Today, a friend went to the hospital where the clinically dead kid’s life thread is sustained by machines to pay his respects to his family and had a brief chat with the kid’s brother. he was obviously devastated and told him that his life’s no longer important and that he will avenge his brother’s murder. the kid will become an organ donor any time today as his family asked the doctors to unplug him. you should know that it’s very easy to find a firearm or explosives in crete – a place where 50% of the population possess non-registered weapons. vendetta is on the air and even the police seems frightened and with good reason. very ominous….in a nutshell, the entire island of crete is in a state of emotional turmoil, and the whole situation is very fragile.
george dafermos: someone i kind of knew years ago was shot in the head 3 days ago when the car he was in refused to stop to the signs of a special police squad known as “special guards” in crete, greece. oh wow. and these guys want to be in the eu.
The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics will screen a classic science fiction film on the first Thursday of each month. The series will explore the idea that “everything we learned about science, we learned from the movies.” Except for Camp-o-Rama, doors open at 18:45 and programs begin at 19:10 with a Flash Gordon serial. Movie begins at 19:30.
the next installment on 12/6 features robot monster along with the well-known plan 9 from outer space:
Ro-Man, the most evil creature in the Universe, comes to Earth to kill everyone with his powerful death ray. Perhaps even outdoing Plan 9 From Outer Space as the Biggest Turkey Ever Made, Robot Monster is beyond belief…and that’s why it is so much fun to watch…but no more than once! Labeled a “Poverty Row Quickie” by film critics, this low budget 1950’s B film stars actors and directors who never should have come within a km of a movie camera. Featuring imbecilic dialog and moronic costumes, this classic sub-schlock masterpiece rivals anything put out by Ed Wood! Starring: Who cares?
On PEI sex is commonplace for girls as young as 12. It is not just oral sex but going the whole way in the school washroom on the floor. If you think I exaggerate have a real heart to heart with a teacher. Amazing to me for whom young girls were sacrosanct, boys of 18 think nothing of having sex with a 12 year old. The “Ho” look is now essential to fit in. If you don’t wear a thong, you are a loser. 30% of boys are on Ritalin. Think about this before you pass onto the next point. 30% of our boys have to take drugs so that they can cope at school and at home. Most of the really dreadful violence such as at Columbine does not occur in inner city schools but in middle class or even upper middle class settings. It’s the kids who have all the things who are most desperate. PEI sent a choir to France recently. One of the sights that struck the parents who accompanied the kids was not the Eiffel Tower but the fact that not one – not one – of the French kids was fat and ~50% the PEI kids were fat. Bullying is endemic and no longer linked only to boys. There have been girls who have killed girls and girl hazing is as bad as anything in the Paratroopers.
PEI is prince edward island, and the post is by rob paterson. i wonder which candidate has anything relevant to say about this? (yes i know it is in canada, but the us is the same, if not worse)
People ask me sometimes why I insist on my full name, including the middle name, in attributions. Most people do, but you have to search for both Gregor J. Rothfuss and Gregor Rothfuss to get the full picture, and that leaves out attributions like Gregor or Greg (don’t use Greg, btw). You could argue that you don’t want that level of transparency, but face it, it is here. so anyway, I did a search on friendster to find a friend of mine, and I got 8 results. which one is it? Names define our identity. In the past, with very localized exchanges, it did not matter if there was someone else with your name somewhere. Now it does. So I am wondering, how much would it take to give every human being a unique name? Some considerations:
Only use meaningful combinations of characters. No ewrjp ewrerwh
Make it future-proof, for we may live a very long time
Have mappings between languages
Would numbers be impolite? Somedude23 certainly is
A linguist may be able to calculate how many characters it would take to achieve this feat. I wonder if it would be at a manageable length? Elke suggests Indian names (based on deeds) or email-style names which are based on association: someone@somewhere. Of course, for the glut of people at hotmail, that does not work, because the association is meaningless. I wonder what other naming schemes may be of interest?
2007-12-06: Thais try to have names as UUID: Any 2 families that are related will have the same last name, and usually quite complicated ones at that.
