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by nsxwolf 1542 days ago
Yes, but this I suppose is a bit like a mechanical watch (if many orders of magnitude less practical). You can spend $30,000 on a watch that keeps terrible time in comparison to a $10 quartz watch. But you know there's all these tiny precision machines inside ticking away, and that makes you happy.

The only power I can extract from a fusor is the current generated inside a Geiger counter. But in my head, I know there's all kinds of cool fusion reactions happening. Gamma rays, helium, tritium, neutrons... that's all going on and it's just cool to know you're making it happen.

1 comments

If the $30k watch can't keep time, then those tiny machines aren't very precise
According to the COSC standard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COSC), a mechanical watch is allowed to have a deviation of -4/+6 seconds per day, while a quartz watch has to have ±0.07 seconds per day. So a mechanical watch can be two orders of magnitude "worse" than an electronic one and still call itself an officially certified Swiss watch. But I'm sure that manufacturers of $30k watches hold themselves to higher standards - not that someone who buys a $30k watch nowadays really uses it to tell the time, but still...
That just means their mediocrity is up to spec