That’s why you go whole newton and mount two opposing shotguns. By firing in opposite directions at the same instant with shot that scatters and loses most of the damage past a hundred yards the dog can more easily spray down everything in the area without falling over.

That does not undo what the earlier false statement professes. What’s not in the article is the guy is a crank who professes in the tired light hypothesis (if you want details explained to you by an actual scientist) and it really came down to releasing results before proper calibration of jwst data. No serious scientist believes the universe is double the age since the Big Bang, this has been debunked in the previous 8 slashdot articles on the same subject just since 2020. Not to say the universe may not be expanding asymmetrically, but the article is trash and frames it as clickbait that distorts the actual truth.

“right down to the over-a-century-old theory that it's expanding at a constant rate.”

I know reading the article is not really expected, but not reading the summary goes a bit far. If the journalists weren’t so terrible at writing these things they would have used “right down to the over-a-century-old theory that it's expanding symmetrically”.

First off no actual scientist thought it was even a constant for decades at least. It’s more like saying a car went from stopped at a light to some speed x a block later giving it an average acceleration of y. This is the Hubble expansion, simply a current measurement of the receding velocity of far off things in the universe whose rate are correlated to their distance in a rather linear relationship. In fact, most believe there was a period of inflation faster than light early on to account for how balanced and equal disparate sections of the universe are, despite no time for equilibrium to occur since the Big Bang.

Currently, we can’t even agree on this average acceleration because measuring expansion by cosmic markers of stars like cephid variables and measuring it by the cosmic microwave background give conflicting results. This is called the hubble tension and underlines how we don’t have a handle on even gross measurements yet.

In 1998 it was discovered the universe was actually accelerating in its expansion, the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Saul Perlmutter at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Brian Schmidt at the Australian National Lab and Adam Reiss at Johns Hopkins University for their discovery. Until then everyone was hung up on the universe slowing down its expansion, falling back in on itself, expanding forever but never reaching a critical size, or continuing to expand forever but doing so more and more slowly. Turns out it was none of them at all.

It’s not a problem if it’s 10-1 or even 50-1 but the department received something around 300 to 500 applicants and not one was female. 500-1 is a problem. This is true if for no other reason than societal pressure is forcing away a sizable chunk of the brightest people and what we are left with is less than what could have been.

Those are also issues. The main thing is that it’s more of a US problem than a world wide problem. It’s not like the departments were flooded with 10x as many applicants from abroad, rather it’s less than domestic applicants by about 7-1. Instead, something about our society shapes these inequalities to a degree significantly below the world average. I’m a firm believer that to optimize society for the most gain it needs to be fair and equitable for all that exist within that society. For example, excluding women from medical fields for the reason of religious based tradition alone creates a massive gap in healthcare felt by the vast majority of citizens and thus lowers productivity and GDP and the quality of life of virtually everyone directly or indirectly. Removing all these pressures present in preconceived notions that aren’t a good fit with reality would improve everyone’s quality of life, even if you don’t fall neatly into one of those categories most affected.

When I was in grad school, all the engineering and computer science departments had this problem. One year was particularly bad for the computer science department, there were no female US citizen applications. Not one.

Isn’t that twitters new video feature?

Its unlikely, but if someone can invent a superconductor that works up to about room temperature or above at reasonable pressure it would be possible to connect the entire worlds electrical grids together and share solar (or any type) power produced on the other side of the planet. Not that we still wouldn’t need storage, but it would completely change the game as overcapacity in areas would be solved by simple transmission instead of being too far away to be economical.

We can’t even detect our own signals beyond a handful of light years, even the nearest star system is questionable. But let’s say it’s 100 light years, even then that’s one ten millionth of our own galaxy, and 0% of the universe. So the idea we can even tell if anything is out there beyond thousands of star systems put into obviously artificial arrangements or entire galaxies rearranged wholesale is nonsense.

More importantly, just look at what our signals have been doing, initially they were quite omnidirectional and high power as receiver technology barely existed. As time progressed, we focused on efficiency as energy in the universe is limited and for any amount you can do more if your efficiency can be higher. Hence our radio signals now are much more directional and lower power. But if this trend continues, we may not ever be able to detect advanced signaling from more than the same bubble we have now as improvements in efficiency keep up with or outpace detection technology.

Furthet, the same principle of efficiency that makes evolved life forms here almost god like in their abilities means the entire idea aliens would use the output power of a large star to just broadcast so primitives could hear is insane and counter productive to basic reasoning. Same with creating a Dyson swarm to harness the power of its star, it would be nearly identical to a star simply hidden by dust. Plus if faster than light communication exists, in some reference frame of instant communication, then moving stars or galaxies around is an enormous waste of energy that would never happen. If faster than light communications is not possible, advanced life would likely act on a pace even faster than our fast paced societies and there can be no cohesive society, no coalition because the time delays are ultimately isolating making life invest into only a few systems or at the least, spread extremely slowly. Like our bodies that now use massive amounts of resources simply on processing and thinking as opposed to our single cellular predecessors, and like our technology that has moved from nearly 0% information processing to a significant percentage, any sufficiently advanced civilization is likely spending the majority of its energy budget on efficient information processing tasks and the entire concept of needing to burn unthinkable amounts of a precious resource on mundane brute force tasks with no benefit is unfounded.

So the complaint they left off information vital to basic understanding is not only valid, but you agree and your statement that I said it’s *more* important is made up and just a troll. Got it.

One second of storage vs two days at 100MW are such different things it makes no sense to leave out such an important detail.

So what’s among the most important things about a battery? Sure, the power it can put out, but what about the energy it can store? I swear these damn articles are just as bad as battery datasheets with partial broken information like it’s a trade secret instead of required for basic understanding of how it functions. “2000 MW” may be capacity in the sense of grid capacity, but battery capacity is generally thought of in total energy stored like MWh, of which this project has the feeling of about 2,700 MWh. It would be nice to actually include how big it actually is instead of up to so many homes for an hour or Olympic swimming pools it can heat.

You won’t know until you actually use the service. Remember, this is quantum computing. /s

But I was promised a Beowulf cluster by Christmas..