I guess that historically the main reason for the dominance of given names in Thai culture is because family names are a relatively recent innovation: they were introduced by King Rama VI towards the beginning of the 20th century. Family names were allocated to families systematically and the use of family names is still controlled by the government. Any two people in Thailand with the same family name are related. This leads to Thai family names being quite a mouthful. Here’s a sample from people in the news over the past couple of days: Leophairatana, Tantiwittayapitak, Boonyaratkalin. Even Thais have difficulty remembering each others family names.
If you become a Thai citizen, you have to choose a new, unused family name. Just as with domain names, all the good, short names have gone. So the more recently your family has become Thai, the longer and more unwieldy your family name is likely to be.
2015-04-23: I’ve wondered about this for a long time.
2016-03-11: Changing your last name for some dude had always been in extremely bad taste. The confusion leading to it has always been puzzling to me.
We’ll each keep our last name and take the other’s name as our middle name.
I am willing to bet that 200 years from now (2222) more than 66% of people born on the planet will have adult names they chose themselves. Having a name chosen by your parents will be like having a marriage arranged by your parents. It’s not the modern thing to do, and a sign of a very conservative traditional family.
Being assigned a name at birth will still be common place, but this name will primarily be a placeholder until the name choosing ceremony, when you get to choose your legal adult name. Perhaps this happens at 12, or 16. The bureaucratic friction in changing your name which is currently normal will be reduced to make it super easy to do. The name changes will also be tracked on the blockchains, making it both easy to monitor and hard to scam. They system would only work if there was a continuum between names, so changing a name was not a way to hide.
Once changing your name at the threshold of adulthood is easy, changing your name later during adulthood will also be easy. I’d expect people to go through life with multiple name stages. We see the hints of that now with nicknames, and trail names, and playa names, and online handles and pseudonyms. The main difference is that these new names will be legal and it will be easy to track their lineage, since the ledger of names is public. The average person might have 3 of 4 hames in their lifetime.
Dolphins cannot use voices as their identifying feature because it becomes distorted at different depths. They instead invent a melody – a pattern of sound frequencies held for specific lengths of time – that they use to identify themselves for the rest of their lives. Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) can even imitate the whistles of their friends, calling out their names if they are lost. Additional information, such as reproductive status, can be conveyed by changing the volume of different parts of the whistle, not unlike how people emphasize certain words to add nuance. Dolphins living among seagrass gave themselves a short, shrill name compared to the baritone sounds of dolphins living in muddier waters. Meanwhile, small pods displayed greater pitch variation than larger groups, which may help with identification when the probability of repeated encounters is higher. Marine researchers still don’t know why some bottlenoses base their whistles on family members and others on lesser acquaintances.
While the signature whistles of female dolphins will barely change throughout their life, male dolphins may adjust their whistle to mirror the signature whistle of their best friend. In addition to an individual signature whistle, groups of dolphins may invent a shared whistle to promote social cohesion.
The current setupis brittle. Concentrated power is vulnerable. Look at the airlines not coping with the discounts. Competing with Wal-mart is impossible. eBay is the largest automobile retailer today. Gigamedia, so concentrated, is so vulnerable.
with cluetrainish notions on the rise, can the upswing be far behind? robert has some very interesting viewpoints. subscribed.
tiny yapper Ill tempered and aggressive, Tiny Yapper is always right out at the end of his leash and barks furiously at the slightest provocation. Though his constant high pitched yips can be very annoying, his diminutive stature and limited strength pose no real threat to other Warriors..
a great cast of characters drawn from social interactions on the net. this would have come in handy last time scott kindley was at it.
Watching the mummy returns reminded me of an article i had read some time ago, arguably one of the scariest i ever read. it talks about the problem of marking a site as dangerous for 10 ka into the future.
These standing stones mark an area used to bury radioactive wastes. The area is … by … kilometers and the buried waste is … kilometers down. This place was chosen to put this dangerous material far away from people. The rock and water in this area may not look, feel, or smell unusual but may be poisoned by radioactive wastes. When radioactive matter decays, it gives off invisible energy that can destroy or damage people, animals, and plants.
