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Cake day: February 2nd, 2025

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  • BalderSiontoScience Memes@mander.xyzSun God
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    7 days ago

    Wow. I was in middle school and had to do a creative writing assignment, and I wrote a science fiction short story set in a colony on that boundary of Mercury. I thought Mercury was tidal locked. I was praised for my creativity.

    I was today years old when I found that Mercury is not tidal locked.



  • The largest stellerator currently operating in the US is. HSX at UW-Madison. The copper magnet coils had to be explosively formed. The coils were delivered one at a time. At one point one was stolen off the loading dock. This caused a lot of panic, as the budget was spent. There was no way to replace the stolen coil.

    Something like a day later the sheriff called the university asking the if they were missing a hunk of copper. The thieves took the coil to a scrap yard for scrap value. The yard figured there was no way this bonkers shaped thing wasn’t made to a particular purpose so they played along long enough to call the cops to find the rightful owner.

    It’s worth recognizing stellerators since HSX have all been periodic, that is every coil isn’t unique. The designs used to be even more insane.


  • It’s interesting to me that in the medieval period the term outlaw applied to persons who broke the law and were no longer protected by it. They were entirely outside its auspices.

    I guess around the enlightenment philosophy changed, and a class of rights were considered unalienable. Society protects itself from law breakers, but even the worst offenders have some protection under law, even if the case law considers their life forfeit.

    When Popper posed the paradox of tolerance one imagines he supposed a tolerant society extending tolerance as an unalienable right. I quite agree the social contact resolution to the paradox of tolerance neatly solves the paradox, but I think it introduces interesting questions about what behavior is beyond the pale, and how we as a society resolve what we find acceptable. The extremes are easy, but edge cases are introduced. I hope we assess those cases with our eyes open.





  • In my experience the community will usually distinguished between “scientific Q” and “wall plug Q” when discussing fusion power gain. Scientific is simply the ratio of power in vs power out, whereas wall plug includes all the power required to support scientific Q. Obviously the difference isn’t always clearly delineated or reported when talking to journalists…


  • OK, so we should be clear there are broadly two approaches to fusion: magnetic confinement and inertial drive.

    In magnetic confinement a plasma is confined such that it can be driven to sufficient density, temperature and particle confinement time that the thermal collisions allow the fuel to fuse. This is what the OP article is talking about. This Tokamak is demonstrating technologies that if applied to a larger the experiment could probably reach a positive energy output magnetically confined plasma.

    The article you referenced discusses inertial drive experiments, where a driver is directly pushing the fuel together, like gravity in the sun, a fission bomb shockwave in a hydrogen bomb, or converging laser beams in Livermore’s case.

    Livermore’s result is exciting, but has no bearing on the various magnetic confinement approaches to fusion energy.


  • I’ve been using Here we go for years. I think it started as a Nokia project, that spun off to it’s own thing. I started using to conserve data. You download the map of your region when you have Wi-Fi, and it’s pretty low data load from there, directions and traffic updates mostly. I’ve been happy with it for a long time. I haven’t opened g-maps in ages. I know there are other options out there, open source and what not, but I never felt the need to try anything else out.






  • I’ve become pretty skeptical we know where the majority is. The question determines the outcome of the survey. The measuring stick is flawed and error bars are many times larger than the difference being measured. Frankly, the thing being measured has more dimensions than are being measured.

    And it’s worth remembering how the party got here. The left and labor coalition failed to beat Nixon twice, Ford’s losing had little to do with the left, and it utterly fell apart against Reagan. The Democrats only started to get traction at the national level by going to the center, using the DLC playbook. I’m as angry about the abandonment of labor by the Democratic party as anyone, but the reason for it is not a mystery. By the same token if the left doesn’t build the structure for a more left leaning Democratic party to operate no one should expect the party to move.

    The hard thing is, I don’t know what that structure looks like, but it’s not enough to be “correct”.



  • I keep ruminating on this argument, and it gives me deeply split feelings.

    On one hand I keep thinking, voters need to grow up. Voting is how the populace gets to engage in self governance, i.e. politics, and as the aphorism goes, Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. Things that are easy aren’t solved by politics, and the voters need to accept that you’re often not going to get what you want and in governance you often have to settle for choosing the thing you hate the least.

    On the other hand, I keep thinking I’m making the classic leftist mistake of demanding everyone should do what I think is right, because I am right, and then being frustrated when my rightness isn’t blindingly obvious to everyone.

    Like the lady says, It’s like rain on your wedding day…