Geothermal Gradients & Flight Control Failures

👋 Happy Saturday! A few highlights for your weekend: lecture notes on geothermal fundamentals, a chart of Airbus A320 sensor locations (and how bad architecture crashed the 737 Max), and everything you never knew you needed to know about washers. Humans have tapped into geothermal heat since the Stone Age, mostly for keeping warm, bathing, and gathering around natural hot springs. Advances in drilling and power systems are now making it viable at larger scales as a renewable and dispatchable resource. This MIT lecture walks through how it works: tapping into underground heat reservoirs, either naturally occurring hydrothermal systems (liquid, vapor, steam) or engineered ones called enhanced geothermal systems, where hot dry rock is fractured to create a reservoir. Most geothermal plants generate low-grade heat (100–200°C) but still manage a high capacity factor (~90%), meaning they can run almost constantly. Fun fact: Iceland gets more than 70% of its energy from geothermal, and in th

👋 Happy Saturday! A few highlights for your weekend: lecture notes on geothermal fundamentals, a chart of Airbus A320 sensor locations (and how bad architecture crashed the 737 Max), and everything you never knew you needed to know about washers. Humans have tapped into geothermal heat since the Stone Age, mostly for keeping warm, bathing, and gathering around natural hot springs. Advances in drilling and power systems are now making it viable at larger scales as a renewable and dispatchable resource. This MIT lecture walks through how it works: tapping into underground heat reservoirs, eithe