Do not drill here. Do not dig here. Do not do anything that will change the rocks or water in the area.
Do not destroy this marker. This marking system has been designed to last 10 ka. If the marker is difficult to read, add new markers in longer-lasting materials in languages that you speak. For more information go to the building further inside. The site was known as the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) site when it was closed in …
2006-10-16: Well-researched Thorium piece, but Michael needs to become more concise: he repeats himself too much in this piece.
Sometime between 2020 and 2030, we will invent a practically unlimited energy source that will solve the global energy crisis. This unlimited source of energy will come from thorium. A summary of the benefits, from a recent announcement of the start of construction for a new prototype reactor:
There is no danger of a melt-down like the Chernobyl reactor.
It produces minimal radioactive waste.
It can burn plutonium waste from traditional nuclear reactors.
It is not suitable for the production of weapon grade materials.
Global thorium reserves could cover our energy needs for 1000s of years.
The new reactor, which is only 7m x 2m, could change everything for a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs.
2008-05-22: Why bother with oil-based stuff when you can have distributed nuclear energy with Uranium hydride batteries? 2008-07-24: Uranium Deep Burn
It is projected that volumes of high-level waste could be reduced by a factor of 50, while extra electricity is generated.
Besides the low amount of waste and almost complete burning of all Uranium and Plutonium, another big advantage of liquid fluoride reactors is fast and safe shutoff and restart capability. This fast stop and restart allows for load following electricity generation. This means a different electric utility niche can be addressed other than just baseload power for nuclear power. Currently natural gas is the primary load following power source. Wind and solar are intermittent in that they generate power at unreliable times. LFTR would be reliable on demand power.
Fuck ethanol. Lets have some 21st century nuclear power
Thorium is one of the victims of the brainless scare campaign against nuclear that has infected most western nations over the last 30 years. Instead of doing silly stunts like the germans, whose “exit” from nuclear energy will mean more coal plants being built, an enlightened nation would chose thorium.
Instead, we are stuck with aging reactors (how does that make anyone safer?) and scientific illiteracy both in the general population and elected representatives.
I’m generally dismayed how little discussion about thorium there is in energy circles.
Kirk Sorensen provides an update on the current state of thorium power. The bad news is that it still remains mostly theoretical concept; no operational reactor has been deployed yet — even as a prototype. However, new thorium nuclear molten salt experiments were just started in Europe. We have good “line of sight” on the science to build one — so, at this point, the limiting factor is mostly funding. In a world of privately-funded space travel, such a gating obstacle shouldn’t remain for long. 4 specific difficulties have been mentioned:
Salts can be corrosive to materials.
Designing for high-temperature operation is more difficult
There has been little innovation in the field for several decades
The differences between LFTRs and the light water reactors in majority use today are vast; the former “is not yet fully understood by regulatory agencies and officials.”
Andrew Yang has proposed a nuclear subsidy—$50B over 5 years
he is pro-nuclear and has a deep understanding of all the technical issues around energy. Real change from the Bush administration in selecting extreme competence. It is not in any way a guarantee of correct energy choices because there is still political reality.
At stake is the 100s of billions spent on meaningless levels of “safety” around nuclear power plants and waste storage, the projected costs of next-generation nuclear plant designs to reduce greenhouse gases worldwide, and the extremely harmful episodes of public panic that accompany rare radiation-release events like Fukushima and Chernobyl. (No birth defects whatever were caused by Chernobyl, but fear of them led to 100K panic abortions in the Soviet Union and Europe. What people remember about Fukushima is that nuclear opponents predicted that 100s or 1000s would die or become ill from the radiation. In fact nobody died, nobody became ill, and nobody is expected to.) 2014-02-14: You can power the world for 72 years with the nuclear waste that exists today, at a price cheaper than coal. Of course it will likely not happen due to collusion between the coal industry and the fear industrial complex.
China approved 2 reactors this month as it vowed to cut coal use to meet terms of a CO2-emissions agreement reached in November between President Xi Jinping and US counterpart Barack Obama. About $370b will be spent on atomic power. Plans to 3x nuclear capacity by 2020 to as much as 58 gigawatts.
