the converter electronics, btw....

It's actually strange that we don't seem to have any system for just dropping containers at the destination until the contents have been processed, instead of the current system that essentially mandates unloading the container rapidly as soon as it shows up because an entire truck+driver is waiting for the unloading to complete.

For palletized loads it's easy to unload them into temporary space in the building they're delivered to, but not everything is palletized.

[0]: http://web.archive.org/web/20171103012446/http://dotsies.org...

Yes, you can just GF(256), but if you're worried I'd also just use a prime field instead.