Assuming a 25% conversion efficiency, a Radioisotope Power Source (RPS) would have 400K MJ / kg (electric) compared to 0.72 MJ / kg for Li-ion batteries. The goal is make a 5 watt “D cell” but with nuclear power that lasts decades
Bill Gates is funding Nathan Myhrvold’s Terrapower, a fast breeder reactor that burns a U238 duraflame log for 60 years, with 99% efficiency vs 1% for today’s U235 reactors. No fuel to reload or waste to ship around. Existing nuclear waste could be used as fuel.
“It is the first time a comprehensive IAEA international meeting on molten salt reactors has ever taken place. Given the interest of Member States, the IAEA could provide a platform for international cooperation and information exchange on the development of these advanced nuclear systems.” Molten salt reactors operate at higher temperatures, making them more efficient in generating electricity. In addition, their low operating pressure can reduce the risk of coolant loss, which could otherwise result in an accident. Molten salt reactors can run on various types of nuclear fuel and use different fuel cycles. This conserves fuel resources and reduces the volume, radiotoxicity and lifetime of high-level radioactive waste.
2016-11-28: Making nuclear energy radically less expensive
“The big thing is that the government is making national lab resources available to private companies in a way that it wasn’t before. If you are a nuclear startup, you can only go so far before you need to do testing, and you are not going to build a nuclear test facility, because that is hard and expensive. But now you could partner with a national lab to use their experimental resources. I’ve been talking about how to set up a pathway from universities for this kind of research.”
2016-12-01: Coal to nuclear can rapidly address 30% of CO2
The high temperature reactors can replace the coal burners at 100s supercritical coal plants in China. The lead of the pebble bed project indicates that China plans to replace coal burners with high temperature nuclear pebble bed reactors.
The amount of used nuclear fuel will continue to increase, reaching around 1M tons by 2050. The uranium and plutonium that could be extracted from that used fuel would be sufficient to provide fuel for at least 140 light water reactors of 1 GW capacity for 60 years. “It makes sense to consider how to turn today’s burden into a valuable resource.”
The overall cost of this first of a kind nuclear plant will be in the neighborhood of $5K/kw of capacity. That number is based on signed and mostly executed contracts, not early estimates. It is 2x the initially expected cost. 35% of the increased cost could be attributed to higher material and component costs that initially budgeted, 31% of the increase was due to increases in labor costs and the remainder due to the increased costs associated with the project delays.
Zhang Zuoyi described the techniques that will be applied to lower the costs; he expects them to soon approach the $2k / kw capacity range. If this can be achieved then the 210 MW reactor would be $525m. A 630 MW reactor would be $1.5b. It could be less if the 600 MW reactor only had to have the thermal unit and could use the turbine and other parts of an existing coal plant.
Terrestrial Energy is leading the way to getting regulatory approvals for its molten salt
fission reactor design. Terrestrial Energy aims to build the first walkaway safe molten salt modular reactor design in the late 2020s. IMSR generates 190 MW electric energy with a thermal-spectrum, graphite-moderated, molten-fluoride-salt reactor system. It uses standard-assay low-enriched uranium (less than 5% 235U) fuel.
Deep in the bedrock of Olkiluoto Island in southwest Finland a tomb is under construction. The tomb is intended to outlast not only the people who designed it, but also the species that designed it. It is intended to maintain its integrity without future maintenance for 100 ka, able to endure a future ice age. 100 ka ago 3 major river systems flowed across the Sahara. 100 ka ago anatomically modern humans were beginning their journey out of Africa. The oldest pyramid is around 4.6 ka old; the oldest surviving church building is fewer than 2 ka old.
This Finnish tomb has some of the most secure containment protocols ever devised: more secure than the crypts of the Pharaohs, more secure than any supermax prison. It is hoped that what is placed within this tomb will never leave it by means of any agency other than the geological.
The tomb is an experiment in post-human architecture, and its name is Onkalo, which in Finnish means “cave” or “hiding place.” What is to be hidden in Onkalo is high-level nuclear waste, perhaps the darkest matter humans have ever made.
The reams of data generated by 3D-printing parts can speed up the certification process and lower the cost of getting a nuclear reactor online.
2021-04-20: Nuclear power failed. We need to deeply understand these reasons, because there won’t be a energy transition without new nuclear.
To avoid global warming, the world needs to massively reduce CO2 emissions. But to end poverty, the world needs massive amounts of energy. In developing economies, every kWh of energy consumed is worth $5 of GDP.
How much energy do we need? Just to give everyone in the world the per-capita energy consumption of Europe (which is only half that of the US), we would need to more than triple world energy production, increasing our current 2.3 TW by over 5 additional TW:
If we account for population growth, and for the decarbonization of the entire economy (building heating, industrial processes, electric vehicles, synthetic fuels, etc.), we need more like 25 TW. The proximal cause of nuclear‘s flop is that it is expensive. In most places, it can’t compete with fossil fuels. Natural gas can provide electricity at 7–8 cents/kWh; coal at 5 c/kWh.Why is nuclear expensive? I’m a little fuzzy on the economic model, but the answer seems to be that it‘s in design and construction costs for the plants themselves. If you can build a nuclear plant for around $2.50/W, you can sell electricity cheaply, at 3.5–4 c/kWh. But costs in the US are around 2–3x that. (Or they were—costs are so high now that we don’t even build plants anymore.)
2022-09-14: Simple reactor designs that can be iterated quickly may be the future
Much of the future lies with KRUSTY-like kilowatt-scale systems. Nuclear has a power density problem that keeps it from powering our cars and planes. The shielding and heat engines are too heavy. The radiation and particles are harmful because they contain a lot of energy. The answer is to make solid-state technologies that convert heat and radiation into electricity. It is theoretically possible to turn gamma rays into electricity with something similar to a solar cell. Shielding gets lighter and generates electricity! It also brings new life to many isotopes that require too much shielding to be practical in radioisotope generators. In the meantime, kilowatt-scale systems can compete in smaller remote power applications and supplement solar microgrids. Further cost decreases could enable electricity customers to defect from the grid where solar is not feasible. Competing manufacturers promise a much more competitive industry than exists today, where incentives rarely encourage falling prices.
The endgame is a chunk of nuclear material that can regulate itself based on user demand, surrounded by energy-capturing devices that soak up every bit of emitted energy. Power density could exceed today’s liquid fuels and batteries while having extreme energy density. We’d finally get our flying cars! Reactors that look like KRUSTY are on the path to that endgame.
2023-03-25: Nuclear has some near-fatal problems that make it a non-starter on earth. Beyond the well-known overregulation, the biggest problem is that nuclear produces relatively low temperature heat that then has to be converted to electricity, which is very inefficient. A process would have to be found to turn radiation and heat directly into electricity, without the steam turbines. 2023-07-13: How we got the current regulatory regime
In a world where industry and activists fought to a standstill, Probabilistic Risk Assessment provided the only credible guiding light. Rasmussen and team first began to compile and model relevant data in the early 1970s. Over the decades the industry’s database grew, and the NRC developed an opinion on every valve, every pipe, the position of every flashing light in a plant. This angered the utilities, who could not move a button on a control panel without reams of test data and its associated paperwork. This angered activists when the refinement of models predicted safety margins could be relaxed.
But Probabilistic Risk Assessment has no emotions. Probabilistic Risk Assessment estimated, validated, learned. Probabilistic Risk Assessment would form the barrier protecting us from catastrophe.
Popularized and raised to a fine art by now-defunct website Adequacy, the Adequacy Style Troll, or AST, brings a blender to the ordinary practice of shit-stirring. The AST achieves its goal by a combination of proven techniques:
A tone of calmness and rationalism is maintained. This creates an enhanced contrast between the AST itself and the responses, which are likely to be emotional and less thoroughly considered.
The initial starting position for argument is unassailably sensible.
Each step of the argument is completely reasonable.
Substantial, even excessive, documentation is provided.
The final conclusion is outrageous and completely unacceptable to the target victim group.
in the fine tradition of sokal, trolling is being elevated to an art form. interesting.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 